[thelist] screenshots in flash format?

John Dowdell jdowdell at macromedia.com
Thu Apr 11 14:10:01 CDT 2002


At 9:40 PM 4/8/2, Erick Papadakis wrote:
> hi, i am looking for a tool that allows me to record
> my actions on my PC and then export this as a flash
> animation, something like that lotus screenview of
> whatWasIt. does anyone know of such a tool?

Sorry for the delay, but there are two angles which could be useful to
consider in such work:

--  A sequential screen capture gives you either a bunch of large bitmaps,
or a bunch of delta-encoded bitmaps (where each frame contains only the
smallest rectangular area enclosing all pixels which changed from the
previous frame).
    Flash and Director both use sprite animation, which can result in such
smaller file sizes. For instance, you may have a sprite of the background
screen and a sprite of the cursor, and can then generate multiple frames
just by specifying the position of the cursor sprite. A native Flash
animation can be much smaller than a series of delta-encoded bitmaps.

--  Flash is resolution-independent... it loves to scale, and offers
sub-pixel positioning. Bitmaps generally don't like to scale, and screen
captures instantly degrade with any resampling whatsoever... icons, text,
and UI elements in most applications are designed down to the pixel, so if
one pixel of source art is not displayed on exactly one pixel of the
monitor, the blurring can be very visible.
    It's not impossible to make one pixel of source bitmap appear on
exactly one pixel of the monitor in Flash... just requires more care during
import, authoring, publishing, and playback, that's all.

jd




John Dowdell, Macromedia Developer Support, San Francisco CA US
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