Flash CS5: The Missing Manual

Exporting Flash to Other Formats

Exporting your entire animation—or one or more of the individual frames that make up your animation—is very similar to publishing. In both cases, you get to specify which file format you'd like Flash to write, and in both cases, you get to tweak file settings based on the file format you choose. Flash designates the most common file formats (.html, .swf, .gif, .jpg, .png, and projector files) as publishing destinations and all other file formats as export destinations. Most of the time, you'll export (rather than publish) an image, sound, or your entire animation when you want to work with it in another graphics or animation program.

To export to a single frame image, select File→Export→Export Image. To export to an animation (multiframe) file format or an audio format, select File→Export→Export Movie. In Flash Professional CS5, there are very few differences in the available formats for Macs and PCs. The most significant is that Windows computers can write to the Windows BMP, AVI, and WAV formats. Table 20-1 shows the available formats.

Table 20-1. File formats to which you can export your Flash animation

Format	Extension	Note
SWF Movie	.swf	Single Frame Image
Adobe FXG	.fxg	Single Frame Image
Bitmap	.bmp	Single Frame Image
JPEG Image	.jpg	Single Frame Image
GIF Image	.gif	Single Frame Image
PNG Image	.png	Single Frame Image
SWF Movie	.swf	Animation
Windows AVI (Windows only)	.avi	Animation
QuickTime	.mov	Animation
Animated GIF	.gif	Animation
WAV Audio (Windows only)	.wav	Audio
JPEG ...