I would rebuild it from source and make it such that you don’t have to use pan/crop. Then just drop the SWF file into Vegas and render. As Spot said, panning and cropping will reduce your resolution. Also, make sure your Flash settings match your project. e.g., make your Flash project 655x480 with a framerate 30 fps in Flash if you're using NTSC DV in Vegas.

~jr

Don't really know if I understood well what you wanna do, but I'll try. Want a good idea? I had same trouble rendering SWF files with Vegas, as MPEG2 or AVI. Why don't you try to go from SWF to AVI with the help of Magic SWF2AVI (it's not free). What a good applc. Set the framerate as 30 fps (for NTSC) and choose the Codec Microsoft Video 1 for a resolution of at least 640x480 (I use 1024x 768). The result is quite good (some stripes at the back will be noticed when you get transitions between light colors and dark ones, though). You can edit the result later with Vegas. Rendering SWF files with Vegas, as AVI or MPEG2 preserved the original quality for these color transitions, but for the rest......
One more thing: MAgic SWF2AVI merges video and "audio" so you preserve the original soundtrack. As far as I know, Vegas still cannot support audio for SWF files.

Yes I did scale it. Why would this mess it up? I can run it on my pc at up to 1440 x 1280 or down to 320x240 and it looks great at all. Doesn't Vegas scale it like the flash standard describes?

I always render to best - probably a waste, but usually don't have to go back.

I'm think I'm going to try camtasia to just capture it while it plays.

Vegas doesn't read the vector information the way you'd expect it to, or that you can scale in Flash players. There's the problem. I think there was a knowledgebase on it, but I'm not sure.

Here's the scaling issue with Flash, in a nutshell. Flash is a vector-based drawing/animation tool(among other things). That means it draws it's objects using math, on the fly. Therefore - it is scalable up, down, sideways...anyways. UNTIL you place a raster image, such as a picture of yourself into the Flash movie. Once you introduce raster formats, you're scalability is gone, period. Can't go bigger, can't go smaller. It's always been that way. The result is that you get a pixelated or distorted image.

Bringing Flash into vegas basically rasterizes every single frame of your Flash file and turns it into video. The principle holds true here - if you try and scale the Flash imported video file, it will pixelate or distort just like an image would.

Hope that helps. If you'd like to see the kind of work I'm doing in Flash and Vegas this week, Click Here. This one is chroma key shots placed into a Flash movie for a commercial spot.

Just curious, but what would happen if you set the media properties for the Flash event to 1600x1200, or whatever, and then cropped? Would Vegas rasterize at this resolution? If this didn't work within a project with lower resolution perhaps creating a new project at higher resolution just to render the Flash out to a new .avi file would work. Then this new .avi file could be used in the original project.