Thanks, Musicvid. it's the client's proprietary material so I can't upload it. Maybe I'm setting Super incorrectly. If you are having good results with Super it should work for me too right? Would you like to suggest some settings? What format should I convert to for good resolution? My show in Vegas is in HDV.

Thanks!
Cal

Sorry, without a clip I wouldn't know where to start. Partly because Super is limited in which outputs will work depending on the source.

Flash is a one-way street on purpose. Very hard to get out of it. That said, I had to get flash converted for a client earlier this year. I could only find one decent program to do it. My office bought it but it's on my machine there. I'll check tomorrow and let you know.

OK. You've encouraged me to experiment some more with Super, I'll report back my results... Thanks - Cal

Thanks PerroneFord, your help is appreciated. -- Cal

the "no other choice" option:
1) get a nice LCD screen
2) put your HD camera looking @ LCD screen
3) turn off all lights
4) hit "record" on your camera
5) play the flash thing on the screen.

Works when nothing else does.

This is the program I used to good effect:

http://www.swftoavi.net/

My source material wasn't great, so I don't know how well this will work on great material. But it's an option.

Thanks for the help everyone. I think I tried just about every conversion program out there.

I settled on AVS Video Converter 6 ($39 for a 1-year license). Converting the F4V to an uncompressed AVI, the resolution is about 95% of what I hoped for, which is close enough, even if I zoom in on a portion of the screen using Vegas. The video is of a computer program with a lot of lines and text, so it needs high resolution. Initially I resisted AVS because of their agressive online marketing, they were the last one I tested.

Another possible solution I found along the way is PCHand Screen Recorder ($49), it's pretty basic but it lets you crop a portion of your desktop (or select a window) and records it in realtime, then renders an AVI, with clean results.

The competition between all the different video formats, codecs and recording media speeds development of better products for all of us, but the vendors each try to be the "worldwide standard" by locking you in to their proprietary format. Given this paradigm, multi-format products like Vegas are the clear winners.

Thanks again!
Cal

I do have access to one solution that will always work, the Edirol VC-300HD scan converter. NOT something one would buy but if you can find one to rent it may solve your problem. You need to keep in mind that it will capture at your screen resolution, if you're running your monitor at 1920x1200 it might be the answer.

The underlying issue is that SWF is not just pixel based video. It can include vector based graphics and those elements are resolution independant as they're rasterized during playout. That means they're infinitately scalable which might explain why you're having problems with how it looks when you zoom in on something converted from SWF to rasterized video. The ideal solution would be to get the source project that created the SWF and work with that. Not for the faint hearted.

Bob.

You might want to look into Flash Decompiler Trillix 4.2. I've used it to edit SWF files where I didn't have the original FLA and it works pretty well.