Topic: Flash conversion

how to convert flash animation to WEBM or GIF and live it up to this site's quality standards?

I've heard someone suggest using Swivel on Newgrounds.

I haven't personally tried it, but I would be more concerned with ensuring that it is converted into one of the supported formats first.
After that, you'd have to check if it still holds up quality-wise. Old SWFs tend to be grainy/full of compression artefacts as well, so you could also possibly encounter issues with it getting approved.

swivel could only render to vp8 and leaves with atrociously bad quality. the rest have their own problems so i choose the default codec h.264 (mp4) and max every slider up

then i convert the rendered mp4 to webm with ffmpeg (i.e ffmpeg -i xv.mp4 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -c:a libopus output.webm on command-line)

for converting to gif, i'd choose jpexs and export sprite or frames into a gif with a suitable size

thegreatwolfgang said:
Old SWFs tend to be grainy/full of compression artefacts as well, so you could also possibly encounter issues with it getting approved.

I've never heard crunchy audio described as "grainy" before. I assume you mean audio, since SWF is a lossless vector format as far as the picture goes and thus could not possibly be "grainy" in the traditional sense.

...isn't SWF just a container format that can store basically any source files? Feels like saying an HTML page is a vector format; like, yeah, it doesn't inherently add any extra compression, & it can contain SVGs, but you can still have a grainy low-quality JPEG in there. Especially considering how old they are, I wouldn't be surprised if there's frequently a lot of grainy source images in SWF files.

errorist said:
I've never heard crunchy audio described as "grainy" before. I assume you mean audio, since SWF is a lossless vector format as far as the picture goes and thus could not possibly be "grainy" in the traditional sense.

I haven't used Flash in a while but I think a lot of people used it to slap tweened JPEGs together.
It also supported a really terrible video codec I think.

errorist said:
I've never heard crunchy audio described as "grainy" before. I assume you mean audio, since SWF is a lossless vector format as far as the picture goes and thus could not possibly be "grainy" in the traditional sense.

aacafah said:
...isn't SWF just a container format that can store basically any source files? Feels like saying an HTML page is a vector format; like, yeah, it doesn't inherently add any extra compression, & it can contain SVGs, but you can still have a grainy low-quality JPEG in there. Especially considering how old they are, I wouldn't be surprised if there's frequently a lot of grainy source images in SWF files.

I did not know that, but from my experience, some animations I saw were visually grainy (e.g., post #160833 & post #530196).
I would assume it's because the either the base file itself was of low quality or because of the small video dimensions. Either way, we have a much more stricter quality control now when it comes to video.

Funny, I was just doing this a couple months ago. I'm not at home right now but I could tell you my workflow.

First you wanna install a Flash decompiler. I recommend ffdec if you're on Windows. It works both as an editor and compiler, you might find a lighter alternative but it works for what I do. Also you need to download Flash itself for it to work, you can even play .swf files on it.

Inside ffdec, once you've opened your desired .swf file, you may find every asset of the file: every graphic, every actionscript, every sound, etc. ffdec itself has a function to batch extract (and convert at the same time) every asset you wanna use.

I usually extract every frame into SVG images and convert them into PNG files using ImageMagick, ensuring they keep most of the quality.

Now with the frames ready, I use FFmpeg and input the frames and encode them in a video, using codecs like VP9 or AV1 if I would to upload them to e6 directly. Or just encode the video into an editor-friendly format to add the sound effects that are missing.

That is the gist of what I do and hope it helps you. Like I said, if you want I could give you a more detailed guide once I get back home.