Flash Animation

I was given the task of creating a flash animation for one scene in our video, as we did not have time to film it with the University cameras. This scene was the lounge scene, with Dr Colm Beeny in the lounge giving a recycling fact.
The task was pretty simple for me as I had animated using Macromedia Flash 8 before. To create the image of Doctor Colm Beeny, I thought it may be simpler to use a picture of him taken from when we were filming, and to add flash effects to it. I cropped the picture using Adobe Photoshop, and imported to Flash.
When it came to drawing the sofa and television, I wanted to make them pretty basic and old, since it was meant to be an old fashioned 50's type film. Although a 50's grain film effect would be placed on using Avid later on. Because I am not very good at drawing, my drawings were basic and boring. I showed these to my group members and they did not like it. They told me not to use a photo of Colm Beeny as it did not fit in place, and that my drawings looked too basic, and not like the real thing.
So I decided to trace over Colm Beeny in flash, giving him more of a cartoon look and making him fit in more with the scene. This effect looked good and worked pretty well. For the sofa and TV, I decided to use images from google, and trace over them, meaning it looked like i had drawn them, when infact I had just traced over the top. I made sure I followed the colour scheme, and where there was shading, I used shading too.
The animation looked good at this stage, and the next job was to work on the TV image. I decided to use a movie clip as it'd be easier to work on animation inside a clip, but when it came to exporting the final animation as an AVI, I realised that it did not show the movie clip. Me and Jon met to discuss final video work, and we decided just to use a simple rotating recycle logo, with the words: + 3 hrs written on, to explain the fact of: One Aluminium Can saves enough electricity to power a television for 3 hours. I ended up creating this on the timeline, exported it as an AVI, and this time it worked perfectly.
The only problem was that the quality settings for exporting as an AVI didn't allow to create a high quality image. This didn't look good for the video, and so I did some researching using Google, and found a program, Magic SWF2AVI, which allows users to import the SWF, choose a f0rmat to export in, whether it be, AVI or MOV etc. and choose the quality. After a few times playing about, exporting as AVI's and MOV's, I found the best quality image produced was in a DVD MPEG format, as the settings meant it exported to be placed on DVD. I chose settings of NTSC mpeg Normal (1.7 hour), which produced a clear image to be imported to AVID. I sent this to Jon to add to the rest of the footage.