Corrupted .fla file - I can only access first frame of animated symbols in imported SWF backup file

[rjdg14]

So I'm working on an animated scene, and found this morning that the main file appeared to have become corrupted, with WinRAR not being able to recover it, though I have an accessible earlier copy that I made a couple of days earlier. I also backed up a copy of the animation as an SWF file the last time I saved the animation, and this still works fine.

What I'm trying to do is import the SWF file to Adobe Animate, from which I hope to be able to extract the animation frames that were lost. Unfortunately, I'm struggling to do this, and couldn't find much help elsewhere on the internet. The animated sequence frames that I want to salvage (to copy back to the earlier version of the .fla file) are contained within an animated symbol, and when I import the SWF file into Animate CC 2020 I only seem to be able to access the first frame of the animated symbol, even though all the other frames are there when played in a legacy version of Flash Player. I really need help on finding a way to be able to access the other animation frames of this symbol within the SWF file in Animate so that I can salvage the frames and copy them back to my main .fla file.

On the support page it states the following:

Graphic symbols containing animation are imported with each keyframe of the animation in a new keyframe. The contents of each frame in the original animation are converted into a new Graphic symbol, one for each frame in the original symbol.

This suggests that the frames of my symbol should be accessible, but for whatever reason I can't seem to access them. Only the first frame of the symbol is accessible...

[n. tilcheff]

Hi mate,

The best you can expect from importing a SWF to the timeline is frame by frame animation on a single layer.

Imagine if you convert your tweens to frame by frame and flatten all layers while breaking apart all containers. Still it can be useful to get some assets out of that and to use it as an underlay/guide to quickly animate the stuff again.

You can try to use a decompiler as well, but if the scene is complex and you already have the assets, I'd suggest to just render a video out of the SWF and use that as a guide rather trying to get something useful out of it.

If you post a link to your SWF I can try to import it in an older version of Flash to see if that will show more than the first frame.