Specific Character is Pixelated/Blurred after Export

[Possumdelight]

On the surface, everything looked fine when animating and previewing, but once I exported, one of my characters turned pixelated and poor quality. It'd make sense if it was the whole animation, but no, it's just that character. I have two characters in the animation, and only one of the seems to be affected with this bug. Here's a before and after:

I have no idea what's going on. I tried many ways of exporting (Including doing a PNG Sequence). Is there a way to fix this, or am I screwed?

[n. tilcheff]

What's specific about this area:

Is it masked?

Are there any bitmap textures?

Any filters or frame effects used?

[Possumdelight]

None of the above. From what I can tell, the mask, cape, eyes, and cracks are the only parts affected. One theory I had is that it has something to do with the way all the parts are parented, but that wouldn't explain why the other character looks fine.

I'm thinking about converting him into one bitmap layer and tracing it so that hopefully it'll be fixed, but I'm not very sure it will help.

[n. tilcheff]

Does it look pixelated if you publish a SWF preview / export a static PNG or only on the video?

Just as a test you can try to change the red color to green or some shade of blue. H.264 often has issues with bright reds.

[Possumdelight]

If I publish an SWF file and preview it, it looks perfectly fine. If I export a single PNG, it's also fine. But if I export as a video in any way (Swivel, PNG Sequence, and Default Exporting), it messes up.

Interesting thought, but I usually export with Quicktime format, so that the color is correct.

[n. tilcheff]

Quicktime MOV is just a container. Internally it may use various codecs.

Try some of the lossless ones to rule out video compression as the cause.

[Possumdelight]

I tried many codecs, but I can't seem to find one that has absolutely no compression. I've heard an older version used to have "animation" as a preset for Quicktime that was completely lossless, but it doesn't exist anymore.

[n. tilcheff]

Yeah, the Animation codec was great. We used to rely on it all the time...

BTW, if you want to export a high quality PNG sequence don't do it via the video export option. Use Export Movie > PNG Sequence.

[Mario_CR]

The default Quicktime preset still uses the Animation codec (also known as Quicktime RLE), you can check by looking at the video properties in VLC media player:

Could you share your .fla file with us to make some tests and see what the issue might be? You can share files using a google drive link.

(If all else fails the PNG sequence workaround that Nick mentioned should fix the problem).