exporting as image using actionscript

does anyone know how to export a flash movie as image using actionscript

Using actionscript you can't. I know PHP has image functions that allow you to dynamically create images, but I don't know if bitmap is one of the image types it supports or not, i'm new to PHP and haven't gotten that far into it.

So with actionscript alone, no. If PHP has the ability, then you will need to use actionscript to communicate to PHP, then have PHP create the image, then do what you want from there.

I didn't literaly mean bitmap as like *.bmp.
What I meant was that if it is possible to make a fash movie export a frame of itself to an image file (jpg, bmp, gif or whatever) using actionscript or php or any language.
Think of it like a swf->jpg conversion script.
Is that possible?

my input on this subject is limited, but I know flash can Save As...
to an image file, so I would think it's possible to do in a movie as
well.

Although, that's the flash program creating the image and not
a movie, so Imay be off.

http://website.lineone.net/~mitsos/site/

Click on the second "O" in the Fotios logo (lower left corner) for the menu, then in there go to Flash/Tutorials/bmp_creator

It's a bit complicated, and to me looks like storing the drawn coordinates in an array, then sending that array to a PHP script that then builds the image.

That's sort of like what my buddy Ahmed did with his experiment called "Scribble" ( http://www.syntheticorange.com/?id=7 ), only he stored the drawn coordinates in an array, parsed that array into a string and send it to a database, then used a PHP script to retrieve those values send them back to Flash where Flash would then re-parse it to an array and redraw the item.

Confusing eh Server-Side Flash was never really my forte, so I can't be much help after this... sorry.

If you need the easiest way to export image from Flash using ActionScript 3 in only two lines, you can try this class: http://www.muhammadbinyusrat.com/flash/PNGExport/

This thread is 5 years old. When it was written the bitmapData class and associated abilities didn't exist.