"I'm trying to import a SWF into Adobe Premiere Elements. The SWF has embedded video which doesn't work once imported into Premiere. Any ideas?"

SWF files (which stands for ShockWave Flash, or Small Web Format) are a little trickier than Flash Video (FLV) because they often don't contain just straight video: while an SWF might look like a simple video presentation of scrolling text, sequential stills or cartoon-style images, under the hood there's actually a very different process going on. Generally, you can import SWF files to Adobe Premiere Pro with an alpha channel, but the audio is usually not retained, the interactive content and scripted animation are also not retained. What retained is the animation defined by keyframes in the main, top-level movie.

To solve SWF and Premiere Pro incomaptible issues, the easy way is to convert SWF to a more editing-friendly format, such a Premiere's MPEG-2. Along with some help from third-party programs like EaseFab Video Converter for Mac, which provides optimized presets for Adobe Premiere, you can easily achieve your goal smoothly. With it, you can convert any video including SWF to Adobe Premiere (CS3/CS4/CS5/CS6/CC included) compatible format without loosing quality. What's more, the conversion is easy to handle and only with a few simple clicks, you can finish the conversion without facing any glitches. For Windows user, please get Video Converter. Download the program and you can edit SWF files in Adobe Premiere Pro smoothly as you wish.

How to convert SWF files for editing in Adobe Premiere Pro

Step 1. Import SWF videos

Install and run the SWF to Adobe Premiere Converter, then run it. Click on "Add Video", and browse your files, select all the SWF files you wanna convert. This application supports batch conversion, so you can add more than one file at a time.

Step 2. Select output format

Click "Profile" pull down list to select "Vegas/Premiere (MPEG-2)" as the best video format for Premiere Pro. WMV, MOV formats are the good choice as well.

Tip: If you would like to customize the video and audio parameters, you can click "Settings", adjust the parameters as you want, like Video Codec, aspect ratio, bit rate, frame rate, Audio codec, sampling rate, bit rate, channels.

Step 3. Start transcoding SWF files to Premiere

Finally, click "Convert" button to start transcoding SWF video to MPG for importing to Premiere Pro CC.

When the conversion task is finished, click "Open" button to get the exported files and then import the converted SWF files into Adobe Premiere Pro CC/CS6/CS5/CS4 to do further editing.