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[bwat]

I've been working with fairly large files (200MB original files, 45MB SWF files) and have not noticed the player slowing down the video. I have, however, noticed that larger video (320x240) seems to drift after a couple of minutes, so that by the end the audio is out of sync with the video by like 1 second. I noticed someone has processed a 15 minute video, did you have any problem with audio drifting?

[felix_man]

just for ref. The reason you had trouble before OS X, is the previous versions of th eMac OS had no dynamic memory managment. Thank goodnees They fixed that with OS 10!

[JHarlequin]

Originally posted by bwat
I've been working with fairly large files (200MB original files, 45MB SWF files) and have not noticed the player slowing down the video. I have, however, noticed that larger video (320x240) seems to drift after a couple of minutes, so that by the end the audio is out of sync with the video by like 1 second. I noticed someone has processed a 15 minute video, did you have any problem with audio drifting?

I had the same exact problem with the audio drifting and it was only by less than a sec as you said. It is really only bad when it video of people talking. The 45MB swf video Running off of a CD will take a bit to load. I tried 20MB video and I tried it on multiple computers ranging from a Dual 1.4 Machine all the way down to a 450mhz. The load time to get the video into the computers RAM ranged from 5 to 30 sec.

[temnatl]

Originally posted by bwat
I've been working with fairly large files (200MB original files, 45MB SWF files) and have not noticed the player slowing down the video. I have, however, noticed that larger video (320x240) seems to drift after a couple of minutes, so that by the end the audio is out of sync with the video by like 1 second. I noticed someone has processed a 15 minute video, did you have any problem with audio drifting?

I have added a 300mb video at 800x600 to my flash presentation... when i imported it at 100% my projector file ended up like 310mb.. which is huge, i put the import setting to 95% and the projector dropped to 50mb (yeah what a difference) i am not sure if the sound drifted, like 95% of the video is showing a production plant, and talking behind it... havent seen anything major wrong just yet.. good luck...

[nowhereman55]

Am I crazy or did I hear someone at a MM seminar say that you can link to .flv files from flash? I know this is possible with quicktime (it gives the option to link on import), but I could have sworn the .flv format does this too. Also, could someone explain to me why the .flv format is better than importing something created in Media Cleaner and imported into MX as an avi, or mpeg, or mov?

Oh yeah, my groups is currently using Squeeze. So far, we like it. But I did not know about Flix, and I am especially interested in how it can loadMovies (.flv's) one after the next. When I asked Squeeze people about this they said it would be a few months before it could provide this kind of "stitching".

Ok. I give info. No gimme somepin' back.

[creativepointe]

you can link to your quicktime file but then you can only publish to quicktime not swf or flash exe. I don't think you can link to a flv only import after squeezing it, I think compressing with squeeze as a flv and importing gives you better quality than squeezing a quicktime and importing it, but that's my own opinion.

[harmonixmedia]

I don’t usually write in, but I thought I would this time. A few months ago I was hired to by someone to work with the Flash MX beta and Sorenson Squeeze Beta on a huge project. I won’t say who the company was, or what the project was, but I will say that is was very exciting. We were going to be the first to use MX to distribute a 90 min conference over the web, and it was to go on a very popular Flash site (I’m trying to be politically correct here, as to not shoot myself in the foot). It wasn’t to long before we found some huge problems and told both companies about it. The first problem was that if a user was on a PC using IE, any .swf they started to download couldn’t be stopped. This means if a user starts to download an .swf video that’s 5mb in size, and decides to click on a different .swf video that’s 5mb is size; MX doesn’t stop downloading the first file into the cache. The user is now only using the second file, but downloading both. I hope that makes sense. This bug is just starting to come out in the open (even though I told them about it months ago) and it’s crashing people’s computers and drying up their bandwidth. Flashmagazine.com has a nice write up about it. The second huge issue is that of memory usage. Anything more then 4 minutes of video and the memory usages grows expeditiously. That’s when Sorenson told me about “stitching”. Soon they will have (probably in their next upgrade) an option to “stitch” the clip. This means that the video will be chunked into 2 or three minutes clips, and each will create an instance and load the next clip into it. So if you have a 10-minute video it will create 5 clips that will load themselves after each other. At least this is one of the benefits. They were also talking about creating instant loading bars (like QuickTime) and some other very cool sounding features. To say the least we got the project done and told MM about all the bugs we found. None of them were addressed but I’m sure they will be. I was told a month before the release by MM that they didn’t thing that video was going to be a big seller and that no one would want to use more then 2 mins worth anyway. Smart move. I think that MX shows good potential for the future and could take the place of Director someday, just not yet. The project was finished but will never see the light of day because “the powers that be” don’t want to promote more then 2 mins of video because of all the issues. Well…at least I got paid.

[bwat]

Wow harmonixmedia,
great information, thanks!

So from what you've seen, any video SWF's over 2MB are taking the chance of choking the computer, and "stitching" should be used instead? Could this be causing the audio/video sync problems that I've been hitting?

Great stuff, thanks for sharing.

[nowhereman55]

bwat,

I noticed that the synch went out a bit towards the end on a 7 minute flv file I was working with. I am inclined to think that it has to do with the memory allocation problem described.

I will have to create a "stitched" version of the 7 min video thing. What I will have to do is synch the content to each video. In other words, I will create one swf with its respective flv (video) and timed content, then that file will load the next swf with its respective flv (video) and timed content, and so on and so forth. It should keep things in synch, but I hope it looks decent.

Has anyone tried this approach?

[bwat]

I am going to try the "stitched" video approach in the next week and see how it works for me. And when I say "stitched" I mean exporting the long video into multiple separate SWFs and trying to load them sequentially with scripting.

I have noticed that rather than feeding the source video in to the FLA as one big file, if it's broken down into smaller files and brought in and laid out on the timeline sequentially, if it drifts out of sync in one clip, when it hits a new clip in the time line it seems to regain sync for a little while. I haven't tested enough to see if this works consistently or not, but it might be another thing to look into. I'll be playing with this as well.

[nowhereman55]

Cool. That is the approach I am using. Let me know how it works out for you. This meassage board is probably the best one on the web right now for information on doing video in MX. Let's keep it going with our results.

[temnatl]

I have a 20 minute movie that I have imported into flash... the audio is out of sync on slower machines, 128mb or less... i have 1 gig of memory at work, and the video/audio is great... how do i stitch, or break the movie up? any help would be greatly appriciated...

thanks

Originally posted by nowhereman55
bwat,

I noticed that the synch went out a bit towards the end on a 7 minute flv file I was working with. I am inclined to think that it has to do with the memory allocation problem described.

I will have to create a "stitched" version of the 7 min video thing. What I will have to do is synch the content to each video. In other words, I will create one swf with its respective flv (video) and timed content, then that file will load the next swf with its respective flv (video) and timed content, and so on and so forth. It should keep things in synch, but I hope it looks decent.

Has anyone tried this approach?

[harmonixmedia]

Here’s how I’ve stitched clips in the past. Let’s say you have a 10 min video clip. Use QuickTime or another product to chuck the video into 2 min segments. Then create a player interface in Flash. If you want to put rewind buttons, pause buttons, stop and play buttons, or just want a plain viewer make it here. In the player create a blank movieclip the size of your video. For example 320 x 240. This will give you a feel for where you should place it. Give the movieclip an instance name. For example “stage”. Then import your first chunk of video into a new movie. Use the “Spark Lite” in Flash MX or use an .flv file from “Spark Pro” (I highly recommend the latter). Once you’ve imported the video skip to the end of the clip and add a key frame on a new layer. On the frame tell Flash to load the next video clip into the “stage” mc. This will take some planning ahead because you will have to know what you’re going to name the next clip. For example:

loadMovie("video2.swf", "_root.stage");

Then export the .swf. Continue to create all of your video clip .swf files this way. At the end you should have 6 files. One player and 5 video clips. Then add a little code in you payer to load the first video clip .swf and the whole thing should just take off, each loading the next when their done.

Known issues: First of all I know that if you are making this for a CD-ROM there will be short and very jarring pauses between the stitches as the next clip is loaded. I don’t know how to get rid of this. One option is to load the next clip in a separate mc and tell it to play. The only problem with that is that you might have a memory jarring in the process. I digitized 5 minutes and 45 seconds worth of U2 concert footage from their Boston concert DVD recently (what an awesome concert). I used the Sorenson 3 codec in QuickTime and the video used 17mb of memory. The same clip in Flash used 47mb of memory so be warned.

I hope this helps and if anyone else thinks of a better way to do this let me know. I hope that Macromedia has received the message that we want to use video in Flash loud enough that they will make a few changes in the future. I suspect that they don’t want to compete too much with their other products (Director) but they need to go one-way or the other.

[jhb]

new to flash video and was curious...how do you handle the large swf file sizes when using the file on the web?

[harmonixmedia]

That’s a good question, and it raises an even more interesting one. Does video on the Internet really work? By day I work as an instructional designer at BYU. Using video has been an issue for us for years. Video has a strict quality to file size ratio. The better the quality of the video, the larger the file size, plain an simple.

If your site caters to large and low bandwidth users then you need to create both options with your video. 320x240 mid quality for large bandwidth and 160x120 low quality for low bandwidth users. Ultimately preloaders are going to be more important now then ever before. You should let one third of you video load before playing it (just an opinion).

My biggest fear is that the people that hate Flash are going to get ammo for their augments as Flashers start using video just because they can, and not because they should. I would hate to see a 3 min video as I enter a site that has a “skip video” button in the lower left.

[Mr K]

I've been doing video in Flash for a while now ... am still yet to really push the whole Flash Video format

But surely common sense applies? A 45mb movie is NOT going to stream on many Web based machines, and a HIGH percentage of machines will have a hissy fit trying to play a 45mb flash movie anyway (even if off CD).

Hmm I must admit this is a good topic, and I can see I need to go read some more on this ...

[alohaha]

Interesting re stitching comments, thanks for the tips guys.

And re wildform's flix/swfx, I am a huge fan of theirs, both products are excellent and underpriced imho. It's great to see an innovative new company develop some really excellent design tools. (um you guys need to update your video clip library though, eg with color "business life" , conference meetings, other practical video clips)..

As for MM, grr, maybe they'll fix their buggy MX release someday, I'm not going to make the switch from 5 to MX til they fix it, sounds like too many MX problems so far.

HINT: I found that experimenting with various codecs is critical to success in streaming web video, there's usually at least 12 to choose from, when you're encoding your original source uncompressed .avi or whatever.

So, try encoding with 2-3 different codecs, export via flash etc each version, to see which one streams the best, there's usually up to 20% variation in image quality, so worth playing around with.

[atomizer]

I had the same problem and this was my solution... I managed to get rid of the loading 'freeze' and you can downlod the FLA sample... hope this helps

http://66.70.72.50/forums/showthread...ight=video+RAM

[JHarlequin]

That was a big problem of mine on a recent project where the video was 4 min long and it took any where from 5-25 seconds to load into ram. I called MM and talked to a bunch of their techs and the were dumb founded trying to tell me to use a regular preloader... This seems like a great method of loading and showing a preloader. Here is the biggest problem that I have come up with. You and I are both running Flash MX on a PC and expecting to make a projector that will run our project from a CD on both the windows and Mac platforms. I did an entire project rleying on that fact. Little did I know that Flash MX projectors WILL NOT PLAY IN A MAC WITH OS 9.1 or Higher!!! It is possible for it to play but not without the client or customer downloading the the "CarbonLib 1.5" Updater from apples website. I called up MM and complained to them and they gave me no answers and no hope for a fix. WTF is wrong with them!!! Flash 5 works with Mac. I have tried so many times to give MM the benefit of the doubt with this version of Flash and it just keeps comming back to bite me in the ass. I was able to license the download from apple to distibute onto CD along with my project but it is stil too much to have to put the client through to have to install something on their computer. I had to buy Director for the Mac and I had to buy a Mac. The only good thing about it is that the new IMac is a beautiful addition to my desk.

[atomizer]

"Flash MX projectors WILL NOT PLAY IN A MAC WITH OS 9.1 or Higher!!!"

****, could things get any more F^up!!! I almost went crazy when I found out that the video went into RAM because the project I'm working on (Also an interactive CD-Rom) required video and I already used some of the features in MX to get things going so there was no turning back

I also heard that the new projector doesn’t recognise dual monitors, I tried it and the projector fixed its self in the middle one part on each side, I swear flash 5 never did that... But I could be wrong because I haven’t tested it fully

Great post indeed, very helpful
it.