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Thread: concerned about flash project..

  1. #1
    Sporadic Member therhomworkshop's Avatar
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    i m a bit worried to tell you the truth.

    i making a flash cd-rom for a local music/media group and what ive been designing is pretty heavy in content, navigation and imagary.

    they want about 6-8, one minute video clips as well as mp3's that the user can listen to whilst browsing. my main concern is size and speed of preformance. is it true that a preloader will actually work when booted from the cd? if so how long on average would it take to load on a standard cd drive?

    the intro i have is nothing eloborate but its 17mb big !
    (its this big because of desired image quality) the rest of the files are tiny incomparison, that is excluding the externally loaded video and mp3's that they want me to incorporate.

    basically im in need of some advice to ascertain whether or not im going down the right road using flash, or should i use director?

    the thing is im not that much of a dab hand with director as iam with flash, so all my nice actionscripted tweening and dynamic colour changing would all go out the window...

    if anyone has some examples of completed flash cd-rom work they think really works, it would be greatly aapreciated to see some of them...

    thanks..



  2. #2
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    Originally posted by therhomworkshop
    i m a bit worried to tell you the truth.

    i making a flash cd-rom for a local music/media group and what ive been designing is pretty heavy in content, navigation and imagary.

    they want about 6-8, one minute video clips as well as mp3's that the user can listen to whilst browsing. my main concern is size and speed of preformance. is it true that a preloader will actually work when booted from the cd? if so how long on average would it take to load on a standard cd drive?

    the intro i have is nothing eloborate but its 17mb big !
    (its this big because of desired image quality) the rest of the files are tiny incomparison, that is excluding the externally loaded video and mp3's that they want me to incorporate.

    basically im in need of some advice to ascertain whether or not im going down the right road using flash, or should i use director?

    the thing is im not that much of a dab hand with director as iam with flash, so all my nice actionscripted tweening and dynamic colour changing would all go out the window...

    if anyone has some examples of completed flash cd-rom work they think really works, it would be greatly aapreciated to see some of them...

    thanks..


    Hello,

    I have the same dilema, we are using flash to build a promotional CDROM that would be distributed natiowide but with director we could get better sound and video quality. I found flash to be a bit unstable for CDROM but i am not very good at using director yet.

    I was me too wondering if using a preloader with the CD that will load the big movies in the interface will work and how can u do?
    Like maybe while the Intro page is playing all the movie files get loaded in the interface in the background.

    Regards

    Xav

  3. #3
    Sporadic Member therhomworkshop's Avatar
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    i havent tried it, but apparently it does work.

    just put a preloader at the begining of your movie and that should be all you need...

    ive put one at the begining of mine but i havnt tried it burnt to a cd yet... might give it a try now...

  4. #4
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    Originally posted by therhomworkshop
    i havent tried it, but apparently it does work.

    just put a preloader at the begining of your movie and that should be all you need...

    ive put one at the begining of mine but i havnt tried it burnt to a cd yet... might give it a try now...
    Let me know but will it work if you use loadmovie? as i call my movies and sound externally. I am not embedding them in the Flash file.

    Regards

  5. #5
    Sporadic Member therhomworkshop's Avatar
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    okay have just tried it and it seems fine, it didnt actually do any loading, it auto-ran the cd (with the auto.inf file i made) quickly showed my finished loading screen then played the 18mb intro with no problems... however this is on a amd 1.2 gb PC, i really need to see what it looks like, or even if it works on a MAC.


  6. #6
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    Thanks, Indeed test it on slow machine we tested our cd on slow machine and it did get Jerky.

    X

  7. #7
    Fly on you crazy diamond. gingerbreadgirl's Avatar
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    Another thing to keep in mind is that the PC Autorun will not work on MAC.

    The CD must be burnt from a MAC for autorun to work on a MAC. I have yet to do it but apparently MAC adds the autorun files when it burns a CD if you check that feature.

    All of your actionscripting should work fine on a CD-ROM including the preloader.

  8. #8
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    to my knowledge A preloader WILL NOT work on a CDROM.
    The flash player loads everything into RAM first,
    so you dont want to have a very large file for your inital
    flash.
    You can make Flash CDROMS ok, but the bet thing to do is to create a smallish inital interface or what ever, that loads your other stuff into it. That way the inital wait to boot your file, (as it is loading into flash) will not be too long.
    A 17MG file is pretty big for the intial load, and you could get a long wait befor the projector boots up of the cd drive.
    Generally speaking director deals with all this stuff better, but it is possible to do it with Flash, you just wanna make sure that you break your files up and dont have a large inital file.

    Also gingerbread girl is right, need to burn off a mac to get autorun on a MAC, Toast is the best for doing hybrid or cross platform autorun cds.

    there a quite a few other threads that touch on these issues, so have a good hunt, around the boards, on MX and in the standalone player section.

    cheers



  9. #9
    Flash Video Moderator Wheels's Avatar
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    To summarize:

    Create an empyt movie with the same background and size as your main movie. The only frame on this movie will be actionScript:

    stop();
    loadMovieNum("yourMain.swf", 0);

    Now your main movie is the _root, keep your levels and targets in mind - this is the one thing that catches everybody, it can be a bit confusing. I use level addressing to avoid confusion. This will load you movie much faster (as mentioned above).

    Check my post on the Mac forum on how to make the hybrid cross platform CD.

    http://board.flashkit.com/board/show...hreadid=231315

    This was written for audio/Flash - but most of it still aplies to what your doing.

    5G

  10. #10
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    The only difference from mac and pc is autorun and autostart when starting a CD. If you're gonna be doing lots of CD work its worth checking out:

    http://www.multidmedia.com/ and http://www.cdeverywhere.com/

    Later.

  11. #11
    Fly on you crazy diamond. gingerbreadgirl's Avatar
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    Originally posted by jakeinomics
    The only difference from mac and pc is autorun and autostart when starting a CD. If you're gonna be doing lots of CD work its worth checking out:

    http://www.multidmedia.com/ and http://www.cdeverywhere.com/

    Later.

    I just found out that MAC doesnt open .exe unless it has a special program. What do you use for the file type? .swf? I also noticed on export options that you can make a MAC .exe. Is that worth using?

  12. #12
    <SNIP>
    Create an empyt movie with the same background and size as your main movie. The only frame on this movie will be actionScript:

    stop();
    loadMovieNum("yourMain.swf", 0);
    </SNIP>

    Does this reduce the preceived load time because the CD ROM drive has already spun up? Hmmm. I suppose its a start at solving this problem that should be fixed in the player by using asych reads off the CD or a local drive.

    Finally, for everyone using MP3 streaming audio (audio only or Audio/video) with the LoadMovie command, you'll run into the player "stuttering" problems that have been detailed extensively on these boards. That bug has still not been fixed in R50 of the Flash projectors. Just remember that if you're creating projects using LoadMovie to load SWFs with streaming audio, this bug will render your projects useless-at least until this bug is fixed! Hope this helps.

    -Arjun

  13. #13
    Flash Video Moderator Wheels's Avatar
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    Arjun,

    Are you referring to MX projectors? I've had no such problems streaming audio .swf's in F5 using this method.

    Basically, you get the movie running so that when it does load more content, it has some place to put it. Into the movie.
    5G

  14. #14
    Sporadic Member therhomworkshop's Avatar
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    okay, this is a major problem if this is true...

    ive got mx, and need to build a cd-rom mp3 player, am i going to be hampered by this stuttering problem?

    any one had similar problems..?

    or is there a way round it?

  15. #15
    Hi,

    The streaming MP3 problem doesn't seem to effect the Flash 5 projectors, just all current versions of the MX Projector. I haven't investigated in on the Mac, just Windows. So, it's hard to tell where the problem exists.

    It seems like this problem is centered around the LoadMovie command. If you place streaming audio in-line into the SWF, then it seems to work. However, be prepared to have FLAs which are so large, that's its impossible to work with them efficiently.

    Hopefully, this problem will be fixed soon since it makes the use of Flash MX as a multimedia CDROM platform useless! There's more info at this thread:

    http://board.flashkit.com/board/show...hreadid=343101

    and here:

    http://board.flashkit.com/board/show...hreadid=335296

    Hope this helps!

    -Arjun

  16. #16
    Flash Video Moderator Wheels's Avatar
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    If the workaround is to make a .swf of the .mp3, this shouldn't be an issue. I convert the .mp3 to .wav (PC) or .aiff (Mac), import to the Flash timeline, then set you sound export settings in the Publish menu. I use 80-112kpbs for broadband.

    The file size will be about the same as a standard .mp3 (5Meg for 3-4 minutes).

    5G

  17. #17
    Originally posted by Wheels
    If the workaround is to make a .swf of the .mp3, this shouldn't be an issue. I convert the .mp3 to .wav (PC) or .aiff (Mac), import to the Flash timeline, then set you sound export settings in the Publish menu. I use 80-112kpbs for broadband.

    The file size will be about the same as a standard .mp3 (5Meg for 3-4 minutes).

    5G
    If you use the LoadMovie command to load this exported SWF into a larger flash movie (like in a jukebox), you'll run into this problem. A streaming audio soundtrack loaded via LoadMovie causes this.

    If you import the MP3 or WAV into the Flash authoring tool, Flash expands it to its full size. Import a few songs into an FLA and you're screwed on RAM consumption in the authoring tool. Finally, trying to export a movie from the Flash authoring tool will take forever, making development nearly impossible! Using external SWFs as assets in a large presentation makes workflow easier, but this bug negates all those benefits. Hope this helps.

    -Arjun

  18. #18
    Sporadic Member therhomworkshop's Avatar
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    so let me get this straight..

    even if i make a swf file for every mp3 that i want to play (import them to the timeline, then export as swf) there is still a stuutering problem?

    is this right?

    or is this wrong?

  19. #19
    Originally posted by therhomworkshop
    so let me get this straight..

    even if i make a swf file for every mp3 that i want to play (import them to the timeline, then export as swf) there is still a stuutering problem?

    is this right?

    or is this wrong?
    If you use the LoadMovie or LoadMovieNum command to load the SWFs, you will run into this problem.

    -Arjun

  20. #20
    Flash Video Moderator Wheels's Avatar
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    O.K.

    There seems to be some confusion here, and much of what Arjun has said goes against my direct experience.

    First, bringing an MP3 into Flash and exporting it as a .swf is a bad idea. Use either .wav or .aif. Flash is good at making MP3's but bad at compressing them even further. If you are going to use an .mp3 with Flash, leave it alone - do all of your compression outside of Flash first. But as I said, you are better off converting it back to .wav or .aif and then bringing it in.

    Secondly, in the method I have described you are only bringing one sound track in to Flash and then exporting it as a .swf that will later be loaded dynamically using loadMoveNum() not loadMovie() (which is used in Flash 5 to load into a MC - not to a _level).

    I have had no stuttering problems using this method (as I stated before).

    Thirdly, the only reason you may "bloat" things is if you don't have a good sound card are enough RAM. I've never seen anything "bloat-up" on import. Either way, it can take up to 10 minutes to make a .swf this way. If you are getting any kind of stuttering with this method, try reducing the the sound stream setting in the publish settings.

    Use the blank movie method I described and load your sound .swf's to the second movie on a level. You should have no problems.

    5G

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