use a mask or an overlay?

[mgason]

Hi,
I have a video which is one continuous show reel. It contains 6 commercials.
3 different aspect ratios are included, so it has differing size black bars top and bottom sometimes.
To get around this I use a resizing mask and reposition the video so that the black bars are hidden. I drive the location and size by checking the time code.
You can see it here
http://www.stinkless.com/orange2/she...struction.html

My question is..
A mask can be processor/player intensive. Would I get better performance if rather than a mask I had 2 white boxes top and bottom that resize and move. Same effect but blocking the bars with an overlay as opposed to windowing the video in a mask?
Or would it be the same in regard to performance?

thanks
mark

[dan_hin]

beats me.

would it make sense to resize your commercials outside of Flash prior to encoding? either that or you could scale the video to fit dynamically rather than using a mask or overlays.

In my limited experience overlays will afford a similar performance hit.

Dan

[mgason]

They want the whole reel in one piece, so you can scrub back and forth. In other parts of the site all videos are separate which avoids the problem.
The aspect ratios being different you can not scale the video to fit.

Curious, did you check out the page? Did it play smoothly, no stutters?

mark

Mark

[dan_hin]

runs smooth as butter. nice skin!

regarding the aspect ratios,you could just zoom to fit the mode aspect ratio and have every video conform to that aspect ratio.

Dan