Preparing Video for Flash

[barrax]

Hi

Ive made a CD-ROM presentation for a company which worked fine on my machine but a bit choppy on theirs. The sync was all out and the video was more blocky than mine (but then i do have quite a high spec machine).

So now i'm taking their originally supplied Mpeg files and trying to prepare them better. Currently they weigh in at around 20-40mb each (as swf files).

I've been reading about Soreson Squeeze - so i have that installed but i need either MOV or AVI to get things started.

So im trying to re-export them from Adobe Premier 6 as one of these formats but the bloody things keep going out of sync and pixelating when i play them back. Sometimes the audio skips as well.

Do i add keyframes to stop the audio from skipping?

I dunno what to do now - and i only have 8 hours to go b4 they want this thing back

Any help really really appreciated.

[Justmade]

You may consider trying some alternative way of playing your video file.

LPFlashEx can let you load and control your external video files in flash without importing them. They can play at origianl quality, quick startup and have low CPU/RAM consumtion.

You may want to have a look at the following samples :
http://www.lpflashex.com/dl/MovieSamplesV2.zip (161KB)

There are 5 samples in the file
You can start test with publishing MovieMouseClick.fla or MMPMouseClick.fla to EXE which shown some more advanced functions. When looking at sources code, you can start with the 2 simple one first.

ChooseMovie.fla show how to write code that support both media playing engin LPFlashEx provided and let user (or your action script code) to choose at run time.

The two engin :
Movie (using Window Media Player OCX) is well testing and used by our many customer. Some also send their production using LPFlashEx for Lab test in over 20 computers with different OS (95/98/Me/2K/XP) and different hardware and scored 100% pass without any error / warning. Media Player 6.4 + is needed to play movie this way. You can use the OCX detection event to prompt user to install Media Player using your included installer or use LPFlashEx download action to download installer from Microsoft. You can see this in MovieMouseClick.fla.

MMP is a newer engin which make direct call to system to let it play media with whatever codec it got so it dont depend on a specific program. For example, if the user had any program that registered it codec to playback mpg file with system, MMP should be able to play it. It also support Audio CD playback and we may act more support to it later such as sound recording.

If you need more info or have any questions. You are welcomed to visit our web site and email me.

[barrax]

thanks - i shall look at that.

I think my main problem is being able to lower cpu usage and also being able to add animations at key intervals (relating to the video) im not so sure how i would do that with that technique. Where as now i can just see the movie on the timeline as i work.

This has to be delivered in a few hours time so im gonna have to continue on the heavy weight route now - but thanks for the info. Very helpfull

[Jonathan_B]

Because of the way Flash works, when you have a SWF on CD, the Flash player loads the entire file into memory before it starts to play. So, depending on your computer's speed, ram, CD player speed, etc. your performance may vary. Consequently, we suggest not creating files larger than 25MB for use on a CD Rom. You can get around this limit by chaining your video swf's and loading them sequentially. Our software, Flix Pro (which will also convert your MPEGs into SWFs or FLVs if you want), can do this for you automatically.
Also, if you're going to make Mac projectors, you need to allocate enough RAM to your projector. When preparing a CD-ROM, the projector file needs to be allocated it's own size plus the biggest Flix file plus a couple of extra MB to be on the safe side. When the HFS volume is burnt onto CD it will inherit the memory settings you've specified.
You should also be aware that there is a "stuttering" bug associated with using the current version of the Flash player on CD with load movie. I am waiting for word from Macromedia about when a fix will be out.
jb
http://www.wildform.com/flix