[CS3/AS2] Flash For Large Touch Screen Display: Need some tips.

[landrvr1]

Greetings all.

Starting a new project for a piece that will run on a 52" LCD monitor, and need some advice. I've only created for the web, so I'm a bit out of my depth here.

My stage size is 960x540 (which translates into a 16:9 widescreen ratio)

The piece will consist of a number of menu buttons that, when you select, will fire off a series of transitions. These transitions are short, 2 second films that have been rendered out of After Effects as jpg image sequences. Each image in the sequence is 1280x720 (again, 16:9 widescreen ratio).

I've been bringing the transitions into Flash as true image sequences, then resizing that movieClip to fit in the 960x540 stage size. Each of the transitions is then made into a swf file. You press a button, the swf transition plays.

When the transition stops, you are looking at a still image of a piece of office furniture.

So far everything works great. The resolution looks nice on the LCD.

My first question is this:
Is this a logical way to create a Flash piece for touch screen/kiosk viewing? There's going to be dozens of swf pieces due to the overall depth and complexity, but I wanted to set it up that way to avoid one massively huge exe file. But should I be considering another way to do this?

My second question has to do with showing a film within the piece:
While cruising around the thing, moving from rendered image to rendered image via the transitions, the viewer will have the opportunity to watch a short animated film. I'm having enormous trouble figuring out the best way to bring the film into this. My source is an uncompressed AVI. I've tried bringing it in as an FLV (@1280x720 resolution), but it's way too pixelated. I need it to run full screen - like the rest of the images/transitions. Does anyone have some tips on how to do full screen video in flash while keeping the quality excellent?

Thanks and sorry for the long post.

[EvolveDesigns]

I think you have a good system working for you. I've done similar things for massive screens pretty much the same way. As to video, I suggest you try the H.264 filetype rather than an flv, WAY better quality.

more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video

[landrvr1]

Okay, cool.

The H.264 compression. I'm really fuzzy on this point. Where/when/how do I incorporate the H.264?

I'm in Premiere. Do I export via the Media Encoder and select H.264? Then import video into Flash and select the .3gp file?

Sorry, totally lost here on the workflow of this. I normally, for website use, just import my AVI and convert to FLV using On2 VP6. The res is smallish, so there's no quality issue. Now that I'm needing to output at a much higher res I feel like I'm out of my depth, lol.

[Gu35s]

search for another video coder. download h.264 codec if you don't already have (usually it's packed with the video coder) and encode with h.264 with out put of either .mov or flv. I think. It's been a while since I do vid encoding.

I am drooling at the 52" LCD touch screen... I wish I have such a platfrom to play with.

For image sequence, I came out with my own scaling calculations to increase or reduce sizes. Basically you have a target mc that you want to fix into a certain frame with yada width and bla height. But if you force images with _width and _height, there maybe problems with ratio and others. So I use scales instead.

_global.mcResize = function(mc:MovieClip, W:Number, H:Number, upSize:Boolean) {
	mc.xscl = mc._xscale - ((mc._width - W) / mc._width * mc._xscale);
	mc.yscl = mc._yscale - ((mc._height - H) / mc._height * mc._yscale);
	if (upSize) {
		mc._xscale = mc._yscale = (mc.xscl > mc.yscl) ? mc.xscl : mc.yscl;
	} else {
		mc._xscale = mc._yscale = (mc.xscl < mc.yscl) ? mc.xscl : mc.yscl;
	}
};
// Usage: mcResize ( target_mc, desired_width, desired_height);
// upSize is optional. default is false. Scale up to the larger ratio if true.

It works well but some images may pixelate. So I use this to compensate. Found it online and modified it. Can't seem to find the original anymore.

import flash.display.*;
_global.loadImage = function(url:String, target:MovieClip) {
	target.tbmc = target.createEmptyMovieClip('bmc', 0);
	target.listener = new Object();
	target.listener.tmc = target;
	target.listener.onLoadInit = function(mc:MovieClip) {
		mc._visible = false;
		var bitmap:BitmapData = new BitmapData(mc._width, mc._height, true, 0x000000);
		this.tmc.attachBitmap(bitmap,1,true,true);
		bitmap.draw(mc);
	};
	target.listener.onLoadError = function(mc:MovieClip) {
		target.attachMovie('brokenImage_mc','brknImg_mc',0);
	};
	target.loader = new MovieClipLoader();
	target.loader.addListener(target.listener);
	target.loader.loadClip(url,target.tbmc);
};
// Usage : loadImage ( 'imgUrl.jpg' , target_mc );

Probably not what you are looking for but it should be useful.

[landrvr1]

Thanks. Nice bit of code. I don't need it for this project, but I'll tuck that away.


Discovered last night that exporting an FLV using the H.264 codec is only available on the new Premiere CS4. I've got the CS3 Suite. Grrr.

Gonna have to find another encoder that export that FLV as H.264.

Off I go....

[Gu35s]

i used to use this.
http://download.cnet.com/Riva-FLV-En...-10320097.html

[landrvr1]

Cool, I'll check that out. Thanks

[EvolveDesigns]

sorry didn't mean to adandon you hehe... You don't have to re-encode the file to flv, that's the beauty of this method, flash can now load a variety of files natively. Here's a great tutorial that will help explain it all:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashpla...sh_player.html

[landrvr1]

Ahh, great. Thanks for that.