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Flash Reference Guide

Aug 22, 2003

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Working with Video

To begin with I am going to focus on standard video. By standard I mean video that is not streamed form a server as you would have with a live broadcast of conference system.

Later in the you will set up Flash MX Communication Server and broadcast video from the server.

As you saw earlier, audio can be imported directly into Flash or you can link to an external MP3 file. Currently Flash MX does not allow you to link to an external MP3 file, however you can import many types of video into Flash MX.

Flash MX allows you to import MPEG, AVI and Flash Movies natively. These file formats do not, however constitute a complete range of video formats available to you as a designer.

You will no doubt want to import files formatted in Apple's QuickTime movie CODEC or Microsoft's ASF format. There is an easy way to support these additional file types: download and install Apple's QuickTime and Microsoft's Windows Media Player. It is best to install the latest and greatest versions of these products.

For Microsoft Windows users you will find that installing the Player software allows you to import additional file types. For Macintosh users you will not be able to import and convert ASF. However, you will be able to import MOV files with the addition of QuickTime.

Flash Video

Flash Video, FLV, is a new video standard specifically developed for Flash. The standard is specifically designed for video broadcast through the Flash Player. You will find later that as you broadcast live events that a native file type is essential.

The benefit of working with the Flash Video format is that you do not need to convert the video as you import it into Flash MX. You no doubt have noticed that when you import an Illustrator file or a Fireworks files that you are prompted to do something with the file. It may be to flatten layers or to leave certain elements of the imported file editable.

An additional benefit is that the FLV file format is the default media format for broadcasting video from Communication Server to the Flash Player.

With Flash Video you have no choices. You simply select a Flash Video file and import it. The best thing, however, is that there is no file conversion. The video shoots straight into Flash ready to work instantly.

To test this out you are going to import a video file formatted in the Flash Video format.

Open Flash and create a new file. Save the file and name it flashVideo.fla.
Select File --> Import To Library. Almost always I select Import To Library as you never know when you will want to use a file again.

Figure 4 Flash Video inside of the Library.
Select OK. The file will import directly into the Library. Notice there was not delay during the import? For file types other than FLV there is a conversion process.
Open the Library and drag an instance of the newly imported video onto the Stage.
Press CTRL+F12 to preview the movie. The files are converted and you will begin to watch a video file directly inside of a Flash movie.

Figure 5 A Flash FLV Video file playing back through the Flash Player in a Flash Movie. It's such a cool, Flash kind of World.
Save your work.

OK, that was the easy exercise. As you may have already seen, you do not have a lot of control over the video file. You are basically stuck with the file format that the native FLV file gives you.

This is where I introduce you to Squeeze.

Spark! Codec

The conversion process used to take video files and enable them to be broadcast through Flash is called a CODEC - a Compression and Decompression algorithm. It is used to compress files into their smallest size. The most popular CODEC you are probably aware of is a ZIP file. You can take a lot of files and place them into a ZIP file. The ZIP file is almost always much smaller than the original file format.

Figure 6 Sorenson Spark! is the mathematics algorithm, or CODEC, that compresses video into the Flash Video file format.

The CODEC used by Flash to compress video for the Flash Video format is called Spark! It is developed by Sorenson . Sorenson has been developing video compression algorithms for many years. The Spark! CODEC is just one of their new algorithms. Sorenson have also created the CODEC's for notable file formats such as QuickTime 6 and Window's AVI.

Any Flash Video file that you create will use the Spark! CODEC to compress the original video footage.

Quality Counts

There is a saying in the video industry "garbage in, garbage out!" What it essentially means is that you can not convert bad quality video footage into good quality. By quality I do not mean the creative process. For that you are on your own. Here, quality refers to the presentation, both audio and visual, of the film footage.

When you create your original video files you will no doubt use a digital editing suite such as Adobe Premiere or AVID video editing solutions. This is the best format in which to create the best fidelity video and audio files. After all the image is digital. And it really does not get better than that.

Just down from all digital video is DAT tapes. The DAT tape is still digital with a very high resolution image.

Beta video (yep, there is still Beta and it still rocks, despite what all the VHS users say) is arguably the best non-digital file type. At this point, however, degradation in video quality can become apparent as you begin to duplicate large numbers of video from an original source. When you use non-digital video types you will always loose quality as you edit from one tape to another. This is where you garbage can begin.

The worst video you can use for creating an original movie is VHS video. Or, even worst, plugging your VCR into the computer and trying to copy a tape that has been watched one too many times.

Flash will not make poor video good. You need to start with the best video and then import it into Flash. Wherever you can use digital video. Today it is increasingly cheaper to buy all digital system: from the camera through to the editing suites. And it you are looking for a recommendation for a video editing hard ware solution than I highly recommend a Macintosh running Final Cut Pro. You will never look back.

Sorenson Squeeze

You will not always be able to import Flash Video files directly into Flash. This may be because the files you are using have only been supplied to you in QuickTime or MPEG format and until Flash Video catches on, there are not too many video editing packages that allow you to export the Flash Video file format.

What you need to be able to do is compress video on the fly. An AVI file should be able to be pulled directly into Flash and be squeezed into the Flash Video file format. Hey, hang on...squeeze? That sounds like a great name, let's use a product called Squeeze to do the man power for us!

OK, so that was a bad lead in to Sorenson Squeeze. Macromedia must have realized that until third party software is available, you will need to have a product that will convert AVI, MOV and other video files into Flash Video. Within Flash is built a small program developed by Sorenson the makers of Spark! that will convert video files into Flash Video. The product is called Squeeze.

Figure 7 Sorenson Squeeze converts video into Flash Video format.

Squeeze is a program that sits in Flash. It only becomes active when you import a video file. So without much ado let's begin squeezing video files.

Open Flash and create a new file. Name the file "importedVideo.fla"
Select File --> Import to Library... Browse to the CD and locate the file testCard.avi. The AVI file is an uncompressed short video. If you are interested it shows some example test screens you can use. Not very exciting, but you can use you own video files as well. I am using AVI as a QuickTime MOV file will require that you have QuickTime installed. The video is made up of two main parts: the video image and the audio sound track.
Select OK to import the file. The Import Video Settings window opens.

Figure 8 The Import Video Settings window compresses video into the Flash video format.
Select the horizontal scroll bar under the black window in the top left of the Import Video Settings window. The scrollbar is a playback handle that allows you to scrub backwards and forwards through the AVI file. You can use this preview to see if the movie file you have selected is correct.
The Import Video Settings allow you to change the settings of the original file. By default, the Spark! CODEC will compress an AVI file on a ratio of about 10:1, which is amazing. But, you are delivering files through Flash over the Internet. At this ration the final video exported out of Flash from the original AVI file (which is 47 Mb large) will still be a whopping 4 Mb. That is too much for delivering media over the Internet even with the prevalence of high speed Internet Access. You must be able to play around with the settings so that you can optimize your imported video for the Web.
The first step you can do is to change the Quality level from 100% to 80%. There is a slight drop in quality. However, this will drop the file size down to 3.5 Mb. You need to measure the value for the web over quality.
Changing the Keyframe Interval will reduce the number of frames of video. The current frame rate is 24 frames per second. Changing this to 12 frames per second will reduce the overall file size to 754 Kb.
To further optimize the video you can convert the file size from 100% to 75% of the original size. This will reduce the file 443 Kb.

Figure 9 The Import Video Settings window settings have been tweaked to help produce the best quality video for delivery over the Internet.
You can choose to remove the audio track to the video file if you want, however, if you are working with video footage then audio is likely to be the least of your worries. Video will always be larger in file size than audio. Removing the audio track will reduce the overall file by only a fraction - and then you have not voice to your movie!
The video is imported into your Library. You will see that the video file has a camera icon to show that it is a unique instance type in the Library. Drag an instance of the video from the Library onto the Stage. Layer 1, the default layer for a Flash movie, will immediately stretch to 205 frames. This is the length of the video file. Changing the length of layer 1 will change the end point of the video.

Figure 10 Flash Video embedded within a Flash movie.
Preview your movie. Turn on the Bandwidth Profile, View-->Bandwidth Profiler, to analyze the size of the video. You will see that the once 47 Mb AVI video is now 445 Kb.

Optimizing Video

The Import Video Settings window gives you a lot of settings to choose from. You have even more when you start working with products such as Sorenson 's Squeeze and Wildform's Flix. So where do you being?

You need to analyze and understand you audience and the type of video footage you are using.

How will your audience be viewing the video footage within your Flash Movie? If you are planning on distributing your Flash movies over CD/DVD-ROM then you can feel free to keep all of your settings at 100%. This will give you the best possible play back of the original video. The Spark! CODEC will still to a heck of a job of squeezing the file.

If, however, your audience is going to be receiving video over the Internet you may want to give your audience a number of choices. For instance, a user connecting with a Cable modem will be able to access richer and more complex video than someone who has a dial-up Internet access. Complex video is always larger in file size than less complex.

A way to avoid this is to change the size of the video you are broadcasting through Flash. Typically, when you import video for delivery for a dial-up user you will not want the video frame size to be larger than 160 x 120. This may be a small image, but, there are tricks where you can fool the audience that the video is larger than it appears. For instance, you can place the video into a presentation and synchronize still images with the video. The still images can be much larger and give the illusion that the video image is larger.

Users accessing the Internet with Dual ISDN can receive more video information over the same time frame as the dial-up users. This means you can increase your video image to as much as 192 x 144. Not much larger, but enough to make an impact.

Finally, high speed Internet access users make up the final group. A video file image size can be as much as 320 x 240. That is half screen. You can go larger. However, I find that for full screen and DVD quality video play back it is better to fall back on video only solutions such as QuickTime, RealNetworks or Windows Media Technologies.

Another way in which you can control the size of the final video image is dependent on the subject matter of the video. A sports event, such as drag race, will need to have video that plays back at high frame rates. The more frames per second the crisper the image will be. On the other end of the spectrum are "talking head" videos. A "talking head" is a video of a person talking directly to the camera. This may be for a presentation, training or interview. The subject, however, will not move very much. For a talking head video what you hear is often more important than the quality of the image.

With both of these different subject types you need to balance the frame rate against the distribution over the Internet. If you have fewer frames your overall Flash movie will be smaller. Increase the frames and you increase the file size.

The bottom line with developing content for the Internet is that you simply do not know hwo fast the customer is accessing your web pages. For all you know they may be like my father-in-law who still uses his 1996 P-75 with a 28.8 Kbps modem (sorry, dad, I'll buy a computer this year for Christmas that will at least 200 MHz with a 56.Kbps modem) or the latest 3GHz+, Cable modem octane ready super machine. Like as much, it will be somewhere in between.

Until the telecom industry can guarantee that everyone connecting to the Internet can do so a Cable Modem or faster access speeds then you will need to weigh heavily the cost of quality over accessibility.

The full version of Sorenson Squeeze

It is hard to ignore the advert Sorenson placed in Import Video Settings window. Yes, you can buy an upgrade from Squeeze in Flash MX to Squeeze published by Sorenson .

The software is available at http://www.soresen.com. Not only can you get a copy of the video you can also view some of the slickest examples of video in Flash.

Figure 11 Squeeze can be purchased as http://www.sorenson.com/.

As will all good software you can download and install a 30 day evaluation of Squeeze. It is worth downloading and giving it is whirl.

What you will notice when you open Squeeze is that is it a relatively easy and intuitive tool. The only role it really has in life is the conversion of video from one file type to either Flash Video, Flash SWF or QuickTime.

Figure 12 Squeeze Pro.

I can guarantee that if you have some video files, you will be up and running with Squeeze in almost not time.

The first step is to drag a video file onto the left screen. A preview of the video will be displayed to you in the screen. You can use the video controls to scrub through the video and play it.
The next step is to choose which file type you would like to convert to. For Flash MX the easiest file type to use if FLV Flash Video. Select the FLV icon button.
Finally you need to choose which audience file type you would like to export to. The seven buttons are preset definitions for different Internet connections. On the far left is a button that will optimize your video for broadcast to dial-up users. On the far right is a preset that will optimize the original video file for delivery over CD-ROM. You can choose multiple file types. Choose the far right button for CD.
To convert the file into Flash Video press the "Squeeze It" button. The video is then converted. Encoding video can take some time depending on the length of the original video file.
When the file conversion is complete you will have a file placed in the same folder as the original video file. The file name will be the same as the original file with the extension _cd.flv. The new Flash Video file can be directly imported into Flash MX.

Figure 13 The final video file exported out of Squeeze.

You can batch export up to 7 different broadcast settings and 3 file types at once. As you might expect, you can also customize each setting. You can also modify the filter settings for the video. To do this you need to select the "spanner" icon.
Selecting the "spanner" icon to open the Filter Settings window.

Figure 14 Squeeze's Filter Settings window.
The main window in the Filter Window is the first frame of the video. Selecting any of the resize handles allows you to crop the video.
You can customize the Contrast, Brightness, Gamma, White Restore and Black Restore to the video image.
If the original video suffers from "noise," the annoying static that sparkles all over the video, then you can treat that by selecting the Video Noise Reduction.
A useful tool tucked into the bottom left hand corner of the tools is the "Normalize Audio" check box. Selecting this check box will level all audio to the highest level without distorting the sound.
You can also choose a simple Fade In/Fade Out transition.
Encode a video to see your new settings take hold.

Flix

Macromedia has released the code that allows software companies to embed the Flash Video compressing CODEC into their products.

One product that has been around for a while is Flix. Flix, by Wildform, converts video for use with Flash. Earlier versions of Flix converted video in Vectors for use within Flash movies. The end result can be effective. However it is not true video.

The latest release of Flix does come fully Flash Video enabled.

Unlike Squeeze, Flix will not convert you video into QuickTime, but it will convert video files into Flash Video, SWF and convert the images within the video to Vectors.

Figure 15 Wildform's Flix.

If you are going to be using video a lot in Flash then you will want to consider purchasing either Squeeze or Flix.

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