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Flash Reference Guide

Aug 22, 2003

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Have you been to YouTube.com or Google Video? Have you noticed that there is an increasing number of real video commercials on the Internet? Have you seen all the video testimonials for sites such as Adobe Acrobat 9? With the increasing bandwidth, power of computers, and convergence of technologies, you’re seeing traditional media technologies cross over to the Web. The most popular traditional media is video—and the number one supplier for Internet video is Flash.

Flash is not the first supplier of Internet video. At the height of the Internet bubble in 2001, Real Networks dominated the press and was the darling company for Internet video. Many of the technologies and techniques we use today, such as buffering, advanced CODECs, SMIL and more, were brought up to a standard of mass use by Real Networks. In hot competition, Microsoft acquired similar companies to outdo Real. The "real" problem was that both companies had come too early to the Internet world. Even back in 2001, more than 75 percent of the Internet users in America connected via dial-up services using 56Kbps modems.

Meanwhile, Flash extended its reach of broadcast quality animation with Flash 4 and 5. At this time, a tipping point for Flash had been reached. With more than 450 million unique users, advertisers considered Flash a good solution for rich Internet advertising. The key here is that advertisers became comfortable with Flash as a medium.

Video support first came with Flash 6. The quality wasn’t DVD quality, but it was a low-risk way for advertisers to experiment with online video ads. It was low-risk because—unlike with other video players at the time—viewers didn’t need to install any additional plugins to run the Flash Player, which was installed on the computers of 95 percent of all Internet users.

The Big Bang for Flash video, however, came with the release of Flash 8. With Flash 8 video you could finally deliver DVD quality video over the Internet. This made solutions such as YouTube.com and Google Video viable solutions.

Two other well-timed events also presented themselves with the release of Flash 8. First, by the release of Flash 8, more than 50 percent of all American households connected via broadband to the Web. Second, Flash was fast becoming a key member of the Web 2.0 initiative.

What You Get With Flash Video

Today there are 750 million people connected to the Internet with Flash installed on their computers. This is more than any other plugin for your Web browser. What you get is a better guarantee that a user will indeed be able to view your content over the Internet.

It’s easy to see why massively popular video broadcasting sites such as YouTube.com have chosen Flash as their media content solution. To put this in perspective, there are more than 102 million registered YouTube.com members—that’s one seventh of the entire global Internet community. And, this is just one site. Factor in Google Video and the numbers become staggering.

So why is Flash video so popular? The main reason is, to be honest, the success of the Flash Player itself. Video has merely ridden in on the shirttails of the Flash Player.

Another reason Flash video is so popular is because it’s so easy to use video in Flash. Flash does support its own proprietary video format, called FLV, but the Flash authoring tool makes it very easy to import any video directly into your Flash authoring environment.

OK. Flash video is popular. Really, really popular. But is that the only reason you should use it? Oh, no, there’s more.

The first reason to use Flash video is control. You can easily convert RAW video into Flash video using a CODEC, which lets you control such aspects of the final video file as aspect ratios and audio and video quality. All of these settings can be tweaked, which gives you an extreme amount of control.

The second thing I really like about Flash video is that it’s treated in your Flash movie like any other Library Item. This means that you can place a video file inside a movie clip, add masks to your video, interact with your video through ActionScript, and more. It’s very flexible.

The third reason to use Flash video is its support for Alpha levels. That's right, if your video is shot on a green screen, then you can dynamically swap out the background in Flash.

Finally, another great reason to use Flash Video is its support for live video feeds. Through interaction with the Flash Media Server, you can broadcast live video to your Flash movie. You can see this being done with Breeze Conference Server.

It’s key to understand that while you get a lot with Flash Video there are some things you don’t get. The first is security rights protection on your video, often referred to as digital rights management (DRM). Many people have lauded Apple's FairPlay DRM solution and Microsoft's "Plays Anywhere" DRM solution. The reason for this is simple: with DRM, only the right registered user can access the video content.

With Flash Video, the files are not locked down by default. They are available to anyone, which makes it easy to create content and deliver it over the Internet. It’s not a solution you’d want to use if you were selling movies on an Internet site. If you’re selling content, such as movies, then you’d want to ensure that your movies were not pirated around the Internet through solutions such as P2P tools. DRM prevents this and is the reason Apple has sold billions of songs, tens of millions of TV shows, and millions of movies on the iTunes Store.

A second problem with Flash Video is that it’s not very portable. It’s designed to be embedded within a Flash movie either directly or indirectly through a Component or through ActionScript. You can’t surf to a Flash FLV file and watch a movie. It just does not happen.

The bottom line is that you need to ensure that you use video in Flash wisely. There are times when you should use Flash Video and times that you definitely shouldn’t.

The default work you can accomplish with Flash video really does take the video experience to a new level. For example, you’re not stuck watching video in a square box anymore. You can paste your video source into an area masked with an irregular shape to give your audience a shapely new viewer.

When you couple live video with Flash, through the use of the Flash Media Server, you can begin to build next-generation solutions such as video-conference tools, shared Flash environments, and more. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

For the video producer, the time for creating and controlling video over the Internet has never been as exciting as it is today.

For a brief video introduction to using Flash video, please click here.

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