Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, I review how to import and work with video in your Flash documents. The ability to include video inside a SWF file was introduced with the release of macromedia Flash MX. This CS3 version of Flash Professional includes options for how video is imported into Flash, uses current state of the art video compression options, the stand alone video encoding application for batch processing of multiple files and the ability to apply alpha transparency to imported video clips. These video enhancements open up even more creative and effective communication opportunities for Flash developers. I have an example here of an FLV file, that I've inserted onto my stage. Let me go ahead and control, test movie, playback a little bit of this video, notice that there is a built in skin controller with volume control. Scrubber for moving backwards and forwards in the video and then playback controls such as pause, stop, play, forward and reverse. Video in the Flash authoring environment is restricted to the FLV file format and is intended for use with communications applications including video conferencing and files containing screen share encoded data exported from the Flash communications server. This example here is progressively downloading from a host when you export video clips with streaming audio in the FLV format the audio is compressed using the streaming audio settings in the published settings dialog box. Files in this FLV format are compressed with the Sorenson codec or the on2vp6 codec. The Sorenson codec is supported by Flash player 7, the on2vp6 codec is later and is supported in Flash 8 and CS3. Let me review the procedures for importing video into your Flash projects. Flash CS3 works with a variety of different video file formats. If you have QuickTime 4 or later installed on your Macintosh or Windows machine or direct X 7 or later on your Windows machine you can import embedded video clips in a variety of file formats including QuickTime mov, AVI, windows media wmv, and mpeg video files. If you attempt to import a file format that is not supportive on your system a warning message will be displayed indicating that the operation can't be completed. Some cases Flash will import the video but not the audio. You'll import your video clips into Flash using the file, import, import video option, that brings up a sequence of windows entitled import video. The number of screens you get here depends on the type of video file you're importing. First select your video either from your computer or video already deployed to a web server. Next choose your deployment option, progressive download from a web server as you can read from the description here, let's you stream the video using http streaming. This option will convert the video file you import to a flash video file, that's the FLV file and configure a Flash video component to play the video. The component is what actually gets stored in your library. The FLV file is actually linked to your document. Stream from a Flash video streaming service let's you upload your video to a Flash media server hosted by a service provider with whom you have an account. Stream from Flash media server let's you upload your video to a Flash media server that you host as a mobile device video bundled in SWF is only supported as the warning here states in Flash Player Lite 2.0 or Flash Lite 2.1, you can embed the video in the SWF file and play in the timeline. There's a warning here that embedded deployment is likely to cause audio synchronization issues and this option is only recommended for short video clips with no audio track. The last option is to deploy the video as a linked QuickTime video for publishing to QuickTime. I don't have this option available because I'm importing an AVI file and not a QuickTime file. Next is your embedding options, if you choose the embedding choice here, if you choose progressive download from web server which is my usual option you'll get your encoding screen here where you can choose what kind of encoding. This is quite a detailed screen where you have tabs for the video settings. Video codec quality, maximum data rate, the audio properties, cue points and the ability to crop and resize the video. Next you have your skin options, these are playback skins that are built into Flash CS3. Once you've chosen the skin you want to use click on the next button and then you'll get a finished video import screen which will summarize all of your options. Read through this carefully and then click on the finish button at the bottom and then Flash will proceed to encode your video and give you a progress on how its going. You can cancel the encoding at anytime by clicking on the cancel button. Flash also tells you the elapsed time and the total time and when it's done it's going to place this component that represents the video file that's been encoded in the library. It will not put the actual video file in the library unless you choose the embedded deployment option. And there's another copy of the video component, let me delete the one that's there. Flash also placed it on the stage for me but here in the library you can see the video playback component right there, the FLV file has been saved to the same location as the video file that you imported.