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Deliver Video With Flash
Embed Flash video into your Web pages.
by Tom Green
July 28, 2004
Note: Tom Green presented "Delivering Video With Flash" on Friday, July 23 at Digital Design World Seattle. This article is based on that session.
QuickTime is dead. Get over it.
When FlashPlayer 7 reaches its critical mass and is installed on more than 80 percent of Web-enabled computers early this fall, the "Holy Grail" of Flash video content will be realized. When that happens, video content in our Web design efforts will be achievable, and we won't have to suffer through missing plug-ins, cryptic error messages, and video that appears anywhere on the screen but in the Web page.
I came to this rather significant realization more than a year ago when I put a small Flash video into one of my lectures. You can see what brought me to this realization here: http://www.tomontheweb.ca/MMDesign/Storytelling3.htm. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a video in the middle of the Web page that plays when you click on "Play."
The key to video in Flash is the creation of the .flv file. You can do this in Flash using the wizard. You can use the Flash Exporter plug-in for a variety of applications ranging from Adobe After Effects to QuickTime Pro, or you can use a third-party solution, Sorenson Squeeze. You can get an overview of the video workflow here: http://www.tomontheweb2.ca/MXtras/VidMXDJ.htm.
You can either embed .flv files into the final .swf or stream them into Flash from your server. If you embed the .flv file into your Flash file, you can control it by using a button created in an imaging or draw program or by adding one of the buttons found at Window | Other Panels | Common Libraries. You can then apply a video behavior such as Play, Stop, and so on. I explain how to do this in the previous link.
Streaming video from Flash is interesting. In this case, you need to use the Video Playback component found in Flash MX 2004. I have written a tutorial that explains this technique at CommunityMX: http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=7574E.
Once you understand how video is added to your Flash file, you can really start to play with it. This is especially true if you own a Web camera. You can use any video recording device to capture a video stream and add it to your Web page. This involves creating a camera object in Flash and attaching the video stream from the camera to it. I have written a CommunityMX Tutorial that fully explains how to do this: http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=BF6D4.
Once you understand how to create a simple video feed into your Web page, you can start to get creative. I have published a few of my initial efforts. They include:
- Interactive video that places the user in the action.
- A video wall.
- Placing the user in a movie's titling sequence.
- Masking video using an image shot in New York's Times Square.
You can find these projects and downloadable source files in my "sandbox": http://www.tomontheweb4.ca.
About the Author
Tom Green is a professor of interactive multimedia at Humber College's School of Media Studies in Toronto. He is also the author of Building Web Sites with Macromedia Studio MX and Building Dynamic Web Sites with Macromedia Studio MX 2004, and is writing RoboDemo Visual Quick Start Guide for Peachpit Press. Tom is a regular contributor to MX Developer's Journal.
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