ugh, flash

[egypturnash]

(This is one of those thinking-out-loud entries.)

Okay. Um... loading fourteen production-quality FLA files into Flash (6) at once takes for. ever.

And it's a CPU and memory hog anyway. Oh, this is going to be boooooring. I wish it had some way to batch process source files into Quicktime.

Hmm, I wonder if it's Applescriptable. I bet not. Uh, sort of. There's one command in the "mBED Interactor Suite": 'do script: play the specified Action". That looks to be absolutely useless. Once again, Macromedia's lack of attention to detail fails to surprise me. Hello, manual batch processing!

..okay, force quit Flash, start again, load the files in one at a time, be semi-sensible in how you use the thing. And choose a codec. Hmmm. DV/DVCPRO NTSC, 44khz 8bit mono sound, how's that look? Bleh, huge, and can I expect to have that codec on Windows machines? Let me look at some of the trailers up on the Quicktime site.

Three out of three from there are Sorensen Video 3, so I think I'll go with that: seems like that's one I can expect any machine with Quicktime to have.

so boring. Then I get to snip 'em down, and maybe recut 'em into a reel, maybe just a bunch of files. I should pick 4-5 of them to finally stick up online and call the portfolio Done, as well. At least most of my hair is now either pink or blonde, ready to dye. There's a big patch of black in the back that I missed, so I'm probably going to go grab another packet of bleach powder and get it, as well as some touch-up here and there.

Comments

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

Good choice (Sorenson), but please try to be a little more kind to the audio next time! For instance, can you do 16bit audio with mp3 compression?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I ended up going with 44khz 16-bit mono. Which is really probably overkill for just dialogue. The earlier specs above were a random try that was way too large a file. I still gotta output some other stuff and pick and choose the best stuff so as not to be boring... and I need too it today 'cause it looks like I've got a prospect.

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

What I'm suggesting is actually saving lots of file space by not using linear PCM audio. It's really wasteful esp. for dialogue. Just like with video compression, you can up the quality AND reduce the file size by choosing a good audio compressor that's already in Quicktime. Just choosing half the bit depth on linear PCM will still give you an inordinately sized movie file. But upping the bit depth with a good audio codec doesn't really make the file size go up at all.

A good choice for dialogue only would be either 22, 32 or 44 Khz 16 bit with a commonly available codec - I suggested mp3 cause that's already in Quicktime by default.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*nod* I can't remember which options it was offering for audio output - I think it was only offering raw-ish ones. Oh, I just went back to output some more stuff, and while Flash offers whatever codecs I have included for video when rendering to Quicktime, it only offers a succession of sample rate/bit-depth/mono-stereo cpermutations - no options for sound compression. Yay Flash!

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I wonder if you can throw it on the timeline in an editor and then output, rerendering the audio without re-rendering the video, before uploading?