Help getting started...
by Craig Sawchuk
on
Nov 15, 2005 at 1:32:10 pm
I have to convert a video to a flash slide show (I know it doesn't make sense --but they are paying me).
I have the jpegs in sequence and the soundtrack which is qt audio. The target output size is 750s550 so I'll make a background for the pictures in Photoshop. Can I import the load into Flash and put dissolves between pics just like a non-linear video editor? What's the best way to approach this? I've just installed Flash and I'm a little intimidated by the learning curve...
Re: Help getting started... by Seth Olson on Nov 15, 2005 at 4:40:56 pm
Without getting heavy with actionscript, you can put all the pictures on one timeline, a new keyframe 120 frames apart with a different pic on each one. Each picture will be show for 4 seconds at 30 fps. On the layer above it, have a black rectangle (movie symbol) the size of the document with a keframe 10 frames before the next image, one above the new image, and one 10 frames after. Motion tween the black rectangle between those 3 keyframes, and then turn the Alpha on the first and last (of those three) keyframes to 0%.
The result will be a black fade in and fade out of your slide show, but it will not be interactive. It will be a movie slideshow. And a dirty way to handle the sound is to throw it onto a new layer itself, one keyframe at the beginning and regular keyframes that will span the length of the show. Another down side is that it will make editing annoying later to change timing.
For a less crude approach, try searching FLashkit.com.
Re: Help getting started... by lajoiet on Nov 15, 2005 at 5:07:49 pm
I've got a Flash file set up to disolve between images based on Lee's XLM and Flash Tutorial. It's not the most elegant thing in the world, and I'd LOVE to have some feedback on what I did poorly and how to do it better. But if you want to use it feel free ( http://home.comcast.net/~tlajoie/Flash/SlideShow2.zip ) Much of it can be controled by editing the XML Text file:
All the Images just need to go into a sub folder of the player "images" and I always just name them "image###.jpg" which makes it easy to run through the list adding numbers and even easier to re-order the slide show, and I keep all of the images at the full resolution (in this case 1024x768) so I don't have to worry about scaling the image holders. The "delay" value sets how long the images are up on the screen (Not including disove time) and is the number of frames, so for mine that runs at 30FPS, 300 frames equals 10 seconds of full screen time. The "Alpha" value sets how much the Alpha changes with each step in the fading process, so a higher value will fade more quickly and a lower value will fade more slowly.
For your application you will need to change the size of the stage and holder1 and holder2 objects to match your size and decide if you want a different frame rate, which is easy enough to change in Flash, but remember it's going to affect the "delay" and "alpha" values from the XML file ( if you change it to 10 frames per second, the 300 value for "delay" will change from 10 seconds to 30 seconds )
If any of you pros cared to take a look at it, I appologize for the lack of documentation (I just can't get into that habit) I'm sure it could be done better with intervals and functions, but they are one of my weak points in Flash so sometime when I have some time to sit and figure them out I plan on looking at this once again and cleaning it up. I've already used it for about 5 displays my company put on over the past 6 months including one where I modified it to display PNG files with transparency fading in and out over a background of stars that were moving randomly around the screen (again, thanks to Lee!!!) and that one came out EXCELLENT!!!
