Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web?

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by David Roth Weiss on Jun 21, 2008 at 2:23:59 am No Flash codecs are included with FCP. To encode QTs to Flash you have several options, but the best are the ON2 Flix products that use the VP6 codec. The Flix products to choose from are Flix Pro, a standalone Flash encoder, and Flix Exporter which is a plugin that adds the codec to FCP, QT Pro, Compressor, and Motion. I use Flix Pro myself and recommend it highly. Its easy to learn, but a bit more difficult to master, as it has powerful tools that do require experimentation. For instance, with your four minute peices, you will almost certainly want to use the progressive download capabilities of Flash, which loads a user defined percentage of the file before playing, in order to provide smooth and uninterupted playback. That requires a certain amount of trial and error, as the manual simply does not go into a very detailed explanation. But once you get it right, its really great. Hope this helps... David Roth Weiss Director/Editor David Weiss Productions, Inc. Los Angeles POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™ A forum host of Creative COW's Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums. Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by walter biscardi on Jun 21, 2008 at 3:24:48 pm [Ed Dooley] "As for David's comment below, not true. H.264 is now a Flash codec, just like ON2VP6 is. You might argue that it's not ready for prime-time because of needing Flash 9 to play it, or that some folks aren't able to play it with certain Flash players yet. But it's an official Adobe-supported Flash codec now." It requires a bit of coding on the back end to make it work. Adobe's own Flash Player won't play H.264 yet, we even changed the file format to mp4 and f4v and it still didn't work. Adobe Media Player works just fine, but not Flash Player. So it sort of, kind of, if you do it exactly the right way works, but it's not as easy as just opening an H.264 file in Flash Player. Walter Biscardi, Jr. Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions. STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now! Read my Blog! Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by walter biscardi on Jun 21, 2008 at 4:50:04 pm [Ed Dooley] "Maybe that's what you're experiencing, the file is downloading (and not starting to play) and you're not waiting for it to download first (not that you should, the move of the moov fixes it)." The files are local. We have two machines here that don't work and our web designer can't get it to work easily either at the moment. We're just sticking with Quicktime Player for the moment. Walter Biscardi, Jr. Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions. STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now! Read my Blog! Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by David Roth Weiss on Jun 21, 2008 at 7:44:31 pm [Ed Dooley] "As for David's comment below, not true. H.264 is now a Flash codec, just like ON2VP6 is. You might argue that it's not ready for prime-time because of needing Flash 9 to play it, or that some folks aren't able to play it with certain Flash players yet. But it's an official Adobe-supported Flash codec now." Ed, My response to Brad's question was pertinent and accurate, and more importantly, helpful in guiding him toward achieving his objectives. But, you chose to ignore all of that and instead opted to point out an omission about h.264 -- that ultimatley hijacked the thread and made it all about h.264. Your expertise on the subject is indeed vast, but try to remember, the objective here is to help people by answering their questions and helping them to get their work accomplished. David David Roth Weiss Director/Editor David Weiss Productions, Inc. Los Angeles POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™ A forum host of Creative COW's Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums. Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by David Roth Weiss on Jun 21, 2008 at 8:53:22 pm Ed, You missed my point. It has nothing to do with my being offended. Your information about h.264 simply wasn't responsive to Brad's initial question, and we ended up with twelve posts about h.264, when my response to him provided the information he needed. If you see Brad's latest post (in the previous thread on this subject) he starts it off by saying that the h.264 discussion is over his head. He then goes on to ask about things more important to his mission, which are about using Flix Pro to create Flash, exactly the info on which I had focused. David David Roth Weiss Director/Editor David Weiss Productions, Inc. Los Angeles POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™ A forum host of Creative COW's Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums. Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by David Roth Weiss on Jun 21, 2008 at 10:20:54 pm [Ed Dooley] "Well, one of us is missing the point. He asked about exporting for Flash, you said there is no Flash codec in FCP, I said that's wrong." No, its not wrong, the fact that h.264 can be played by some at this point on the Flash player is simply extraneous information that I intentionally left out, because it's not germane to the question at hand. As forum leaders who know our audience well, part of our job in these forums to pick and choose the information we write. Just like editing a film, we do our best, especially on the busiest forums, to advance the story and to leave out extraneous details that would serve only to confuse the audience and add to the huge amount of excess bandwidth that is wasted by hijackers such as yourself who have a personal agenda. The purpose here is not to impress anyone with extraneous details in one's personal database, but rather to help others with the issues before them. Its quite evident that your goal is not to help or advance the anything other than perhaps the false perception that you know something that others do not. Well, I am here to help Ed, and the proof is in the pudding. After you've posted 8000 times on the Cow come back and argue with me on this topic if you still care to do so. Until then, grow up and try to keep on topic so that others will benefit from your knowledge instead of simply being impressed by it. David And BTW Ed, for the record, if you were to do a search of the Cow, you would find that I posted a thread about Adobe's h.264 initiative and posted a link to their press release on the very day they made the announcement. David Roth Weiss Director/Editor David Weiss Productions, Inc. Los Angeles POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™ A forum host of Creative COW's Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums. Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by walter biscardi on Jun 21, 2008 at 10:54:14 pm [David Roth Weiss] "Well, I am here to help Ed, and the proof is in the pudding. After you've posted 8000 times on the Cow come back and argue with me on this topic if you still care to do so. Until then, grow up and try to keep on topic so that others will benefit from your knowledge instead of simply being impressed by it." Quantity of posts do not equal Quality. Ed's discussion was valid as the question was what is the best way to get from FCP to Flash Video. In theory H.264 is now supported by Flash so in theory you can directly from FCP and/or Compressor to Flash with nothing else required. In practice it's not quite that easy yet. I would consider the H.264 a branch of the original discussion. Oh and if you really want to discuss numbers, then as of right now it's 16,800 since September 2001. Walter Biscardi, Jr. Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions. STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now! Read my Blog! Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by David Roth Weiss on Jun 21, 2008 at 11:14:48 pm [walter biscardi] "I would consider the H.264 a branch of the original discussion." Ed made h.264 "the" discussion, and it's very clear by the follow-up from Brad, who started the thread, that he agrees with me on this. I think that's what really important. And, Ed also said the fact that it was over the head of the person who posed the original question didn't matter to him. That makes it very clear that Ed misses the entire point of the Cow. Enough said... Onto more important issues... David Roth Weiss Director/Editor David Weiss Productions, Inc. Los Angeles POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™ A forum host of Creative COW's Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums. Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by walter biscardi on Jun 21, 2008 at 2:37:13 am In the future, use the Search Posts function here on the Cow. There is a thread right down below discussing how to create high quality Flash videos from FCP. http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/993278 Walter Biscardi, Jr. Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions. STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now! Read my Blog! Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by David Roth Weiss on Jun 21, 2008 at 9:41:50 pm [Brad Jenkins] "What is best to end up with, a .flv or .swf or whatever the 3rd one is .f4l or something like that :)" Of course I've now answered most of your other questions in that other thread... The answer to this question is somewhat complicated and too complex to go into here in any depth. THe answer depends upon the requirements of your web application and web designer. Adobe is very much tied into .FLVs, because action scripts, which are the only way to create players in Abobe Flash and Dreamweaver, require them. But, Flix Pro can create players right into in SWFs and can do pretty sophisticated progressive downloading with SWFs as well, which it can't do with with FLVs. So, I stick with SWFs for those reason. SWFs are however limited to videos with a duration of 16,000 frames, or about eight or nine minutes. As I wrote in my initial post Brad, mastering Flash encoding is a complex subject. I've been using Flix Pro for two years and still struggle to obatain that perfect balance of high quality and smooth play when dealing with long files. I recommend that you either get the demo of Flix Pro or the real thing and immerse yourself in it. Its really the only way to learn it well. If you have specific questions along the way I can help, but its way to deep to go into on this site. David David Roth Weiss Director/Editor David Weiss Productions, Inc. Los Angeles POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™ A forum host of Creative COW's Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums. Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by Sean ONeil on Jun 23, 2008 at 5:01:59 am I gotta jump in here and suggest NOT getting Flix Pro. I bought it and I think it's awful compared to Sorenson Squeeze Flash Edition. Just my opinion of course, but I ended up buying both a few weeks ago and it's a night and day difference on many levels. Sean Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by walter biscardi on Jun 23, 2008 at 11:05:58 am [Brad Jenkins] "really, thats good to hear. Now Im trying to find an alternative to buying one of these programs. I only need to convert 3 short videos for my new website, and I really don't want to spend that cash if I dont have too. Thanks for the info." Then you're back at looking at H.264 probably. As we noted before, Flash now supports this codec. Takes some work on the back end, but it can work. You can create that for free from FCP or Compressor. Walter Biscardi, Jr. Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions. STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now! Read my Blog! Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by walter biscardi on Jun 23, 2008 at 3:14:32 pm [Brad Jenkins] "Are you saying I can just use the FCP h.264 ?" That's what Adobe is saying. Just standard H.264 files are supposed to work natively in Flash. They do work perfectly in Adobe Media Player. [Brad Jenkins] "What do you mean "it takes some work on the back end" What do I need to do to it????????? thanks" If you go back to Ed's original posting, he has a link to an Adobe article describing how to make this work, but you need Adobe Flash CS3 to do the coding. Now Ed was describing how to make this work in Flash Player, but he has dropped off the thread since David told him to grow up and get away from the H.264 discussion. I can't get it to work natively in Flash Player here yet, but my website designer is looking in to this and if she figures out something, I'll let you know. It was something about setting up the header in the file correctly. Walter Biscardi, Jr. Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions. STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now! Read my Blog! Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by David Roth Weiss on Jun 23, 2008 at 6:30:25 am [Sean ONeil] "I gotta jump in here and suggest NOT getting Flix Pro. I bought it and I think it's awful compared to Sorenson Squeeze Flash Edition." So spill the beans Sean. Do you find it difficult to use? Or do you think it's inferior in some other way? David Roth Weiss Director/Editor David Weiss Productions, Inc. Los Angeles POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™ A forum host of Creative COW's Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums. Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by Sean ONeil on Jun 23, 2008 at 6:59:46 am [David Roth Weiss] "So spill the beans Sean. Do you find it difficult to use? Or do you think it's inferior in some other way?" It's beyond more difficult to use by comparison. But aside from that, there are a lot of functionality differences. I'm going to assume you haven't tried Squeeze, else I don't think you'd be asking me this. The biggest thing is cropping. If you use the crop filter in Flix Pro (which I need because I have letterboxed stuff), the encoder does not intelligently recalculate the AR and size for you. You have to calculate the dimensions yourself and enter them in manually. Squeeze is the complete opposite. It's cropping and AR calculation is smart and automatic. When you create an FLV progressive download in Squeeze, it automatically creates an SWF player file as well for you. Flix requires you to hit Command-P and manually create a SWF player. Player skins in both programs are a total joke. But On2 also sells a "Power Player Pack" which I bought assuming they'd be good. They're not. Squeeze at least provides the FLA project files and a very detailed manual on how to edit those skins in Adobe Flash. The Flix Pro interface is very clunky. Going into that hidden menu to add player skins is annoying. Little hiccups like previewing one of the skins loses focus of the app. And that annoying popup screen when you quit the program - it tells you to click "Yes" to exit (I've never seen that on a Mac app before). It just seems like a very amateur-hour port from the Windows version. Last but not least, I did not see any obvious way to batch encode multiple files and multiple outputs. Squeeze is very well designed for this task - better than Compressor even. Perhaps there is a way to do batch encoding in Flix Pro, but it wasn't worth spending time to figure it out given all the other shortcomings. Even if there is a way to do it, I know it' can't do all the things Squeeze can. Like you can take a filter preset and drag it on some movies in the batch, or all of them. It gives you a graphic tree telling you what's being done to each file. So comparing the pros and cons for each program, I couldn't find a single solitary thing I liked better about Flix Pro. Oh crap! George Carlin just died!!! Not too happy at the moment. Sean Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Best way from FCP to Flash Video for web? by David Roth Weiss on Jun 23, 2008 at 7:21:26 am Oh, that's too bad about George Carlin. He was very funny. I suspected your issues with Flix Pro might be more user related than anything to do with results. It's a very deep app and as I've said several times, difficult to master. David Roth Weiss Director/Editor David Weiss Productions, Inc. Los Angeles POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™ A forum host of Creative COW's Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums. Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index