Bringing in the audio in video

Week 7

February 19, 2008

Today we looked at importing video and audio into Flash and I had time to scan in some images for my project using the scanner.

Video

We were told the Flash help application was a good place to go for details on video uploading, This includes a list of file formats that are useable in Flash depending what programmes you computer has on it. These included .avi .mpeg or .mpg, .dv, .mov and .wmv and .asf. I was interested to know what my computer could deal with. I do have Quick Time (but I will have to check it is Quick Time 7) and apparently I can get a free download of Direct X9 to install which allows overlay (an animation/video term for one thing running on top of the other). Then I will be able to use all the file types shown in the help application.

 Importing video

To upload a video to Flash go to file – import – import video. You will then be taken through and options wizard which gives you two options on the way you upload the video.

1 – Progressive – using this way your video plays from an external file (if chosing this option you need to fill in Flash 8 encoding option and video codec – on 2VP6 – and then choose your skinning, the style of the player your video appears in). With this method as long as you keep all your media in the same folder you will be fine. You can place a button on the timeline to bring in your video in its player (a start animation button so to speak).

2 – Embedded video in .swf – using this method you can put your video into a movie clip but before doing that as you go through the video wizard you can chose the option to edit it first using an intuitive editor that creates clips for you as you select parts of your video. Once on the stage you can stack movies on top of each other and use the blen options which will have apppeared in the properties panel to get some nice effects. You may want to create an invisible key frame over the video so people can click it to play. You can do this by dragging the key frame from up to hit so there is only a hit state.

Audio

Again you need to go to file - import and then import to library this time to bring in audio. You can also choose settings for your audio from the file - publish settings option. From these you would chose an ‘audio event’ for a short snippet, a sound effect perhaps. Using this option once the play cursor has reached the first frame the whole sound will play regardless of whether you have placed enough time for it, in frames terms, in the timeline. Althernatively you may need to use the stream option. With this option you can scrub through the audio where it appears in the timeline and hear it as you do so. This would be useful if you wanted to place key frames at key sections of the audio. Our tutor recommends sticking with MP3 files in our animation.

Tip - If you go to the bottom of the library panel and click the ‘i’ symbol you can see the properties of the symbols – such as MP3.

Scanning

The scanner was a simple machine much like a photocopier only with the image being uploaded to the computer. In order to do many images as quickly as possible, I uploaded the scanner’s own wizard and set it to scan to desktop and just kept scrolling back through the scanner’s automatic scan and upload options. Once I had done I transferred all the images into a desktop folder I had created and saved them to my memory stick as I would have to use them both at home and in the tutorial next week to create my project.

 Tips and hints

Remember when you place an action on a button you place it on the image and therefore it is on that instance of a button – so if you drag a new instance of the button out you can (indeed must) place new actions on it.

Out of hours – work between tutorials

This week I worked every evening and all weekend on creating my Flash movie. Details of what I have achieved will be uploaded so far and how it progresses will be uploaded to the blog in a series of entries all titled PROJECT … Please find the details there.

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