Macromedia/Adobe have made it much easier to include video in Flash
movies in the latest version, Flash 8. This lesson assumes that you are
using Flash Professional 8 and shows you how to make a
Flash movie that contains a movie player configured to play a specific
movie clip. There will be nothing else on the stage. First, of course,
you need to obtain a video clip. Video takes up a lot more space on the
computer than audio, so you use a clip no more than a few seconds long
and with modest dimensions, not exceeding 640*480 pixels. You can use a
video that you have found on the internet or make your own - if you make
your own it is better to use a digital 'still' camera that can make
video rather than a DV camera since the 'still' camera will produce
files that can be more easily loaded into the computer and converted
into the FLV (FLash Video) format that Flash needs. Your digital
'still' camera probably produces files in the AVI format but
Flash is capable of importing and converting several other formats too
including Apple's MOV format. If you don't have a video file of
your own then you can use the MOV file located at Program
Files/Macromedia/Flash 8/Samples and Tutorials/Tutorial Assets/cafe_townsend/cafe_townsend_chef.mov.
Make a new Flash file and save it. Choose File>Import Video
and browse to the video file. Step through the wizard, accepting the
default settings. This will encode the video in FLV format while
applying 'medium compression' to roughly halve the file size. The Flash
video file will be saved in the same folder that you saved the FLA file
into. The Flash video will be set up to progressively download -
this is less likely to have synchronisation problems than an 'embedded'
video (see the bottom of this page for more info on embedded video).
Flash will automatically place a FLV Playback component on the stage and
size it to the dimensions of the video file. Having checked these
dimensions in the Property Inspector, you should adjust the size of the
stage to the same dimensions (Modify>Document). With the FLV
Playback component still selected, use the Properties inspector to set
the X and Y values of the component to zero so that the component is
aligned with the top left corner of the stage. Now choose Window >
Component Inspector and note that Flash has automatically set the 'contentpath'
parameter so that the player can find the FLV video file.
Press Ctrl-Enter to watch the video and if all is OK then go ahead
and choose File > Publish to create the SWF and HTML files that
you will need to include the Flash video in a web page. Note that in
this case two SWF files are published, a main one and an
additional one which contains the control panel (play, seek, mute) for
video playback.
To put the Flash video into a web page using FrontPage:
First make sure that you have a saved page ready to accept the
video (create and save a new page if necessary).
Then import both SWF files and the FLV file into your web
using File > Import. Put the imported files in the same
folder as the web page that you plan to insert the video into.
Then double-click the HTML file that Flash created in order to
open the web page in a browser. View the HTML source by choosing
View > Source then select and copy the lines beginning with
<Object> and ending with </Object>.
In FrontPage, open the page into which you want to paste the
video in design view, click where you want to place the video,
choose Insert > Web Component > Advanced Controls > HTML (or
simply switch to code view) and paste in the HTML code that you
previously copied. Now if you switch to Preview mode you should see
your Flash video running in your web page, just like this:
The tiny video above uses about 2MB for 20 seconds - imagine how big
the files would be if you made a taller, wider video lasting several
minutes... Note that when I carry out the above procedure Flash reports
an error but this does not seem to be a problem - I don't know what the
error is but it must be either minor or non-existent.
You may be aware that it is possible to import videos directly into
FrontPage without using Flash. The advantage of using Flash is that the
Flash video file format is compatible with more computers than other
formats such as AVI or MOV which many computers are not able to play.
Also, the Flash procedure described in this lesson attaches a control
bar to the video allowing the use to Play/Pause, to seek and to mute the
movie. You can change the 'skin' parameter of the FLV Playback component
if you want in order to change the appearance of the bar of the controls
that it provides e.g. you could choose a skin that includes a volume
control instead of just a mute control.
More info on embedded video
If, when encoding video into Flash, you choose the
'embed video' option instead of progressive download and if you choose
to embed the video as 'embedded video' and not a 'movie clip' then there
will be the following differences:
a risk that the sound and image in your video may
not be properly synchronised when played back
the timeline will expand to accommodate the video
instead of adding an FLV Playback component to
the movie, an embedded video object will be added
no separate FLV video file will be created since
the video will be embedded into the SWF file, making it large
the FLA file will also be VERY large
there will be no control panel to control the
movie during playback, and thus no corresponding SWF file.
