Wow! OK… so I spent a few hours looking for an application to convert my videos to Flash. Yeah, yeah, I know that you can encode FLVs straight from PPro and AE… but there’s still that little bit about embedding them in a Webpage, streaming, etc. In the end, it looked like I was going to have to spend about fifty bucks to get a program to take AVIs or FLVs and embed them into usable SWF. Are ‘ya dizzy yet with “alphabet soup”??

But first a little video (my first Flash video!) of the lead-in from my current project for my church’s small group ministry. I just animated some Photoshop layers in AE, added a 3D camera and some lights for the logo. Then it goes into the titles where I just got lazy and used an AE text animation preset.

And now the backstory….

So I gave Adobe something like $1,300 last year to get myself current with the Pro version of their Production Studio. Umm… make that second-best version, since I saved $300 by not getting Flash in the bundle. Since I do video, motion graphics, photo editing, and the occasional large-scale beer poster… I didn’t really feel like adding a fancy Web-building app to the “list of things to learn this year.” Getting somewhat proficient with AE was tough enough!

But I’ve since gotten spoiled watching videos within Web pages with Flash. And not on YouTube, either, because that site is awful. I can’t believe Google bought them! I’ll rant about that some other time. But the encoding to WMV for Windows users and then to Quicktime for Apple heads was getting kind of annoying. And then, my viewers have to click on their appropriate link and might have to download an update… or simply crash out or hang the browser. Ack!

So a few days ago I fooled around with encoding out of AE with a Flash format. I then had to read up on FLV vs. SWF, streaming, progressive, XML… oh, my head hurts. I downloaded a few Flash video conversion apps and found the best features split between three of them… one had more HTML customization and skins, but had very limited encoding options. Another made beautiful video, but spit out massive, nasty code or stuck the file in an ugly wrapper I couldn’t change. In the midst of my playing with these, I found I needed to update my standalone FLV player software to support the new Flash codecs…

And low and behold I stumbled on Jeroen Wijering’s FLVplayer site. I tried to use his software back in the dark days (before Wordpress) and gave up. But on his links today, I saw mention of a WordPress FLV embed on Jaosan’s site. A quick download and five minutes later I’m showing Flash files in my blog. I think I’ll donate ten buck$ each to both of them for some great software… and still be ahead of the game.
Wow!

I’ll do a post on encoding straight to FLV from AE in the next day or so.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 1:38 am and is filed under Flash, video, after effects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.