Webmaster Forum / Flash / General Flash Topics / October 2008

Well, I'm not clear on what your goal is here. First you wrote that you want to
cut encoding time (which would be something you'd do in the Adobe Media Encoder
in CS4.. it's a total rebuild of what was the Flash Video Encoder... it's a lot
faster at encoding.)

On the other side of the question you're asking about streamlining this work
by updating to CS4..

If you're using the video components, I can tell you that to take advantage of
h.264 (or any of the other formats supported by FP9 update 3 and FP10) you're
going to need to be authoring in either CS3 or CS4.  Because you have to have
those to get the components and API's that support h.264.   And you'll have to
publish the SWF's for Flash Player 9 to take advantage of those updates.

Here's an h.264 article that might help:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/hd_video_flash_player_02.html

So this is one case where I'd say CS4 will pay for itself, primarily in
encoding time wih the new AME (however, I should not that there are 3rd party
tools that can do that encoding too.. mentioned in the above article).

On the CS4 authoring side, you'd at least get the most recent version of the
video components (assuming you're using them).

That said, if I were doing this work I'd be examining my workflows to see if
there was some way I could use JSFL or a custom-built flash component to
automate the process.  Without knowing more specifically what you're doing it's
hard to advise..

Basiclly our workflow is edit the video in Final Cut Pro, Export the video to
Quicktime file, then take it into the Encoder and turn them into flvs.

So I ma just trying to just cut out going to the Flash Encoder all together
and just export to a h.264 Quicktime and then use that to play in the video
player. If I am way off track here please let me know. I am trying to justify
upgrading to CS4 for my company and I think this could be a huge reason if all
I have to do is re export the swf file from what I already have.

Yeah, you can cut out the encoding part altogether.  You'll need to upgrade at
least on machine to CS4 (or CS3.. that would be OK for this)  to build
yourselves a video template with whatever components and actionscript you might
need.  

You could build a shell that grabbed the video names from an XML file and used
actionscript to feed the names to the component.  The idea would be to make the
template generic so you could grab the video name from an external source (xml,
textfile, flashvars, etc...)

Then put the pieces up and just upload your h.264 stuff to the right folder so
the data source could find it.  Very doable.

Here's a little 3rd party article on h.264.  It's not a generic player but
will show you what you're dealing with...


http://blog.six4rty.ch/tutorials/flash-cs3-play-h264-video-using-the-flvplayback
-component/

No. You have to replace the components you're using with the new components (and while you're at it it would be a good idea to check your actionscript).  It shouldn't be too painful though.