importing Videos to Flash

[emanhattan]

So, I have a project that basically involves a part of the movie being in live action video and the second half being animated in flash. I think it would be easyer to import the video into flash than to try to somehow merge the flash into a video editor. Ive seen a few people import videos into flash but i have always found problems into doing so.

Our video will not make use of any audio in the videos, we will add the music in the flash file. therefore reducing any quality aspects of the video that affect the audio would not matter at all.

So, pretty much, what is the best way to import a video into flash, knowing that its audio will not be a burden?

[lenko]

does it strictly have to be flash? if i were you i'd record the footage, animate your stuff seperately in flash and then combine them both in after effects

[emanhattan]

^that is also a good alternative, but I dont know if doing so would reduce the quality of any of both

[rtil]

never resort to flash for a final video export. go ahead and animate in flash with a video underlay, then export your flash movie as an image sequence. after effects will treat the image sequence as footage, and you can combine the two with the audio and export there. it's not going to reduce the quality of anything unless if you make it - ae's render queue options allow you to export with any avaliable codec, with any available container at any quality you specify.

oh and there are two reasons why you should export your flash as an image sequence -
1. perfect quality. png with 24-bit alpha will give you exactly what you want. just avoid movie clip internal animation, vcam, anything that wouldn't export what you see on stage. it's a WYSIWYG export in regards to preview on stage
2. no frameskips. this is a problem i discovered early with flash's video export. it will always miss a frame here or there, eventually causing your video and audio to go off sync with your flash, forcing you to find where they are and extend frames and chop things up. it gets really messy and isn't worth the effort.

[emanhattan]

alright cool, these are some pretty good tips and have actually adressed some doubts ive had for years regarding flash´s video export.

How hard is it to use after effects exactly? I have never used it and I have less than 3 days to complete this assignment. think I can do it?

[rtil]

yes, what you are doing is relatively simple. you'll just put the image sequence layer above the video layer, then export it using render queue. oh, and the audio, too. you'll probably have to put the audio on its own layer as well, AE doesn't focus much on audio. in fact you can't even preview audio unless you do a RAM preview which has to pre-render.