Been Flashing lately?

PeterWright wrote on 9/29/2011, 8:45 PM
I needed to output an .flv video for a recent project and my previous converter, SwishVideo1 was a bit out of date, so I looked around at what else was available.

The "official" Macromedia Flash is of course now owned by Adobe, and they wanted around $1100 for it. As my current conversion job was for $65 that seemed extravagant. so I went for SwishVideo 3 with an add on called Video HQ which enables H264 and AAC. This cost under $60, and the result was extremely impressive in quality at a small size.

This makes me wonder - what would Adobe's Flash do extra for an additional $1000?

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 9/29/2011, 9:00 PM
You don't need .flv or Flash unless you are doing all the interactive stuff.
For video, MP4/AVC works just great on all Flash-based players since version 9.
PeterWright wrote on 9/29/2011, 9:48 PM
That's interesting musicvid, but in this case I originally supplied an MP4, then the client had an issue with the 3rd party streaming video provider he's using (screencast.com) if he used MP4 format - if the user's player was out of date, it just displays a blank box, rather than an error message warning about the out of date version. Apparently FLV allows him more customisation options when embedding the player code on his site and he also doesn't get the obsolete player issue.

This is all a bit beyond me, but I was happy to be able to supply an .flv.
musicvid10 wrote on 9/29/2011, 11:07 PM
That's interesting. screencast.com seems to be aiming for 100% penetration, which is impossible, because Flash Player is an optional addon.

In reality, the number of people who have Flash 9 or lower installed is statistically insignificant when compared to the ~2% who do not have Flash Player at all. Youtube tells you to install 10.1 or later to view their product.

If you can stomach the obstacle course, Super will encode both FLV1 and FLV2.

[r]Evolution wrote on 9/29/2011, 11:49 PM
Swish Video 3 -vs- Flash CS5 = Vegas Pro -vs- "Insert NLE Here"

It depends on what your needs are in relation to what they offer and at what price point.
For you, it sounds like Swish Video 3 covered your basis at a minimal cost. For others who may need certain other features only offered by Flash, they would go that route.

Who cares how long the list of Features is?
If the features aren't features you need, then they are irrelevant.

For instance:
I DO NOT need RED Camera support in an NLE so I don't care if my NLE offers it.
I DO need multi-cam capabilities though.
rmack350 wrote on 9/29/2011, 11:54 PM
Well, the price of a full Flash CS5.5 license here in the states is $699.00. And yes that's a lot of money. It'd be better to get it as part of a suite.

If all you're doing is video then I don't see why you'd need to buy Flash. That's really just a small subset of what Flash does.

Rob
TheDingo wrote on 10/3/2011, 3:17 PM
AVS Video Converter does a fairly good job for low cost software

http://www.avs4you.com/AVS-Video-Converter.aspx

If money is no object then Sorenson Squeeze would be my first choice

http://www.sorensonmedia.com/video-encoding/

Laurence wrote on 10/3/2011, 4:08 PM
I never use flv anymore. It doesn't play on my ipad and it brings my android phone to a crawl with it's inefficient flash decoding.
enespacio wrote on 10/3/2011, 9:40 PM
Someone here recommended Freemake Video Converter. I've found it to be very useful. I mainly use it for converting videos to flash (swf).
James
robwood wrote on 10/4/2011, 11:12 AM
I use After Effects from the production suite to batch render FLV and MP4... $$$ rather than $$ solution, but works great for me.
musicvid10 wrote on 10/4/2011, 11:59 AM
When talking about solutions, free or otherwise, one needs to be very careful about which version of FLV they are talking about.

FLV 1, which has been around a long time, supports h263 and VP6, neither of which is very exciting to look at, and are inefficient by today's standards. "Most" ffmpeg-based encoding solutions only support encoding to FLV 1.

FLV 2 support was added in Flash 9 (previous post corrected). h264/MP4 support was added to the others, and this is the most preferred format for Flash video delivery, whether the extension is .flv or something else.

Google's answer to FLV2, VP8, is having a rather slow time getting off the ground.

If I was a big content provider like screencast.com, I would probably have a notice like Youtube saying that Flash 10 or later is required to play my content, and stop worrying about the relative few who do not.