FLASH VIDEO CREATIVITY KRI5TIA1M BESLEY ERWAN BEZIE MURAT BOOUR NEAL BOYD HOSS GIFFORD TIM HAWKINS BRUCE HERBERT DIANA JOHNSON KEN JOKOL LEONHARD LA55 LI FAROS DOUG MCDERMOTT ANTHONY ONUMONU JEROME TURNER MATERIALS extras.springer.com APress Media, LLC FLASH VIDEO CREATIVITY CREDITS © 2003 Apress AUTHORS Originally published by friends of ED in 2003 KRISTJAN BESLEY ERWAIM BEZIE All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, MURAT BODUR stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by NEAL BOYD any means, without the prior written permission of the HOSS G1FFORD publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied TIM HAWKINS in critical articles or reviews. BRUCE HERBERT DIANA JOHNSON KEN JOKOL The authors and publisher have made every effort in the LEONHARD LASS preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the LIFAROS information. However, the information contained in this DOUG MCDERMOTT book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. ANTHONY ONUMONU Neither the authors, friends of ED nor its dealers or JEROME TURNER distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused either directly or indirectly by this book. COMMISSIONING EDITOR BEN RENOW-CLARKE EDITORS First Published February 2003 DAN SQUIER JULIE CLOSS TECHNICAL REVIEWERS KRISTIAN BESLEY LIFAROS JON STEER JEREMY THOMAS MICHAEL WAL5TON GRAPHIC EDITORS Additional material to this book can be downloaded from http://extras.springer.com AVTAR BHOGAL MATTHEW CLARK Trademark Acknowledgments PAUL GROVE friends of ED has endeavoured to provide trademark COVER AND TEMPLATE DESIGN information about all the companies and products KATY FREER mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. INDEXER However, friends of ED cannot guarantee the accuracy of SIMON COLLINS this information. ISBN 978-1-59059-159-8 ISBN 978-1-4302-5129-3 (eBook) PROJECT MANAGERS DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-5129-3 RICHARD HARRISON SIMON BRAND PROOFREADERS SIMON COLLINS JOANNE CRICHTON HELENA SHARMAN MANAGING EDITOR CHRIS HINDLEY COflTeflTS INTRO 1 1 KRISTIAN BESLEY 7 2 NEAL BOYD 39 3 LEBONZE 59 4 HOSS GIFFORD 87 5 KEN JOKOL 111 6 LIFAROS 147 7 ANTHONY ONUMONU 177 8 LEONHARD LASS 203 OUTRO 261 INDEX 265 JEROME TURNER BONUS CHAPTER INCLUDED ON CD Foreword by Bruce Herbert and Diana Johnson ofSorenson Media Creative boundaries are being blown apart as Macromedia Flash MX ushers in a new era of moving images on the Internet. At its launch, analysts predicted that the Flash Player would transform itself from being a lightweight animation tool" to "the de facto technology for simple web interactivity5* (Randy Souza, Forrester). Since then though, Flash developers combining vector animation and video have proven that it's capable of much, much more than "simple web interactivity". We're still just beginning to scratch the surface of the possibilities it opens up to us, but already it looks like Flash MX is becoming the key technology for pushing video creativity on the Web to a new whole level. Understandably, many people look at Flash as just another way to deliver video on the Web, one more program for showing movies on your desktop. Well, it can certainly do that - but there's a whole lot more it can do besides! You can use ActionScript to add custom controls, determine a video playback sequence, or mask your video with a custom shape. You can use layering to create special effects, design custom templates for e-learning applications, and use lightweight video streams along with Flash animation in rich media e-mail campaigns. With Flash MX's unique set of tools to hand, the Flash Player can deliver a brand new range of video applications with a creative scope the like of which has never been seen before! The impact of video You only have to look at the massive social impact of film and television to appreciate that moving pictures are a fantastically - perhaps uniquely - powerful medium. Offline video is often used to complement interactive media such as games and CD-ROMs, because it can be dynamic, entertaining, and can leave a lasting impression on the viewer. Video on the Web isn't a new concept; despite all the technical hurdles involved in sending watchable images across connections with miniscule bandwidth, pioneering designers have struggled for years to find ways of working within (and working around) the limitations of the day. Let's take a quick look at its history, and see why online video content in Flash offers up a whole new frontier for web designers and video producers alike. Web video production Video production often falls into two broad categories: disk-based and web-based media. Disk-based production took off in the early 1990s, as desktop video editing (non-linear editing) and storage solutions began to mature and become widely availabie. Just a few years later, the Internet began to take off, and the Web started to look like it could be a viable platform for delivering video content. Even though it was early days, the obvious potential of online video sparked off a great demand for reliable encoding tools and delivery services. To many producers, the Internet represented an untapped medium: a new way to distribute video files for a variety of uses in the entertainment, business, and educational markets. Video players such as QuickTime, MS Windows Media, and Real Media became standard fixtures on millions of desktops. They played a critical role in pushing forward the market acceptance of online video. Compressing video There's a fundamental problem with delivering quality video content via the Web: the sheer quantity of data. Raw video files tend to be massive, and they're typically very difficult to compress. Each frame typically contains an enormous amount of information, so just a few seconds of video can easily take up several megabytes. On a hard disk or CD-ROM that may not be a problem, but on the Web (where bandwidth is precious) it's a killer! A video codec (codec - compression and decompression) is a decision-making algorithm that video authoring software uses to crunch massive amounts of video data into smaller, more manageable files. The codec does this by looking for redundant data - information that doesn't significantly affect the image quality - and throwing it out. There's just enough data left for a video player (using the same codec) to recreate the original movie from a downloaded file, and play it back. Deciding exactly what image data is redundant is a tricky call in itself, and even now, it's not something that can be totally automated if you want the best possible results. There's always some trade-off between bandwidth (the amount of data needed per second) and movie quality (the detail and number of frames needed for each second of video). So, video compression wasn't just a critical step in the preparation of video files - it's the technology that made mainstream delivery of web video possible. Sorenson and the evolution of codecs Even once codecs had begun to make online video technically viable, moderately large files, limited bandwidth, and high technology costs still prevented most people from getting much out of it If a producer wanted to make their video available online, they'd need to figure out how much storage space was required and how many separate hits the server could handle at any one time. Hosting could be expensive, and only users with bandwidth (or patience) to spare would see the finished product in its full glory. As time went on though, more and more powerful algorithms were developed, each finding new ways to squeeze more quality into less bandwidth. By 1997, the standard Sorenson Video codec (then sold as a product in its own right) was promising to reduce video files to as little as one percent of their original size. Delivering high-quality video to ordinary users over the Internet was really looking like a viabte option. Apple noticed the strengths of this codec, and in the spring of 1998. formally licensed it for exclusive inclusion in QuickTime. Major motion picture studios such as Lucas Film, Disney, MGM and Paramount began to use it to prepare high-profile movie trailers for release on the internet. The codec quickly became famous for its powerful compression and high-quality results. Sorenson Media continued to refine it, and began work on an easy-to-use compression application called Sorenson Squeeze, for producers new to video encoding. Sorenson and Flash It was during this time that Macromedia began to take notice of Sorenson Media's unique strengths in the video compression industry. Flash developers had repeatedly asked for the ability to import video files into Flash movies for playback through the Flash Player Previously, video content had to be included in a standalone video player, or faked by creating bitmap sequences from the video and transforming these into vector-based images. Adding integrated video presented a challenge. The encoded video files created in the Flash application would need to be small enough to be managed by this lightweight player Recognizing the strong demand of their customer base for rich video integration into Flash, Macromedia approached Sorenson Media late in 2001 to create a video codec that could be EncLuded in the next version of Flash: Flash MX. Macromedia needed something that would be extremely small (less than 70Kb), and easy for the new Flash audience to use, but still offering high-end video encoding capabilities, Sorenson Media created a new codec, Sorenson Spark, loosely based on some video conferencing technology that had been previously developed by Sorenson Technology.