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Building The File (Pt 1)
1. Create a new .fla file and save it on your hard drive with the name progressiveVideo.fla
2. The next step is to create a new Video object into which we download our video.
To do this click on the library menu icon (top-right hand side of the library window) and choose "New Video" from the fly-out menu.
This creates a Video object and places it in our library. By default it will be called "Embedded Video 1".
We now need to drag an instance of that object on to the main stage and give that an instance name. We'll call it
videoContainer.
3. Save the file again.
Creating the FLV file
Flash MX04 can't bring in external video as avi or mpeg files, so first we need to convert our avi or mpg in to a format it can handle
- FLV (Flash Video). At this point you may well want to choose one of your own videos to play around with and import.
For a couple of reasons (bandwidth consumption and lack of access to short, good quality, royalty free video clips)
I have decided not to include an actual video with my tutorial files, but just incase you can't get access
to one for some reason I have included a compressed FLV file instead. However I will describe the process
(including the conversion stage) with reference to the video clip I used, which was called neil_pub.mpg
Flash MX04 comes with a built in Sorenson Spark encoder. Not only can you import video into Flash and export it as an FLV, but you can also make
minor edits to the video before exporting (note: at the time of writing this doesn't inject Metadata into the flv file regarding video duration,
and it also results in rather large file sizes so I suggested you use another encoding process. Perhaps the cheapest alternative is using Quicktime Pro
to encode your flvs, but I will stick to describing how to use the encoder which is built in to Flash, for the sake of those not wanting to
purchase additional software.)
The whole process is handled by a wizard (no, not Gandolf), and is very straight forward and self-explanatory, so for this tutorial
we'll just concentrate on loading and encoding the video without actually editing it.
Although the aim of this tutorial is to eventually download an external FLV, we first need a FLV to download,
and so we will import the video file into Flash, and export it out as FLV now.
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