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After Effects into Flash – many questions
I am exploring the possibilities of using work created in After Effects in my Flash movies. I want to be able to create small bits of animations in After Effects and then import them into Flash to enhance the Flash animations. The Flash movie is not intended for online viewing so file size is not an issue. Ideally I would like to export the final Flash movie as an .swf to view in the flash player.
There seem to be a number of ways of doing this.
It seems that to export an After Effects project as an .swf or a FLV, I have to go File > Export rather than using the settings available in the Render Queue. Is that correct?
If I choose to export as a Quicktime .mov with the render Queue and wish to produce footage with a transparent background, I choose the following settings: RGB + Alpha in the Channels field, Millions of Colors + in the Depth field. I choose “Animation” in the Format Options dialogue. Am I on the right track or is there a better way? And what is the implications of choosing between the Premultiplied (matted) and Straight (unmatted) options in the “color”field?
In general, under what circumstances should I export footage as .swf as opposed to .flv, or render it out as a Quicktime movie, if my purpose is to use it in Flash?
Would using After Effects animations in Flash in this way have a negative effect on the speed that the flash movies can play? Are there any danger areas like this that I should watch out for?
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3 Replies
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For offline viewing I strongly recommend rendering out to QuickTime ( i go uncompressed) and using Sorenson Squeeze to output an FLV for Flash to use. You can import the FLVs into flash to use as MovieClips if you need to control them as graphic elements otherwise keeping the FLVs as external video files is recommended as it will keep the video loosely coupled with the swfs frame rate.
You can use Flash’s Media Encoder but Sorenson Squeeze ($150?) will give you better results because of it’s 2 pass encoding option. I have not tried to used the direct to swf/flv out of AE and don’t know the quality of output but that is a inherently less flexible workflow.
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thanks, that is very helpful. Sorry if this is a silly question, but what is Flash Media encoder? Since I live in South Africa, $150 is quite steep – it works out to about seven times that for us in Rands.
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If you have Flash 8 Professional, you have the Flash 8 encoder which can convert just about any file to the flv format. As far as I remember, if you can output from AE to flv that means you must have installed 8Pro. I’ve always used Flash 8 Pro and AE 6.5.
Either way, I always render out an uncompressed or mpeg4 quicktime video from AE and then use the Flash 8 encoder that comes with 8 Pro to convert to flv. I set my cue points in the encoder as well.
However, you can also import the video into Flash 8 and it will encode it to flv for you.
Visit http://www.gotoandlearn.com and watch the first two tutorials on using video and you’ll find one way.
You can also just go (within Flash 8) File – Import – Import Video follow the steps and you’ll have video.
But, as mentioned above, you’ll need to put these into a movie clip or video component to be able to play them via events and control via actionscript. Otherwise, they just play
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