Compressing a Video in Flash

In this tutorial we’re going to take our Power Director produced .mov video and run it through Flash.

By doing this we’re able to further compress the final video without a significant loss in quality, the main benefit being that you can make high quality videos that aren’t as big as they’d normally be if you didn’t run them through Flash, meaning that they will load and stream faster for viewers.

What Flash does is break the videos into three components, a .fla component, a .swf component, and a .flv component . The .FLV and .SWF components need to be uploaded to your server.

Flash also allows you to add a variety of skins or controls to your video. The skin also needs to be uploaded to your server.

So let’s open up Flash, here I’m using Flash CS3 which is not the latest version but none the less does the same functions as the latest version.

The first thing we need to do is under the middle column “Create new” is click on the Flash File action script 3.0 What these other Flash File components do is something you can research in your own time.

This opens the following window and we need to make sure our size settings are right, in this case 640 x 400 pixels. If you make all your videos this size then this size will stay as is each time you open Flash.

The next thing we want to do is come over to “File” and scroll down to “Import”, then across to “Import to stage”. What this is doing is pulling our .mov video into Flash from where ever you have it saved on your computer.

Navigate to where the .mov file is saved and when we find it click “Open”. In this example we’re going to process the video “testvideoone.mov”.

Next we confirm where the video is on our computer or external hard drive. If the details are correct hit “next”.

Under “deployment” we leave the setting as is “Progressive download from a web server”. Hit next and we come to the Encoding page.

Here we’re only concerned with two settings, Video and Audio.

You might need to experiment with different settings depending on your video length and size. If you have a big high quality video you may need to back these settings off a bit. In the drop down menu they give you a bunch of different settings depending on your situation. Generally I find with video sizes of 3 gig or under you can use high settings without affecting the rate of the download stream, so I generally use custom settings of between 1500 and 2000 kilobits per second and the highest audio rate of 256 kilobits per second.

What these other settings are, who cares for the time being! Hit next and we come to the “Skinning” page. Here we have a choice of skins or controls that will go under the final video. Different colors and different controls. After you select what controls you want and the color you like, click “next”.

Then just click on Finish in the Finish Video Import screen. This will take you to a page where you must specify where you want the final Flash produced video to be saved. As with all videos no matter what program you’re working with, always save them in the same folder. As mentioned previously, Flash is going to produce three files a .fla file, a .swf file and a .flv file and these need to stay together in the same folder for the video to work properly.

So we save the finished files in the appropriate folder and name the .FLA file. This name can be anything you want.

Hit save, and Flash starts encoding the video. The encoding process can take some time if you have a large file, but the subsequent compression is well worth the wait.

And that’s basically all there is to producing videos in Flash. When the video has finished encoding the FLA file appears on the screen.

To check the final video go up to the top of the page and click on “Control”, then scroll down to “test movie”.

And here is our final video, displayed and playing as it should.

Finally we need to save the project and the video is now ready to be inserted in a webpage and uploaded to your server.