I produce a lot of what the trendy now call screencasts: a movie of something happening on your screen, usually used to demo software or explain a process. The app I use is Snapz Pro, and it’s great software.
But it outputs movies in .mov format. I’ve posted a lot of those online over the past 4-5 years, and the problem is that not everyone has Quicktime installed. Or they’ve got an older version. Or another problem.
So I’ve often wanted to show the movies in Flash format … something that almost everybody has. And if they don’t, it’s a small (still less than a megabyte, I believe) download, whereas Quicktime is something like 30 MB last time I checked.
But getting .mov files into Flash is a major, major pain – one that was supposed to be solved by the lastest version of Flash MX. But it wasn’t, or so, at least, I thought. Importing the video was fairly easy. But Flash always dropped the audio, forcing you to export your audio separately and import it to another layer, and then futz with re-syncing audio and video. Painful.
But there is an easier way. Mike Skovgaard just alerted me to the key ingredient: .avi. Saving my movie files as .avi files allows easy import into Flash, which will automatically create the right number of frames and accepts the audio (in perfect sync, I might add) without a glitch.
Nice!
I’ve done a proof of concept tonight, just for fun, and it worked. There are some minor quality problems, but those are undoubtedly just settings I need to play around with to optimize the import and playing.