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Is Flash Becoming a Viable Audio/Video Alternative?
Part 1: Flash Tools in Camtasia Producer
by Rick Hendershot
www.videoinabox.com, www.sbo-linknet.com
I've been playing around
with online audio and video for years and have always been unhappy with
the mainstream alternatives — Windows Media, Real, and Quicktime. What a
pain having to encode for different players — and then trying to get those
players to work. It is no wonder that rich media has been stalled for the
last three years or so. About a year ago I
stumbled onto Camtasia. TechSmith had just started including a flash encoder in
their upgraded suite of screen capture tools ("Camtasia Recorder /
Producer"), and I found I could create some very good looking (and
sounding) software training videos by using a combination of these tools.
The final step in the process involved encoding the finished .avi file as
a .swf, and then embedding it in a web page. This worked like a charm, was
relatively easy, and the quality was surprisingly good (here's
a sample.) But, as usual, there were some
problems... First, I didn't like Camtasia's clunky
stock control buttons. TechSmith had anticipated this, and actually made a separate
controller available — one with more functionality, and one that looks much
better (see
the sample.) But to add it to your flash movie you had to do some work
in Flash MX. If you happen to own Flash MX — it is ridiculously expensive
— you probably agree with me that it succeeds in making even simple little
tasks like this painfully difficult. No problem. I learned enough
of Flash to get by, and was able to crank out quite a few demo training
sessions. Second problem: the Camtasia system is
based on screen captures and uses a special codec that gives you
incredibly crisp images at very low fps (usually about 5 fps). This is
good for screen captures (software tutorials), but no good for regular
videos that have much more motion, and a higher frame rate. Using the
Camtasia tools to encode regular video into .swf files creates files that
are much too large for streaming or progressive downloads. So "real"
video can't be done in Flash with this set of tools.
Curses! This means the enterprising online video guy is back
to using a hodge podge of tools. Forget it! Third
problem: the Camtasia system (Producer) doesn't have enough flexibility to
handle straight audio. So if you want to just take an online article and
create an audio version of it, there is no easy way to do it. Well, that's
not quite correct. Creating a Flash audio controller amounts to creating a
"movie" -- some buttons that control an audio source. For
a while I took advantage of this to create "radio" presentations that
included photos (see
this example.) I actually constructed simple videos (.avi) with Ulead
MediaStudioPro, and crunched them through Camtasia Producer to encode them
as .swf files. But apart from the clunky work flow and mish mash of tools,
Camtasia Producer simply does not (did not?) have enough audio conversion
capabilities. You pretty much take what you get.
In Part 2 of this series I look
at a product called Flix Pro from Wildform. This is an honest to
goodness video encoder which also packages your video in a variety of
flash players. -- Rick Hendershot
www.videoinabox.com | 