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Shoot Expertise: The Filmmaker's Codec

Aug 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Barry Braverman

Flash becomes a dominant force in video producers’ workflow.

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Get up to speed in Flash

In the beginning, it was known as FutureSplash, the product of a small startup that had come up with a way to deliver animation to dog-slow computers connected via a dial-up modem. A decade later, and now part of the Adobe family, Flash is poised to become a dominant force in what had been a traditional video producer's workflow.

For shooters and producers of every stripe, Flash capabilities are now relevant to everyone on the runaway digital bus. If you're on the bus clinging to a handrail and plan on still being there in coming years, it's a simple matter, really: You're going to need a decent, working grasp of Flash.

August 2006 will mark the 10^th anniversary of Flash, and, after more than a decade, the program's original features are still the most compelling to authors and producers. Its freehand style of creating graphics through use of a stylus is extremely efficient and still works well. Indeed, longtime Flash users (including myself) with a traditional graphics sensitivity appreciate the way that shapes can be drawn with naturally textured edges, a process that goes beyond merely manipulating points on a vector. For Flash artists, the paintbrush is and will likely continue to be an extremely potent tool.

From one perspective, Flash is the animated graphics technology that powers Adobe's Studio/Flash applications. Flash files can be viewed with or without a dedicated web browser; the Flash player is also directly accessible by many third-party web and video applications.

Today, with a Flash player user base of more than 600 million and a growth rate of some five million per day, the traditional producer of videotape programs and DVD can no longer afford to ignore the potential of Flash in the marketplace. One reason is the economy inherent to Flash-based authoring that produces a very efficient file size. For the video producer, this translates into a lower-cost, less labor-intensive process, directly attributable (in part) to Flash's less demanding storage, CPU, and overall bandwidth requirements.

Beyond the eye candy that seems to permeate every corner of the Web, Flash is rapidly becoming a filmmaker's codec as well. Because Flash uses vectors to generate graphics rather than the overstuffed bitmapped files of conventional MPEG and AVI movies, Flash programs are inherently much more compact. They're also scalable — a major advantage when considering distribution options over typically slow consumer networks as might be encountered in Video on Demand (VOD) implementations. For producers of content moving rapidly to web-based initiatives, Flash represents a key enabling technology embracing many viewer platforms and connection speeds.

The primary appeal of Flash to many producers is its low cost. In television animation, the advent of Flash and the Flash player has breathed new life into domestic animation production, as Warner Bros., Disney, and others have moved substantially into Flash-based production. Tom Ruegger, creator of legendary cartoon series such as Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, and Histeria!, recently used Flash to create his mock newscast strip, The Weekly Gnus.

The Weekly Gnus was never intended to mimic the look and feel of 1930s vintage cel animation; those days are almost certainly gone forever as far as television production is concerned. Rather, it was Flash's efficiency and economy that held the greatest appeal, the animated content in this case being particularly topical and concept-driven. Flash's ability to generate video frames can be extremely compelling to image creators of every stripe — shooters, DVD menu creators, and animators alike. The Weekly Gnus simply couldn't have been realized in any other way.

My recent experience with Flash stems from a series of online tutorials for advanced DVD training. The curriculum, built almost entirely inside Flash, took ample advantage of Breeze (a web communication system built around Flash that enables audiences around the world to access compelling multimedia programs) to provide an optimal two-way online training environment.

The curriculum included a multitude of screenshots and graphics, in addition to several Flash movies embedded in a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. For the pre-produced video portions, I used a Panasonic AG-HVX200 recording 720p30 to a P2 card, and subsequently captured and edited in Apple Final Cut Pro 5.0.4. For the live interaction, I provided audio only coupled with a still graphic on screen.

The high level of interactivity, onscreen navigation, and realtime chat made the four two-hour sessions as effective as one could reasonably expect from a remote presentation spanning eight time zones. I especially appreciated Breeze's ability to integrate high-quality video elements and screenshots in a self-paced, on-demand environment, and the live feedback capability in my modest implementation greatly expanded my group training feature set. Flash's low-bandwidth needs extended the opportunity for training to a maximum number of users and companies with widely varying connection speeds.

One major reason for the success of Flash-based training is the ubiquitous nature of the Flash player, residing on several hundred million of the world's computers. Recall that Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 loads the Flash player as part of the standard installation so that PDFs with embedded content can play on virtually any computer regardless of platform. According to Adobe Flash Product Manager Mike Downey, Flash (.flv) has become the second most popular video format on the Web, a remarkable achievement considering the Flash player didn't even offer video support before version 6 was introduced only a short time ago.

A lot has been made of Flash's potential future role in the creation of motion graphics and menus for HD DVD and Blu-ray discs. One can imagine, for example, a 10,000-question quiz where 2,000 to 3,000 still menu graphics are generated automatically in the Flash timeline from a database and single background TIFF.

In SD DVD, the role of Flash is growing as in the case of Warren Miller's DVD-ROM Ski World ‘97, which features interactive lessons on the slopes along with the expected action footage. Despite tens of millions of DVD-ROM drives in the United States, few commercial (less than 50) DVD-ROM titles have actually reached the market. The reason: DVD-ROM is a notoriously dangerous and lawless place, devoid of standards and rules of engagement. The format, despite its enormous promise, has been difficult for producers to exploit.

Today, Flash is helping to service this vastly underexploited DVD-ROM market. In Ski World, Macromedia/Adobe Director MX 2004 was used with embedded Flash movies to ensure maximum compatibility with desktop computers, the requisite high level of interactivity simply not being possible within the narrow constraints of the DVD-Video specification. So while DVD-Video offers near-universal playability on a dedicated set-top player, Director 2004 with Flash offers comparable compatibility and far greater capabilities on the computer, providing in the process a dose of much-needed standardization in the ROM domain.

The maturing of Flash and the Flash player holds enormous promise for traditional video producers. Beyond the dull rectangular video in a box that has long dominated web video presentations, video with Flash allows complete control of the interactive space including overlapping vectors (or images) without limitation. This contrasts with other media players, such as QuickTime or Real, that are largely self-contained. As Downey states, “Flash is a lean-forward experience, not a lean-back one.”

Looking ahead to the future and the demands of large-screen display, Adobe is hoping to extend Flash technology even further. In its project, Apollo, the Flash player's “Runtime” application integrates Flash with HTML to enable web and video combined capabilities. As an example, one application of Apollo might be in conjunction with VOD, whereby video playlists accessible from the desktop can be cached for playback at a later time. This functionality could be enabled from within or without the web browser environment.

The potential impact of Flash in coming years cannot be overstated. Microsoft Vista will likely feature its own solution for delivering vector-based graphics across extended platforms; so will QuickTime and Real, which will also play a role in competing technologies. For authors and content producers, however, the challenge becomes, then, whether to learn a whole new markup language and yet another way of doing things. For Adobe's part, the universality and integration of Flash is already a reality. Considering Flash's role in explosive new arenas such as programming for mobile phones and authoring and distributing compelling content, the format should be on everyone's radar.

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Get up to speed in Flash

Here are some upcoming workshops for Flash:

Introduction to Flash Professional 8
Free, www.adobe.com

This one-hour online session includes a brief overview of Studio 8 products followed by an in-depth look at Flash Professional 8. After an introduction of some of the core concepts for novice Flash users, a live demonstration will showcase many of the new features in Flash Professional 8.
Sept. 21, 10 a.m. - 11 a.m. U.S./Eastern (Online)

Video Made Easy with Flash Professional 8 and Dreamweaver 8
Free, www.adobe.com

Discover how easy it is to incorporate video into your website with Flash Professional 8 and Dreamweaver 8. In this session, you will review tools and methods for web video workflows.
Sept. 21, 12 p.m. - 1 p.m. U.S./Eastern (Online)

Adding Flash to your Video Workflow
Free, www.adobe.com

Learn how to extend your workflow and take your video to the Web using the advanced authoring environment of Flash Professional 8. During this session, you'll hear from Flash product evangelist Richard Galvan on how you can take video from your favorite editor and turn it into an interactive media experience that you can deliver over the Web.
Aug. 23, 2 p.m. - 3 p.m. U.S./Eastern (Online)

Adobe Flash Professional 8: Flash Video Development
$1,195, www.ledet.com

In this three-day hands-on training class, students will learn need-to-know techniques to produce and deliver high-quality Flash Video over the Internet using Flash Professional 8. The new Flash Video codec will be explored in-depth to deliver higher-quality video over lower-bandwidth connections.

This course is for developers with extensive experience with Flash (Flash 8 Professional recommended). Experience working with video is also recommended. Class time is 9 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Sept. 6-8	San Diego
Sept. 13-15	Chicago, Denver
Sept. 18-20	Atlanta
Sept. 20-22	Philadelphia

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© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.