Flash/Quicktime problems

I’m working on a 27 minute interactive live-action movie using quicktime 5.02 and flash 5a. At 30 fps it’s around a 55,000 frame file and I’m running into problems.

Is there a frame limit in Flash 5?

  1. My timeline scroll bar has gone all the way to the right edge and I can only move further down if I keep hitting the right arrow - it’s very tedious.

  2. I’m also having problems with my flash scenes converting to quicktime - they work fine with actions enabled in Flash but after converting them to QT and I hit one of the buttons I created to go to a different scene - it goes to the last 10 frames of the scene that lines up before it and plays this little chunk before playing the scene I want it to play (flash pushes all of these ‘branch’ scenes to end of the quicktime movie)

Does anybody have any suggestions?

i personally didnt understand that last bit of the message bout the ‘branch’ stuff but maybe das jus b/c it’s late…but i truly didnt understand it fully.

I didnt even know Flash could vonerte to QT.

Does Quicktime even support the ability to use buttons? Because as far as I knew, it wuz only to play movies on…not interactive things…

But in my own personal opinion, QT sux…b/c it jus always lowered tha quality of things…and the whole program didnt seem to stable…but that’s jus me

interactive, as in “choose you own adventure” style? cool, i loved those books.

try breaking up the quicktime into smaller movies and putting them in seperate flas. then at an interactive part:

Do you pull his finger?

 
if(yes){
   loadMovieNum("instantdeath.swf",2);
}else{
   loadMovieNum("closeone.swf",2);
}

this will have the added benefit of not downloading sequences that you don’t need.

It’s my impression that Flash does not convert WELL to QT, but it can be converted… I’ve just had no luck myself.
Interesting premise my friend… let us know how it turns out.

I’m doing something almost identical. I’m making a flash movie with flash animations accompanied by streaming voiceovers and quicktime movies between them and publishing to a quicktime file. It runs fine on my Mac, but when we run it on a PC we get weird syncing problems. Not just audio syncing problems but stuff playing out of order or not playing at all. It’s really weird.

I was searching the web trying to figure out what the problem might be when I came across this post. Did you ever figure it out? I’m completely baffled. I’m trying exporting it to QT file rather than publish, but it’s taking a really long time to run and I wasn’t sure about the settings. I’m guessing when you publish it’s treated more like a flash movie with a bunch different components being told what to do. I’m hoping that by exporting it it’s getting completely rasterized into a quicktime movie format and it’ll work.

This sucks this is do in the morning and it’s 1:30am.

yes, i think you’re right about the rasterizing. the down side is that anything that’s relying on actionscript won’t work.

does it work as a swf?

as a quick fix, you might try taking your qt file that works on a mac, bringing it into an editing program (like premier) on that platform, and converting it to something else that will play on a pc.

i think the moral here is that flash makes a very poor video editor. ; )

That’s a good moral :slight_smile:

I didn’t need interactivity in mine anyway, but the weird thing is the audio for the imported QT movies never came in and I don’t know why. We had to do it in Premiere (which the whole thing should have been done in in the first place) afterwards. Weird.

It turns out the problem was Quicktime 5. A published file plays fine in Quicktime 4, but takes a dump in 5. I wonder what changed?

I was really tired when I wrote the original question in this post and I know you all usually use Flash for animation so I’ll try to make it more clear what I’m trying to do:

  1. I’ve got a 27.5 minute live action film (actually shot on video) that I call the ‘MASTER’ movie.

  2. I’ve got about 15 live action scenes (lengths range from 5 sec. to 1.5 minutes long) that I call the ‘BRANCH’ movies.

  3. In the final quicktime movie that I’m trying to make it should go something like this: As you’re watching the ‘MASTER’ Movie when something weird happens to the main character a small FLASH button appears in the lower right hand corner and if you push it you cut to one of the ‘BRANCH’ movies and go inside his mind. At the end of that BRANCH movie it sends you right back to the spot in the MASTER movie that you came from, and it keeps on playing.

THE WAY I’VE SET UP THE FLASH PROJECT:

Before anything, I’ve edited all the live action scenes in Final Cut Pro, then exported and compressed them with the Sorenson 3.1 codec in Cleaner 5 - they turn out to be .mov files.

IN FLASH

  1. I import all these Quicktime files.
  2. I make a Flash scene for every quicktime movie I’ve got.
  3. In the Flash scene that contains the ‘MASTER’ movie, I add my Flash button in the lower right hand corner at certain spots that, if pushed, sends the viewer to one of the various ‘BRANCH’ Flash scenes.
  4. I publish this as a Quicktime movie with a Flash layer.

I’ve got it all working pretty well on a Mac, especially after breaking up the ‘MASTER’ movie into smaller pieces like suprabeener suggested.

The problem I’m now facing is there seems to be a limit on how many total frames can be published to Quicktime from a Flash project. Does anybody know how many? I can publish 3/4 of the MASTER movie with the 15 BRANCH scenes included (ending up as a 237.6 MB Quicktime file), but when I try to add the last 1/4 of the MASTER movie, Flash will not publish it correctly. It makes a very short 2 MB Quicktime with no buttons or anything. It basically freaks out. Anybody have any suggestions?

Sorry for the length of this explanation/question.

Im of no use on this board, and I have no solution to your question.

However, I would like to say you did do a tremendous job with the explanation. I understand it complety now. Even though I know nothing about QuickTime.

i think putting all of your branches into their own movies will solve this.

if it’s a matter of number of frames, you might also try lowering the frame rate, i don’t think that will affect the quicktime, just the flash animations.

You should read the Quicktime manual before you put it down. Right now, it’s one of the most powerful multimedia formats on the web. As for not being interactive… you’re wrong. You could have a quicktime movie playing and make it so that you could click anywhere on the movie and it would take you to a whole new movie. If you were so inclined, you could make a completely interactive film with Quicktime.

You can also export Flash to Quicktime, which, as I understand, is the only way Flash can show a Quicktime video.