Hello
I am now on the third deadline of a massive project. It is an induction program done in flash AS3, for a company, to induct their employees and explain every aspect of the company in the form of a media rich slideshow. I have created 10 modules(chapters/sections), each of which has a series of slides in the form of movie clips, each module is basically a slideshow, published as a swf, and the modules vary in slide content and have mp3 sound clips for voice overs attached to the timeline, and also links to external videos. I am in the process of making a main swf that will load / unload the other module swfs.
I have converted all the videos to FLV, some are still very large - ranging from 20 MB to over 150 MB in FLV format (original .mov files were much larger). Everything works fine so far on my laptop, but I am worried about final deployment. This is a massive scale project and the first and foremost criteria from my boss when I started was that in the end it must be one file if possible, one exe that can run on any machine, seamlessly, with all videos playing correctly etc.
I have come really far and even got offered a permanent position for pulling through the first two deadlines under immense pressure, I really dont want to trip at the finish line now. I am worried about the videos not playing correctly when the entire project is burned to a disk or transferred to another machine. I dont really know about coding ‘video container’ .as files etc, all I have done was import the FLV videos externally, onto a keyframe in the slide/movieclip timelines (with the import wizard).
I dont know about Flash Media Servers or streaming servers etc, this project will not be run off the internet as yet, for now it will be deployed on different machines - it will be run at different company branches on different machines, projected onto a big screen.
My questions are :
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What is the best way to go about making sure the videos will work no matter what machine I play them on, I have checked the paths and I see only one FLV playback component in the library, but I have a few instances of it where I import various videos. I am sometimes confused when I am working in the FLA and some of the playback component instances on stage are grey and say ‘the video player is in the error state…’ but yet when I compile, the videos still work fine.
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Also, Is it better to import the videos into the modules only using code? I think I would have problems with this…
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I am also wondering if there is a way to package everything together (the main swf, the 10 module swfs, all my .as files, the videos folder and the voice overs folder) relative as they are now, into one exe ? I tested a third party program on just one module with its .as file and videos, it packaged it fine but it didnt display anything when run. I assumed its because the program only works with AS2 since the help documentation had AS2 code everywhere.
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The entire project, including all swfs, converted FLV videos, mp3 voice overs, and .as class files, is about 1.5 GB in size so far. Would that be able to play smoothly straight off a DVD for example? Or even if the ‘package everything into one exe’ option is not viable, would it be best to have one folder with all assets in it, and alongside that folder in the root dir have the main.exe and then expect the user to copy everything to their hard drive?
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Do I need to include a folder with the latest flash player installer, how can I ensure cross platform/machine compatibility?
I cant really send or post anything due to large file sizes, I dont expect a miracle or anyone to just suck answers out of their thumb here, and I appreciate anyone taking the time to read this - but any help would be appreciated even if its just general advice on where I should go from here. I apologise for the wall of text, I sincerely hope I have not doomed myself and the final deployment phase in the way I have gone about creating this large project.
kind regards
Mike
