I am a noob trying to get my flash file converted over to a looping, DVD video clip that will play on a wide screen TV at our local pub. I have no idea how to. I also have these questions…
- I made it 1020x720… should it actually be… 1280x720?
- I’ve downloaded several demos of SWF to DVD conversion softwares, yet none seem to provide the graphics quality once converted. What software is best?
- What format is best to convert to for the best graphics? .AVI, .MOV, .WMV, .MP3?
- What’s Bitrate do when converting? I assume higher is better?
Hope someone here can at least provide me a few expert pointers on how to best get my flash file to widescreen TV with the best quality without spending hundreds on additional software. Oh, and I am using Flash8 if that matters.
Thanks for any help!!!
KZ
- Although most TVs are much bigger than PC monitors, their resolution, or size, is actually a lot smaller than a monitor. The reason for this is because TV’s are supposed to be viewed from a greater distance. If the TV is bigger, the pixels are made bigger, but the overall resolution remains the same. The resolution also varies according to the format. NTSC (America and Japan) has a resolution of 720 x 480 while PAL (Everywhere else) uses 720 x 576. I’m guessing you’re in the UK by the pub reference so widescreen PAL is 1024 x 576.
Another thing to bear in mind is something called the safe area. Typically, a TV will cut off up to 10% of the area on the outside of the screen so, if you want to ensure that your final video fits properly, you will need to reduce the stage size further by this amount. You can get an NTSC template in Flash showing the safe area from here: http://www.cartoonsolutions.com/downloads/broadcast_template.zip
There are photoshop versions for PAL here: http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=81835
There’s also a useful video about the subject here: http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to/video/how-to-create-an-action-safe-and-title-safe-template-in-flash-181108/
Finally, bear in mind that NTSC and PAL have different frame rates; 29.97 for the former and 25 for the later…so design your FLA at either 30 or 25 fps.
- There could be a number of reasons for this mostly caused in the design stage. TV’s generally use rectangular pixels while monitor pixels are square. To make things worse, they’re different rectangles depending on the TV format. NTSC pixels are taller which can make your video look stretched, while PAL pixels are wider so your video might look squashed. You can cater for this in Flash by, using PAL as an example, designing at 768 x 576 and then scaling everything down to the native TV format of 720 x 576. However newer LCD screens have square pixels so you’ll have to base the resolution on the intended display.
Another quality consideration is that TVs tend to use interlacing to draw the image on the screen, in other words, they will draw two seperate images by effectively only drawing every second line. If you’ve ever taken a photo of a TV you’ll see a black bar running across the picture…this is caused by interlacing. To solve it you should ensure that any horizontal lines are at least 2 pixels high and larger lines are in multiples of 2 pixels. This will stop any flickering on the screen.
Colour can also be an issue. Avoid using white as it probably won’t be reproduced that well, and steer clear of bright colours like red or yellow. Stick to a TV safe pallette. Make your fonts much bigger than you think they need to be too. And avoid any serif font. You can get a set of fonts that are supposed to have been designed for TV here: http://www.tiresias.org/fonts/fonts_download.htm
Strangely enough, the UK government gives some useful advice about colours and fonts here: http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/resources/handbook/html/5-2.asp
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Avoid any compression. The DVD conversion software will probably do that for you anyway.
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Go for the highest that your conversion software can support.
Hope that’s useful
Wow! Great response!!! Thanks a ton for your in depth reply and time!! No, I am in the USA so I guess I need to format for non PAL. Again, thanks for all the info and links… very much appreciated!
In reference to #3 question, what format would you recommend using for the video… AVI, MOV, WMV or does it not matter?
KZ
It doesn’t matter. Here’s a link that might be more useful than my previous waffling:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/flash_to_video.html
you can try Moyea FLV to Video Converter Pro it maybe can help u.it can convert web videos known as Flash video (FLV) to popular videos.u can google it.
