Lin Evans Posted April 15, 2006 Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 I decided to take one of my larger slideshows and convert it to Flash 8 FLV to test the efficiency for really large slideshows. This one started as an over one gigabyte mpg converted to Flash 8 FLV with 0n2 Technologies Flix Pro. I'm hoping we get a beta of 5.0 soon so I can duplicate this one with P2E - this one was made with a competitive product (PSG) which I really don't like nearly as much as P2E because I've not had good luck with either support or issues being quickly resolved. It seems every new release brings yet more bugs so I'm anxiously awaiting P2E V. 5.0 beta which I know will knock the socks of of PSG.The original mpg output of +1 gigabyte size was reduced to a 106 megabyte Flash 8 FLV encoding at 640x480 screen display size. It was encoded with 29.970 frames per second and a 512 kbps bitrate. As with my other test show, this requires the Flash 8 player and broadband. If you don't already have the Flash 8 player, clicking on the link below will point your browser at the Adobe (Macromedia) site where you can quickly download and install it (takes only a few seconds). Then click on the link below again and the show will play. For those who already have Flash 8, a preload of 15% was used for the player so that 15% of 106 megabytes or about 15 megabytes must download before the show begins. There is a text "percentage loaded" message which counts from one to fifteen percent. If this one runs well on most broadband systems, then essentially any size slideshow can do likewise. The tradeoff with Flash 8 FLV is compression. Some image quality is sacrificed for the huge amount of compression, but overall I think it's "good enough" and provides cross-platform compatibility (will run equally well on MacIntosh or PC).This show runs about 27 minutes......http://www.lin-evans.net/ctml/ctml.htmlBest regards,Lin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LumenLux Posted April 15, 2006 Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 Greetings Lin -In case it helps anyone else - After a week of non-success trying to install Flash8 Viewer, I had to download an Uninstaller from Adobe Flash8 Viewer support. Just now was able to UNinstall Flash so the Flash8 Viewer would install.Watching your latest is a little dissappointing compared to what I'm used to from your video postings. On my fastest pc (Intel 540 Pentium 4, 2.8 ghz?) on 19'' lcd monitor, the Flash8 playing is definitely compromising your supurb photography. My best try to describe is there is too much pixel movement and too much blotching. The pixel movement is present (not consistently) in still views but worse in any kind of pan or zoom. The blotching is what I call a forest scene where the detail of indivdual trees instead looks like a thumb smudge on wet ink. Maybe my disappointment is influenced by my high expectations based on the earlier tests you have invited us to view. Hope this helps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lin Evans Posted April 15, 2006 Author Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 Greetings Lin -In case it helps anyone else - After a week of non-success trying to install Flash8 Viewer, I had to download an Uninstaller from Adobe Flash8 Viewer support. Just now was able to UNinstall Flash so the Flash8 Viewer would install.Watching your latest is a little dissappointing compared to what I'm used to from your video postings. On my fastest pc (Intel 540 Pentium 4, 2.8 ghz?) on 19'' lcd monitor, the Flash8 playing is definitely compromising your supurb photography. My best try to describe is there is too much pixel movement and too much blotching. The pixel movement is present (not consistently) in still views but worse in any kind of pan or zoom. The blotching is what I call a forest scene where the detail of indivdual trees instead looks like a thumb smudge on wet ink. Maybe my disappointment is influenced by my high expectations based on the earlier tests you have invited us to view. Hope this helps.Yes, thanks for the feedback! I'm wondering if this may be related to a particular video card or combination since you had difficulty and had to uninstall the earlier Flash version to get Flash 8 to work. The pixel 'twinkle" about every three seconds is normal and corresponds to keyframes but the "blotch" isn't and "shouldn't" be there. Flash 8 isn't nearly as good as viewing an mpg or even a good AVI for sure, but I'm suspecting that there may be some interaction perhaps between the LCD monitor which tends to reveal more issues because of the difference in the way video is displayed (versus CRT where there is phosphor persistence) and perhaps your particular video card. It would be helpful if you could tell me which particular card you have and how much RAM is installed.When I get some more feedback from other viewers perhaps we can put it all together and make sense of whatever individual differences we see from system to system. Unfortunately, there isn't any perfect or even near perfect "solution" for cross-platform presentations via web. I've pretty well run into a stone wall with Java and HTML which both work very well as long as there is no subject "movement" (video frames) and QuickTime is way too large to implement decent sized slideshows. Earlier Flash iterations don't have the compression range of Flash 8 and require much higher bitrates to get similar (to Flash 8) image quality so the downloads for streaming must be appropriately longer which make them fine for smaller slideshows, but for a behemoth like this one they run the meter to exhaustion on server resources.I had high hopes for divx but it doesn't look like that will pan out either so for now Flash 8 seems to still be the best compromise even though, as said, it has its share of problems. I would love to see some affordable technology which could spool a simple AVI. Of course the AVI would still be huge compared to the compression levels of Flash 8 - and that may indeed be part of the problem you experience.Best regards,Lin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ken Cox Posted April 15, 2006 Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 Lin tho' there was some pixel movement on some shots it was very minimal on others. I have watched it several times on my 19" LCD monitor and via the svhs output to the tv's and same was not objectionable - i guess it depends on the end usethe 100 mb+ flv file is a keeper -- to studied"somethin better than nuthin"You make me very jealous of your talents ken Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lin Evans Posted April 16, 2006 Author Report Share Posted April 16, 2006 Lin tho' there was some pixel movement on some shots it was very minimal on others. I have watched it several times on my 19" LCD monitor and via the svhs output to the tv's and same was not objectionable - i guess it depends on the end usethe 100 mb+ flv file is a keeper -- to studied"somethin better than nuthin"You make me very jealous of your talents kenHi Ken,First - happy Easter - thanks for ringing this out, I know it was a long one! Hey tell my wife I've got some talent - LOL, she's convinced I should have continued in academics which bored me to death! HA! Actually, I would probably have made more money had I still been teaching Anthro or Physics than I've ever made as a photographer but it's been much more fun with the camera all these years...Best regards,Lin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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