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HD Quality Video in Flash

I am in a particular situation where money is not an issue, and I have isolated my problem to be with the equipment that I am using. Whether or not I need new equipment has yet to be determited. I am using a desktop computer with an AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ 2.2 GHz processor, an nVidia e-GeForce 7900 GTX video card with 512MB, 2GB RAM and a very large striped HDD RAID array. The project is to create an interactive, lossless, compressionless demo which runs at 1920x1080 (1080p) resolution. To do this, I have chosen to use Flash 8, because this gives me the quickest control over visual elements, which is key in getting the projects turned in during strict deadlines.

We already created one such project (see http://newsroom.cisco.com/Newsroom/flash/evp/Flash7/main.html?videoXML=../xml/high/901C0FCED4859D4B8E5B5AC54452452E_video.xml&defaultTopic=Corporate&defaultSubTopic=John%20Chambers) and ran into issues when importing HD quality video into Flash. The video was very jerky and caused the processor to hit at 100% while the video was running. Compressing this video is OK, but it needed to be compressed far too much to play smoothly.

The way that I solved this problem for the deadline was to run the SWF in an HTA at fullscreen, and have the Flash file call for an object in the HTA to play a full-sized WMV file, which worked beautifully. The only problem is that there are semi-transparent, graphical elements that need to be displayed over this video, which we couldn't do. WMV has a windowlessVideo parameter, but this option also maxed out the processor.

So my problem is, I need a way to use HD quality video (doesn't necessarily need to be in Flash) and still have semi-transparent, graphical elements able to animate on top of the video. Please let me know any hardware and/or software solutions that you would suggest. Thank you!

Merete

Hi I have only touched on Macromedia dreamweaver even though I have the programs I was sidetracked with other work
Just some ideas and programs that may offer you the tools you need.
I know Adobe is at the top of the list and very expensive but it also is a very ram hungry program.

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX and fireworks
Fireworks 8
http://www.adobe.com/products/fireworks/
http://store2.adobe.com/products/fireworks/

http://www.learnthat.com/computers/learn.asp?id=362&offset=1
http://www.learnthat.com/computers/learn-362-dreamweaver_mx_2004.htm

I am a member here and I think you may find this site very interesting too
http://www.cgsociety.org/
enjoy the browse

MediaMacros

THere are many ways to compess FLV files. I find that sometimes, 3rd party tools like Sorenson Squeeze can actually get better quality to size ratios than using Flash's built in compressor.

Ten90Group

ASKER

Ideally, I don't want to have to compress video at all. I would like to use the HD WMV that I get directly from our video post-house in the final application.

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MediaMacros

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Ten90Group

ASKER

I have heard of Director but am not aware of many of it's features. I will look into how it can help me. Thank you very much!