Solutions and Process

After pursuing myriad options and avenues recommended by developers, Flash forum posters, and video industry professionals, Ian presented the now-burgeoning production team (we had swollen as a studio from three to nearly 30 a/v contractors working on deferral) with a multipronged software strategy to make our DVD dreams a reality. To make our dreams come true, we tapped into the following software solutions.

SWF2Video—Image Output

SWF2Video is a third-party creation recommended by several developers. It is a wonderful tool for outputting a stable image sequence or AVI movie from an SWF file. Most importantly, it allows for audio output and maintains the integrity of embedded movie clip animations, which you would normally lose if you exported directly from Flash. In early tests with the software, we discovered that SWF2Video enables you to render an output as large as the screen size on your primary monitor—so we outputted all 57 acts of Broken Saints at a size of 1500 x 906 in PNG image sequences.

After these image sequences were placed on our working drive, we still had to address the frame rate, resolution, and bitmap shake issues, which we were able to do with Combustion.

Combustion—Rendering

Combustion was one of our only options for quickly and affordably resizing and retiming our image sequences to broadcast. For the import of our pseudo HD image sequence, we set the project settings to 720 x 480 at 30 fps interlaced. Ian then applied a broadcast-safe color treatment to make sure the movies were just within legal requirements for broadcast. (This keeps whites and vibrant colors from bursting or bleeding too much on a television screen.) Combustion also allowed us to overcome the other NTSC hurdle by setting the square aspect ratio of the source footage into a non-square stage and adjust it accordingly.

As an added bonus of working with this tool, we were able to harness it at this stage to add some truly beautiful effects such as particle and morphing renders that were simply too large and complex to be placed on the original Flash Timelines for export without triggering crashes. These effects sequences would be sewn together with the outputted SWF2Video frames to make a completed movie sequence that was ready for encoding. (To give you a better idea of the amount of footage we had to deal with here's an example: 700 minutes at 20 fps in Flash. 840,000 frames to resize. Output of 1,260,000 frames from Combustion when adjusting the frame rate to 30 fps.)

Cinema Craft—Encoding

Next comes the compression stage for DVD. We've all read reviews where critics either praise or slam the video quality of the disc, and this can definitely be a make or break step in your project. Your choice of video encoders is largely responsible for the quality of the results, or lack thereof.

We wanted to be sure we had the best encoder for our needs. The Broken Saints DVD project would need to house over 15 hours of movie and special features on 4 DVD-9 discs, so digital real estate was a major concern. Luckily the series itself, by nature, contains many static scenes with rich color and dynamic lighting effects, allowing us to compress the material to a greater degree and still end up with a gorgeous final "print." With a versatile encoder, we could take advantage of the audio- and video-quality shifts between the series and the behind-the-scenes features and—if our math was right—we would still have space to spare.

This is definitely where Ian's diverse production background paid off, as he had taken time off from Flash authoring at the conclusion of the online series to supervise the mastering of several DVD projects. This gave him face-time with a handful of professional decoders, and made his choice a simple one—Cinema Craft, used on such award-winning projects as Shrek and Lord of the Rings to crisp and vibrant effect. I highly recommend Cinema Craft for any DVD project you want to hit the mainstream after mastering and replication are complete.

DVD Studio Pro—DVD Mastering

Based on the Professional Spruce Maestro by Daiken (then bought by Apple), DVD Studio Pro really gives you the best bang for your bucks on the DVD market. Having opportunities to use the more expensive Hollywood mastering solutions such as Scenarist (at about $18k), it holds up really well if you make sure you bypass its built-in encoder for the Cinema Craft or similar encoding option.

Menus will always be a matter of functionality and design preference. The ones for Broken Saints (four variations on the original website navigation theme) were created with dynamic effects and layers in Combustion and Adobe Photoshop, and then imported into DVD Studio Pro studio for linking. That said, Flash is a wicked tool for menu creation, and more and more major studios are utilizing its versatility and ease of use for this part of the process.

Audio and subtitle implementation was the final stage in the process. Audio tracks and multilanguage subtitles were added with drag-and-drop ease with this software, which was essential when you have 57 individual movies containing 5.1 and Stereo audio options as well as six subtitle types.

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