Producing Flash Video with Premiere Pro and After Effects

by Dr. Woohoo & Brad Wolfley

With the continuing growth of broadband connections, the availability of consumer video gear, and the pervasiveness of Adobe Flash Player, more and more people want to deliver video on the web using Flash. Celebrating its tenth birthday this month, Flash is the most widely deployed video platform on the Internet.

Adobe offers the video products you need to produce Flash Video on the web — including Adobe Premiere Pro 2, After Effects 7, and Flash Professional 8. But if you're just beginning to work with video on the web, it can be difficult to determine when to use each product, and it can be equally difficult to develop an efficient workflow.

In this article, we'll take you through some scenarios that will help you understand which products to use when preparing video for the web.

Scenario 1: Capturing footage and editing it into a sequence

Workflow: After Effects → Flash Professional

After Effects is the best tool in the industry for 2D and 3D compositing, motion graphics, text animation, motion tracking, image stabilization, and visual effects. Though some nonlinear editors offer greatly simplified versions of some of these features, only After Effects provides the breadth and depth of features that you need for serious video enhancements, including a set of tools for intuitively and precisely manipulating keyframes. After Effects also provides nonlinear editing tools that are sufficient for simple editing of short sequences.

Let's say that you've shot all the elements for an opening scene in which a giant toy robot attacks the city. Now you need to overlay animated titles, composite the toy robot with the city background so that the robot appears gigantic, and add some lightning bolts shooting from the robot's eyes.

After Effects includes a robust set of text animation tools, but new users will find that the drag-and-drop functionality of the text animation presets is ideal for creating a professional-looking title sequence in mere minutes.

Placing the toy robot over a new background is an example of compositing — another area in which After Effects excels (Fig. 1). First you need to create a matte that defines the subject as opaque and the background as transparent, allowing the new background layer to show through. Though it's always best to plan ahead for separation (for example, shoot your toy robot against a green screen so that you can use color keying to easily cut out the background) After Effects includes a wide variety of tools for precisely creating and animating mattes so that even the trickiest shots can be separated into subject and background elements.

Finally, you can choose from hundreds of effects and animation presets to apply to your video. You can do anything from performing subtle color correction to adding not-so-subtle lightning bolts blasting from your robot's eyes using the Advanced Lightning effect, for example.

When you're finished enhancing the look of the scene, it's time to export to FLV. Like Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects offers many ways to export as Flash Video; we'll concentrate here on the simplest way. (For more information, see "More on FLV export" at the end of this article.)

Choose File > Export > Flash Video (FLV).

We suggest sticking with the default values in the Flash Video Encoding Settings dialog box until you become experienced with the settings. Experiment and export your composition a few times with different options; then compare quality and file size, keeping in mind the bandwidth of your target audience. To begin, we recommend using either the Flash 7 Medium Quality (400kbps) or Flash 8 Medium Quality (400kbps) encoding profile.

Scenario 2: Enhancing selected shots within a sequence

Workflow: After Effects → Flash Professional

This section doesn't describe a scenario, but it discusses some tools you can use to enhance your work by doing the same work faster and by finding entirely new ways of working.

After Effects has a powerful scripting interface you can use to automate repetitive tasks, exchange data between After Effects and other applications, and perform complex operations that would be quite difficult manually. Similarly, you can use After Effects expressions to manipulate properties and create relationships between them. Flash users should feel right at home with scripts and expressions in After Effects because both the scripting language (ExtendScript) and the expression language are variants of JavaScript, which Flash users will recognize as close kin to ActionScript.

This sort of functionality is often overlooked by new users because of its apparent complexity, but After Effects offers tools, such as the pick whip, that make writing simple expressions as easy as dragging the mouse pointer from one property to another. Using expressions, you can connect the scale of an image layer to the audio amplitude of a song so that the picture appears to pulse in time with the music. Scripts and expressions help all users make the most of After Effects and other applications.

An example of the power of scripting is the exchange of keyframe data between After Effects and Flash. If you export keyframe data from After Effects to Flash, you can do things like analyze a music file in After Effects and use the audio amplitude data in Flash to dynamically animate objects in the street scene behind your toy robot. Flash itself is unable to analyze the audio data, but access to the keyframe data from After Effects opens up this and many other possibilities.

For more information on the process of exchanging keyframe data between After Effects and Flash, see After Effects 2 Flash – Audio Amplitude and After Effects 2 Flash – Transform Properties, where you can download a free After Effects script and tutorial.

More on FLV export

With the popularity of Flash Video increasing daily — think Google Video, YouTube, NY Times online, and ABC's Full Episode Player — it's only a matter of time before you will want to create your own Flash Video files for the web. There are undoubtedly big advantages to creating Flash Video files for the Internet. Flash Video can make your video look great while keeping the file size low. And using an FLV file ensures that users can view your content regardless of platform when they have the nearly ubiquitous Adobe Flash Player.

Whether your Flash Video project requires complex editing, advanced visual effects, precise animation, or any combination of the three, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects deliver the tools you need to create your masterpiece.

For more information, visit the Flash Developer Center: Flash Video, Adobe Production Studio, Adobe Premiere Pro 2, Adobe After Effects Pro 7, or Adobe Flash Pro 8 pages on Adobe.com. Additionally, Steve Kilisky's After Effects blog is always worth reading.

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