Flash Synchronization: Video Captions, Graphics and Cue Points
Recently, I was tasked with creating a presentation for the web that incorporated video and animation synched to the video. A few weeks later, a friend asked me about creating captions for web video. Though there's always more than one way to do anything, Flash seemed like a great solution for both of those projects.
Flash cue points allow you to embed markers in a Flash video that trigger an action in Flash such as a related animation or the display of a text caption. The problem I encountered was that I was logging all of the video using regular video timecode in either Quicktime or Final Cut Pro to determine the exact points in time where I wanted actions triggered. Flash's interface doesn't support video timecode, instead of frames it accepts only milliseconds.
Essentially, I needed a frames to millisecond converter so that I could input my logged timecode into Flash to create the cue points. But it seemed tedious to convert the timecode for each and every cue in my project and then enter it into Flash's interface. Wouldn't life be easier if there was an easy to use tool to automate some of this work? Well, ask and you shall receive. I created a free online tool (mostly for myself, but you can use it too) the Flash Video Cue Point Generator, to allow you to enter in your timecode and generate an XML file of cue points that can be imported into Flash.
Check out the video tutorials below.
Tutorial 1
Tutorial 2
Links used in the video:
Flash Video Cue Point Generator
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/vidtemplate_corppreso.html
Download the sample Flash files from Adobe's site used in the video to get the template and ActionScript.
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