how to maintain high quality video to swf

March 28, 2010 1:34 PM

What is the best way to convert a high quality video into a high quality .swf? I have footage of a stamping machine that i filmed and want to put it on a website (like a flash banner). It looks great in imovie but when i convert it to flv and import to flash it looks grainy.

I'd also like to be able to adjust the output size to the pixel. 805px x 330px or whatever. lastly, I do not want video controls and there will be no audio.

posted by Paleoindian to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Adobe Flash comes with a video converter that has fine-grained control. Have you tried it?

Alternatively why not uploading the video to Youtube or Vimeo and let those figure out the best way to convert it? Ultimately this also allows the user to choose the quality according to their bandwidth.
posted by oxit at 1:43 PM on March 28, 2010

Response by poster: I don't want to use youtube or vimeo or anyone else to host the video, it needs to be on a client's server.

If you are talking about the flv encoder then yes i have used it, but my results are grainy. perhaps someone can point me to a tutorial.
posted by Paleoindian at 1:51 PM on March 28, 2010

I'd also like to be able to adjust the output size to the pixel. 805px x 330px or whatever. lastly, I do not want video controls and there will be no audio.

You are the perfect candidate, then, for using x264 for flash-compatible H.264 encoding and its own native FLV container output. You will want to feed x264 with Avisynth, and in doing so you will probably want to use one of more of many available denoisers to improve compressibility as well as cropping and resizing to spec.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 1:57 PM on March 28, 2010 [1 favorite]

Do you have access to Adobe After Effects? I used it for a similar purpose (years ago, so sorry I can't offer more details) and it turned out fine.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 7:06 PM on March 29, 2010