MAC "Episode" Flash video people...
 

Just bought Episode Pro with Flash 8 for my macs. I know a few around here use it, any tips? I'm thinking about redoing my members area using all flash video. This is new to me so any input would help. My members area is MAS driven, and Im having mansion redesign it to work. If you are already doing this, please, don't make me reinvent the wheel here... What im looking for is a nice members area that makes it extremely easy to find and view any of my content, yet makes it hard to download and share that content. I'm know FLV's not the perfect solution here, but seems to be the best going right now. DRM is just to much of a pain in the ass and a support nightmare.

So any ideas? Help? etc? I would be willing to pay for actual one on one consultation here.

Thanks

I am pretty curious myself.. bookmarked

Sebs

Flash is the way to go imo.

Not being a video guru of any sorts, I'm struggling a little with the actual workflow, settings etc. One I get it setup It will stay that way, but the initial process is a little confusing to me.

Most of my content is on Mini DV. I need to capture it all to the HD, But capturing it it all at Raw AVI seems a little over board for me. Is there a better capture format? Maybe MOV? I need a foramt that's native to my editor (I have adobe pro6.5 on the pc and final cut pro on the mac) I'm willing to just use the final cut if thats an issue. Why is it over board to capture raw? Well, 12 gig per hour of tape and 400 plus tapes... I know garbage in garbage out yada yada, but I'm only producing for the web here. No DVD's no VHS etc. A 4 gig Mov file seems even a little large, but I could live with them if I had to. So, whats the best capture mode for my scenario? All I need to do to the captured video is add my 2257 disclaimers, watermark and do some lite edits and trims. The outputted file will be the archive file I use from now on for all my other encoding. I'm thinking Mov is the answer here... but let me move on.

Once I have a folder full of archived videos I want to be able to batch them using the episode pro, seems fairly easy, I'm reading the manual now. But, in FLV, so I need to encode multiple streams or is one enough? What's a good setting or are the defaults good enough? In the past I used WMV. My work flow looked like this...

Capture to VCD quality Mpeg, (Used an all in wonder pro for this) This gave me a so so looking video around 650 meg per hour. Then I would do simple edits in Tmpenc editor, which was VERY fast since it was native mpeg. I would then chop it up to 5 equal segments using AVI MPEG splitter. and then send it all to Windows Media Batch Encoder. (Own 3 versions of cleaner but they all seem to suck and are Very slow) I would batch encode a Low_vid name a High_vid name and a Full_vid name. (naming convention was fixed according to my MAS design) This work flow is not only time consuming but a pain to teach to anyone else... hell I have a hard time remembering where I'm at in the process half the time. So I'm looking for a simpler solution.

What other programs are good for the mac that people use?

I never understood why people bookmark a thread, the minute you post it is listed in the control panel and the search

as much as I see people say "bookamarked!" they must have hundreds of gfy pages listed in their bookmarks

You can get free info at spymac.com . it s all about macs . If you have a mac. I m sure u know about that site .

if you thought cleaner was slow rendering wmv just wait till you start rendering flv, you'll think the wmvs were fast.

capturing minidv is generally not raw/uncompressed avi... its DVAVI type1 or type2. for nice results you might want to try the following..

capture to dvavi, make your edits and export as dvavi 720x480, keep it interlaced

encode the dvavi to xvid, unconstrained (let it use as much kbps as it likes) use a deinterlace filter and resize to 640x480. youll have a nice high quality file for storage thats easy to split without reencoding.

batch to flv. use 2 pass encoding for best results. 640x480 at 1500kbps is nice =] a 320x240 at lower kbps for the pokey bastards.

im crashing now but feel free to hit me up for any help

Rich

i have about 60 gfy bookmarks in a subfolder
for other things at gfy i use the search function

Nice, I'll do a couple tests today and see how that works for me.

Interesting. I did a couple quick tests while I'm ironing out Episode. For the test I used Captured DVD footage. I ripped the footage from the DVD (My Own content) and it created a single hour long VOB file. I then pulled 3 minutes of it out for testing and created a new 3 minute vob file. I tosses it into Episode and had it create a watermarked Flash 8 video from it using the default settings... The machine encoded it in real time. took 3 minutes. That's the fastest I have even seen anything encode. (Considering Im coming from and Mpeg starting point) The final video would equal around 360 meg per hour. It does look create, but I'm wanting to get this down even further. I'll post a few more results later today if anyone is interested.