A Cineform to FLV Story
 

vegas 9.0a. vista business 32/sp2.

i just got neo scene. i encoded a 28-minute film (originally hdv 1440x1080) to cineform 720x540, 16x9 - looks great.

yesterday: i wanted to put it on my website where all my other clips are in flash. before i got cineform, my workflow was vegas>wmv>flash cs3>flv. i tried to import my cineform avi w/flash cs3, only to find that flash couldn't see the video, audio only, on vista...

so i found a program called XviD4PSP 5.0. it was able to generate an flv file in about 40 minutes and it looks very good. only problem, max size is 640x480, so it's really 4x3 not 16x9. if you need flv up to 640x480, i'd recommend this program.

today, i tried another computer running xp/sp3, flash cs3 sees the video, but the comp is much slower and i'm looking at a 5-hour re-encode (currently running). i'm hoping that the end product will be worth the effort.

does anyone have an alternate vegas/cineform-to-flv solution? i know many have asked sony to add vegas output to flv, but this doesn't seem to be a priority, and i know they're busy with the generated media debacle. thoughts?

1) I would try downloading the Cineform New Player: Neo Player Downloads

I have only researched it, but it seems that the player installs the codec required to view the footage.

2) Why was your workflow Vegas-->WMV-->FLV?

Personally, I would not encode a highly compressed format like WMV to FLV. If possible, I would export the least-compressed format possible to encode to FLV. I prefer not to create absolutely uncompressed video because of space considerations, but I find exporting a Huffy AVI then encoding that to FLV yields very good results. I choose Sorenson Squeeze as my FLV encoding software.

Ken

A Cineform to FLV Story
 

thanks, kenneth. i do have the latest neo player installed.

i used wmv after extensive testing - it produced the best-looking flv files, compared to the original and the wmv.

i encoded on my xp computer - took 3.5 hours, and the result was ok, but all the transitions were fuzzy compared to the original cineform. i also encoded to wmv from vegas, and the wmv looks better than the cineform to flv. go figure.

maybe sony will add direct flv output eventually.

Oh man i Hope so. Direct FLV rendering has got to be the biggest render option I want (besides a distributed network render service that actually frickn works as advertised and serves up frames less-frequently to maximize network speed usage & final render time).

To wmv before encoding to flv? I would expect very poor results indeed.

My method is Vegas: render uncompressed avi. then render avi to flv with Adobe Flash Encoder.

... or try FlixPro from On2 Technologies - Making Video Possible, from Handhelds to HD I've used it for the last couple of years. It converts .avi to .flv or .swf

Here's another product for those who have better things to do with their money than hand over a fist full of hundred dollar bills to Adobe share holders.

Flash Encoder – Sothink Flash Video Encoder helps to convert video to Flash

Out of all the tool for encoding FLV I have found Sorenson Squeeze to be the best by far, but at $599 it isn't cheap. The presets are easy to use and modify and it encodes great-looing video.

However, there are flash players out there that play other video formats such as Mov and MP4: Flash Media Player - MediaPlayer Flash Component

I remember reading someplace about a player that plays WMV files directly but I can't find it so maybe I am mis-remembering! ;-)

Overall, I think FLV will be replaced fairly soon by other more standard formats as flash integrates wider format support.

Ken

Squeeze is a great product - part of what you get for your money is a workflow/batch tool that can manage a few hundred encodes per day.

Most of us don't need that.

There is flv and there is flv. What I mean by this is that the original Sorenson Spark codec, the first video codec for flash, has fair-to-poor performance, as measured by picture quality for a given bitrate.

But what do you want - it's free! Super-C is an example of shareware/opensource/freeware that uses that codec, but there are many others.

Flash video really came into its own with the VP2 codec from On2. When this was introduced with, umm, flash 9v3(?) in 2003 (?) flash video started looking about as good as wmv, as measured by picture quality for a given bitrate.

This is a rock-solid codec. Used to be that you had to buy something like CS3/4 or Squeeze to get it, costing many hundreds of $. On2 now has Flix Standard for $39 that encodes to this codec - this is a great deal for a flash encoding codec that offers great results.

Of course the latest and greatest is MP4/MPEG4/AVC/h.264 encoding. Vegas will encode this, and the flash player will play it if its made correctly - usually you'd use the QT encoder for this. However, it requires a lot of horsepower both on the encode side and for decode. Truely excellent quality, as measured by picture quality for a given bitrate, but so highly compressed that not every computer likes it.

"as measured by picture quality for a given bitrate" is an important concept. If you give more bitrate to even an inferior codec like spark, it can look pretty good.

Am I missing something here? Why not frameserve out of Vegas?

I've been frameserving from the vegas timeline to my flash encoder for years now with excellent results -- no intermediate render needed.

Now some apps can't deal with a frameserved file, not sure about yours. Also, I believe there were issues with frameserving from v9, but those were dealt with and work now I believe.

I've had no success frameserving from Vegas 9 as of last week. I don't know why, I am using Vegas 9.0a and the latest Debugmode Frameserver and it says it is compatible.

One reason I could think of not to frameserve for FLV is if you need to batch encode a bunch of videos to FLV which I often do.

Additionally, I never thought about frameserving instead of working with an uncompressed AVI for FLV encoding, but I like to play around with different encode settings, and also Squeeze is sort of a resource hog so I don't like to have a lot of programs running when I use it.

in this program, XviD4PSP 5.0, you change the size to what ever you want, I usually use an uncompressed avi into flash and it creates a very nice clip

A Cineform to FLV Story - Update
 

hugh, my XviD4PSP would only go to 640x480.

doing further research, i came upon an article by cliff etzel from 2008. i created a quick lesson on what i learned, posted here.

basically, i rendered my cineform "masters" to mp4 in vegas, got it to play progressively in flash, and the quality is as good or better than the on2/flv that flash cs3 gave me.