TodCon8: Tom Green on Flash and AfterEffects Integration

This is the last session where I'll be attempting real-time blogging of a conference session. Tom Green is presenting a session on the integration between AfterEffects and Flash video. Scott Fegette is sitting in and lending moral and technical support.

Tom is a really great presenter, and as he talks he's making connections between the interface in AfterEffects and Flash. For those of us who are new to the Adobe world in general, and to video editing in particular, it's a big help to see the connections between Flash and AfterEffects and how the interfaces are similar in some ways, but radically different in others. Still, it's good to have a frame of reference, which for most of us is Flash, as we learn new concepts and ways to do thinks. Scott is adding another connection, explaining how comps in AfterEffects is similar to movie clips in Flash.

Responding to a question on the potential for integration between the AfterEffects and Flash, Scott relates the fundamental problem is that Flash is a frame-based applicaation at its core, while AfterEffects is purely time-based. While there are discussions at Adobe about how these applications could be more closely aligned, there are real challenges to be overcome when there basic differences in how things are done.

Tom relates a little about an upcoming book that he's currently working on that will be out later this year. He intends to open the book with an apt metaphor that heading into the territory of integrating Flash and AE is much like the early mariners who marked their maps with the label: "There be dragons here".

Some tips and notes:

1. When setting composition settings in AfterEffects choose 320 X 240 (Web video preset) and a frame rate of either 15 or 12 frames per second. Pixels are set to square and you're good to go.
2. AfterEffects uses many of the same keyboard shortcuts as Flash and Photoshop, so if you want to do something like zoom in or out, you just use the familiar Ctrl+ or Ctrl- keyboard shortcuts.
3. Whoa! When you open the Help files in AfterEffects for the effects presets you see a preview of each of the effects. That is way cool.
4. There are sooooo many cool pre-built effects here, and with the abiility to export out a SWF we're all a bit giddy at the possibilities of creating effects for use in intros, preloaders, and more.
5. Publishing out from AfterEffects as a SWF then importing into Flash as a movie clip gives you much better compression. In Tom's example the original SWF dropped from 68K to only 9K after a short trip into Flash and a little bit of keyframe trimming.
6. Tom says this is the key to getting talking head video out of AfterEffects and into a format ready for Flash video. During rendering make sure that the Compressor for QuickTime is set for Millions of colors plus.
7. Scott and Tom both hammered home one other point. Do NOT use any video format other than one that is uncompressed,and do not use the FLV export option. It's best to use the Flash Video Encoder in all cases to take advantage of better compression ratios and more options for FLV output.

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That wraps things for this TodCon, at least as far as the sessions go. I'm not sure how effective live blogging is, but it's an interesting experience regardless.