For tutorials, Camstudio is fine. Also for fully professional tutorials in the flash format, BB Flashback or BB Flashback Express, http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/Products.aspx
are the best, they are low cost, but the features such as recording keystrokes with a red circle are really good. Occasionally they release a free version on Magazine disc. Many tutorials use bb soft.
For web based or even disc based tutorials Certainly I would use the Flash format. I have no problem with it. It really is a industry standard for tutorials. Are other people using low quality avi for tutes? To reduce file size.
I am sorry if I am missing your point.
There are plenty of Open Source Players out there and flash is a widely acceptable format.
Do check out that link, it is very clever and would be great to do a similar thing in Blender.
SWF does have nice antialiased vectors - but Flash/SWF is not a real format, just a closed source memory heap.
And dont confuse that with FLV = flash video.
This whole proprietary browser plugin business is a clear evidence that shows how immature the whole field and industry is.
This is the bronze age of internet apps.
And dont start with Ajax, for the most part its libraries that took years to develop just to show a JPG in a fancy way (which is a waste of time in todays world where there would be many much more burning issues than fancy JPG shows).
One aspect of flash that is annoying is that, unlike video formats, you can’t just download a single file for viewing later.
If you just download the flash (SWF) file, you lose the context of the native playback size. Without an HTML container (or the Flashplayer application) the SWF will play back at whatever the browser size is in which it is played. Video formats are self contained and maintain information about their ‘proper’ size (so you don’t have to deal with stretching, etc.). Otherwise, to download a flash movie, you need to download (or create) an HTML container to keep the sizing context.
I never watch movies directly in the browser if its anything of more than a few minutes of throwaway content (Youtube) - as I like the controls you get in the desktop players better. I have much more control in MediaPlayerClassic than I get in the browser plugin if I want to scroll back, scrub the timeline, etc. This makes it better for longer video tutorials than watching in the browser.
That said, depending on the content, I’d trade some functionality for file size … though I have good broadband, so filesize isn’t the most important thing for me.
Thanks everyone for the feedbacks! I conducted a poll on my site about preferred tutorial formats and after about 350 votes, Flash was dead last.
I don’t mind the xVid format but, I think Flash will work better in certain situations. However, I don’t want to alienate anyone. I was just curious about the reasons behind the preference of a regular video format instead of the Flash format.
Maybe I’ll create a regular video and a Flash version and see which one works better.
Well I’ve been playing around with Flash movies for a while, but it’s really a pain in the ass to encode them to that flv format. I’ve tried to encode a video of 2 minutes in less then 300x400 resolution and on the worst compression it took over 80 minutes. Now I thought it could be my machine and retryed on my laptop with 1 gb ram and pretty fast processor, but well it didn’t care and took me again 65 minutes. (encoding to mov, mpeg took me less then 5 min)
Now yes in some cases it compresses movies really well, but what exactly is the use for this filetype?, you can’t play it on anything else then a flash player which in a lot of cases you have to build yourself.
Now I know that YouTube uses this format (I think) to turn there movies into flv files, no idea thought how fast they can do that with thousands of movies on the same time.
Anyways, personally I don’t really see a use to directly encode to this type of file, maybe it’s just better to create your movie and encode it aftherwards using the Flash encoder, and Edobe’s strategy won’t allow you to encode to this file type without perchacing the flash program, so if Blender would support it, still you have to buy Flash to use it legally.
Only geeks are going to vote against flash in a poll. The real deal is to the viewer. Does it just play or do they have to download something… Flash is on most all new systems from 2001 Soo thats not really a problem.*
But making a new format system will suck for anyone. Getting people to download blender player was always a problem and never a solution.*
Thats why buzzwords like Ajax and web 2.0 Work, their instant and accessible*without any knowledge needed to run them. Same goes for flash, it has programing access, so it can load anything at any time instead of a flat movie, which is what makes it far better than a mov or avi
Against:
-Flash the app is expensive and there is no alternative GUI to create SWF.
-The Flash app has the worst interface ever. It’s like nothing I know.
-FLV is not the best codec for Moving pixels, it’s not bad, but there are better ones for less costs and faster to compress.
-Slow compress times on compressing video.
-I’m bored with the flashy looking vector flash stuff.
-For web pulldown thingies there is the DOM and CSS, works just fine.
Pro:
-Fun (Actionscriptable) possibilities for user interaction.
example: http://www.chevrolet.com/avalanche/launch/index.jsp
-Freeware actionscript compiler available.
-SWF vector animations are very small in filesize.
-Lot’s of people can watch SWF files, in browser or stand-alone.
flash app is bad… But no one has made a better one for swf, they have tried but all work badly. But mostly the need from blender is somehow to turn everything into vector so the file size is small from blender… And does not have that compressed frame look
Video tutorials - flash, xvid or whatever video contents - suxx.
@kernond: i’m talking about the format, the .swf, this is not open and not patent free thus it breaks all, thus to make an open implementation, say “hello” to reverse engineering.
And no, i didn’t say you pay something if you make a flash shit, the flash itself is “patented” (algo, concepts etc etc)
the only thing that matters is what you do with the format. flash is easy and powerful to use in creation of interactive content. flash is successful and in my opinion has more than proven itself as a useful web delivery tool. sites like this and this have inspired me to many hours of playing with code. i flash too.
ecma style python?
One of the problems with this whole discussion is that we’re starting on a Adobe Good - Adobe Bad rant.
Why do you want to convert Blender stuff to Flash? There are different possibilities:
If you want to make Blender tutorials in Flash, there isn’t any rendering going on, which means there isn’t ‘Export to Flash’ you can make. There are several applications that let you work with screengrabs and just do a ‘dif’. In a sense, if you have a static display of an application on your screen, modern video formats are EXTREMELY efficient. They only store what’s changed, so you don’t have much wasted space.
If you want to export a blender animation to Flash, that’s almost impossible to do. Animations are rendered, which makes a pixellated image from the .blend file. During that rendering you lose all the inforamtion about vectors, points in 3D space, edges and such. The loss of that information makes it very hard to convert the resulting data back to a vector-based format. Some attempts have been made, but they are blocked at the part where they have to do some sort of tracing to detect the edges in the images. When you have cartoony edges, that’s no problem. Anything else is very difficult to get a resembling vector trace.
I think you need to explain better how you need your Flash, if you still consider it to be vastly superior to all the video formats (DivX, MPEG4, Ogg Theora …).
PS. For online games java owns, for video xvid, for web page navigation CSS/DOM and for static vector images (and basic animations) SVG. The only place I’d consider using flash if for pure vector animations.
One of the big problems at the moment is that the adoption of SVG is quite inexistent. Until more browsers come out with SVG integrated in the browser itself, you can’t just build a whole system based on SVG. Which is sad IMO.
Ideologically, I tend to agree with you, but there is also the little detail called reality, and we have to take that also into account. If people will have to install the Adobe SVG viewer for example, many won’t do that if they’re not experienced users. Given that you want to use it for a tutorial site, large part of your users will fall into that category. The Adobe SVG viewer isn’t without bugs either, to complicate things.
I think Flash at the moment is adequate for the moment, until there is something that’s better.
flash too.