Help:Flash
From WeeabooDB
Contents |
Flash integration
Because this wiki is primarily focused on anime and related multimedia, the wiki has been configured to make use of Flash.
Why Flash?
We like Flash.
The Mogulus application that the Weeaboo Review uses as its core is built on Flash technology so why not extend Flash capabilities into the wiki?
We deal with a lot of multimedia, and while static images are standard on the web when it comes to video or animated media there are few choices, with Gif being a common format used to provide animation. Unfortunately the Gif format is a rather ancient file format that has severe limitations (256 color palette, size limitations) that does not enable the Gif format to handle video very well, especially when one considers that the majority of the anime handled by the review is now in super high-definition. Gifs are still useful to provide minimal animation of a few frames, but if the user is attempting to provide clips of anime for documentation purposes Flash is a superior alternative.
How2Flash
Converting
Source to .FLV
The first step in being able to use Flash on the wiki is converting your source media into a Flash format. If someone knows of a way to convert many formats directly into the required .swf Flash format please feel free to update this, but as of now the best way to do this is a two step process where you convert the source media (.mkv for example) into a Flash movie (.flv) file and then converting the .flv file into the necessary .swf format.
In order to begin, I highly recommend Koyote Soft's Free Video Converter mainly because it's free, and secondly because it supports conversions from the majority if not all of the formats anime is commonly released in.
Once you download and install the software, it is very intuitive to use. Use the add file button to add the file you wish to convert from, with the video selected in the list you can then use the controls on the right side of the window to pick the window of time you want to convert (Note: I highly recommend giving yourself "buffer" room on both ends of the time span, as the software seems to be inaccurate to some degree and you can remove unneeded frames in the next step). Then once you have your span selected you will wand to specify FLV as the desired output format, along with the desired video size (I recommend not making anything larger than 720x as it will break the wikipages), aspect ratio (keep this in mind and match it with your source material to avoid bad looking clips), framerate, bitrate, and audio settings in the bottom portion of the window. One final thing you may wish to do before converting is to configure the output directory, it defaults to the desktop which some of you might find okay but other may wish to store their files in a better location.
Please take into consideration very carefully what you are trying to present with the video, we don't want to be ripping entire episodes of shows (nor could to successfully upload a file that large) so use some proper discretion when choosing the length and bitrates of your file (as to not rape our bandwidth). A good example of a proper use of flash can be found here .
Once you have everything configured make sure the file is checked in the list, but i recommend not actually leaving the file line highlighted as this will cause the program to try and preview the video as its ripping it which I suspect causes some framedropping, and go ahead and click the convert video button. After a few seconds you should have a new .flv file in the directory you specified read to be used in the next step.
.FLV to .SWF
Now that you have a .flv file you need to convert it into a self contained file that the wiki can use.
I'm sure there's an bunch of programs out there that can convert .flv to .swf (and maybe not, because after looking for a while I ended up coming up with this method to do it) but the way I'm going to outline here is to use the Adobe Flash editor to do the converting.
Acquire a copy of Adobe Flash (I've used a version as old as MX so it can probably be any version).
- Once you have flash, open a new project and go to File>Import... and navigate to the directory where your .FLV is.
- When you import the file, flash will probably prompt you to expand the amount of frames to the required amount stored in the .FLV, so say yes.
- Next, go to Modify>Document... and set the Dimensions to the proper size of your video, if you don't do this correctly the video will be cropped and not look right. You will also need to set the frame rate in this window to match the frame rate you converted the video in (this will probably always be 25fps if you're using a clip of anime).
- Make sure the video is centered on the document space.
- In the Timeline pane click on the 1 to make sure you are viewing the very first frame, if you gave yourself too much buffer room when you converted the video this is where you can remove it by cutting unneeded frames from the beginning and end of the timeline. If you clip frames from the beginning, make sure to move the remaining frames back to the beginning so your video actually starts at frame 1.
- Once your have your video clipped and centered, go to File>Export Movie... enter the file name you want and make sure that the Save as type is set to Flash Movie (*.swf) as this is the required format to work with the wiki. Click Save.
- In the new Export window, leave the load order to Bottom up, make sure Compress Movie is not checked, set the JPEG Quality to 100, if you have audio in the clip there's audio settings that can be configured here too, and set the flash Version to be exported. Hit OK to export your .swf file and you're finished.
One final thing you need to check now that you have the completed .swf file is its size, ideally this is going to be as small as possible becuase we're not made of disk space and bandwidth, but the maximum filesize for uploads to the wiki is 8mb so if you do end up with something bigger, go back and either lower the bitrate in the original conversion, or shorten the length of the clip in Flash.
Posting Flash in the Wiki
Upload
I'm sure you're familiar with the Special:Upload page.
Wiki markup
The minimal required markup in order to display a Flash video in a wiki page is as follows:
<flash>file=happy.swf|width=value|height=value</flash>
The filename that you uploaded the .swf as, and the width and height values of the video, these are supposedly only required for Internet Explorer compatibility, but it doesn't hurt.
There are additional parameters that can be included in the Flash tags and they can be found here
