I purchased the upgrade to Freeway 5 this morning and continued working on a site for a client. The aim is to put a small flash movie on the home page which loops continuously but I can’t get it to work. I dropped in the swf file that was converted to Flash from an MP4 original using Episode Pro and it plays fine but then stops at the end without looping.
I did tick the option inside Freeway to loop the file and if I do a right click on the file when previewed in Safari, it indicates that looping is enabled. I wonder if somebody who is more familiar with flash content might have some idea what the problem might be?
Perhaps I should have asked this question in the general Freeway Talk forum. I selected the loop option in Freeway so I figured it should just work. As a test I took the same file and tried this in Freeway 4.4.2 but got the same result.
Does the contents of the flash movie pause or stop at a frame or end frame? - therefore stopping it looping if Freeway
David
On 29 Feb 2008, at 6:52 pm, cornishman wrote:
I did tick the option inside Freeway to loop the file and if I do a right click on the file when previewed in Safari, it indicates that looping is enabled. I wonder if somebody who is more familiar with flash content might have some idea what the problem might be?
On 29 Feb. 2008, 5:52 pm, cornishman wrote:
I dropped in the swf file that was converted to Flash from an MP4 original using Episode Pro and it plays fine but then stops at the end without looping.
I have a site which uses a swf movie which was set to play once before i exported it to swf - the loop flash button in Both v4 & 5 does not affect it.
I have just tested it with a version of the same file which was set to play forever before I exported it to swf- I then replaced the previous version in FW and it loops forever in the browser - the loop flash button in FW has no affect on it -ie ticked or unticked the movie plays forever.
so I’m not quite sure how the button in FW is supposed to work.
but the best way to get your movie to loop is to make it so before exporting it and adding it to your FW document
The swf movie just plays from the start to the finish (like the mp4) and then stops. That’s it. I also tried saving the original with view set to loop inside QuickTime but its just the same. I wonder why Freeway include the loop option if it doesn’t do anything.
Once in the past I set up a small flash presentation made up of 3 still frames using Image Ready and that looped perfectly in Freeway but this movie is different. There is nothing I can see in Episode that creates a movie which loops.
On 1 Mar. 2008, 6:21 pm, cornishman wrote:
Once in the past I set up a small flash presentation made up of 3 still frames using Image Ready and that looped perfectly in Freeway but this movie is different. There is nothing I can see in Episode that creates a movie which loops.
I don’t know anything about episode so I can’t help on that one
A solution has been found and it now works but it wasn’t something I was able to do myself and involved help from a friend who is particularly good at working with Flash. Simply ticking the box in Freeway to loop a flash file continuously does nothing at all, so perhaps someone from Softpress could explain how we are supposed to do this.
The required procedure involved my taking a QuickTime movie and converting it to .flv using Episode Pro which gave me a file of about 4.3mb containing the displayed content. My friend took note of the pixel dimensions and then sent me a file with exactly the same name but with a .swf extension and that was about 30k. Clearly that .swf file had some commands in it which were telling the film to loop continuously.
After this the .swf file was added normally to Freeway the site was uploaded but I had to then use Transmit to upload the .flv file separately to the same resources folder for this to work. I don’t have a copy of Flash and really have no experience with Flash. I only wanted to do this simple procedure so I need to know how this could be done simply and effectively in the future.
Something else I discovered along the way was that if I produced a .swf file in Episode and dropped it on a window in Safari the quality was good, but if I tried viewing the same file which had been added through Freeway it suffered a visible loss in smooth details with an increase in artefacts. I have no idea why this should be happening but it was noticeable.
Flash is not my thing, but I needed it in this case and from what I learned yesterday it appears that you need both a .flv and a .swf. The .flv file holds the content and the .swf then feeds the instructions. The part which confuses me is that the main contents can also be held in the .swf file but for some reason this is not recommended and it wouldn’t allow me to do the loop through Freeway.
I know that Flash is very much an Adobe thing now after they took over Macromedia, but we live in a Flash world and I would agree that some kind of explanation on dealing with Flash from Softpress would be very useful. Curiously when I spoke to somebody at Episode about this he mentioned that he was a freeway Pro user himself, so I may get some useful feedback there as well with any luck.
During my search I did find a shareware program for about $45 that would take a QuickTime movie and convert it to a looping Flash file that worked but the quality definitely suffered compared to Episode Pro.