Hi guys,

Again possibly a silly question soz!

I have 30 short clips in Canopus avis, and they need converting to swf's for inclusion in a flash presentation.... Ive tried a few different ways and am keen to find out your guys opinions and suggestions as to which is the "best" way to do it....

I ve looked at some of the stand alone "avi to swf" converters but figured either Procoder (with canopus hardware & flash plugin) or Flash itself would be the best way? Perhaps this is my mistake!?

The presentation will be played from a dvd so file size isnt too important but my main problem when using the various methods I tried is controlling bitrate... I need the swf to be 360x288 & pretty high quality without ridiculous file sizes...So here are the three ways I tried...

After Effects : Import to a 360x288 after effects comp... resize to fit comp...Export to flash...

The problem is I couldnt find any bitrate controls... I read that it is something to do with the resolution of the comp...but this resizes the image?... So I used full resolution and basically I ended up with some AMAZING quality swfs...but the were 30mb for 5 secs!!!!! (A little on the large side!)

Procoder2 : Using flash mx plugin... Again I couldnt seem to find any bitrate controls again and the quality was awful... I guess this was "user error" though as it was by far the easiest...(If your familiar with procoder)

Flash itself : This is what I ended up using I believe flash uses Sorensons encoder when you import an avi... It lets you choose all the settings etc... but this is where I came across a weird one...

You can choose bitrate by Either 1) set bit rate... but the max is 750kps which looked poo! or 2) set quality... which is great but you have no idea what bitrate it is using!!!!!

I ended up banging them all out at highest quality as the file sizes arent too bad...

Basically it just didnt feel "right" there must be a more professional approach to this!

Any tips appreciated... cheers

__________________