flash mx allows video to be played within the flash environment, you no
longer have to export it as a quicktime movie after processing..a great
thing in my opinion.
thanks diana,
that's what i thought and from my perspective i'd (provocatively)
argue that flash has just figured out a way to be a better tv set.
the great thing about flash is that it plays everywhere, which is not
the case with something like quicktime. so flash as a container is
brilliant.
but in terms of interactive writing with video it is more about
assimilating video into its file structure (whether internal or
external) but not, if i'm right about this, making that video
interactive in and for itself. the interactivity will still live
outside the video.
as i mentioned in my blog the other day, i see this as potentially
the kiss of death for interactive video because flash with all its
interactivity will use that to present and control which bit of video
when and where is shown, but won't grant any of that interactivity to
the video itself. i think that makes sense. video becomes content
that is controllable by flash, but it still doesn't let you script
the video in the way that you actionscript layers, buttons, etc etc.
it's sort of digital colonisation so that video still gets treated as
something sort of 'whole' which you turn off and on, show and hide.
my argument with this is that when i work only in quicktime i treat
video in the same way that flash authors treat images and/or text.
flash mx still doesn't do this, and so flash artists will now think
they're doing interactive video, whereas i think they're doing
embedded video. and i think tv is also a form of embedded video.
which brings me to another point. earlier i was asked about how much
work it takes to make a vog and that it was different to blogging in
terms of technological literacy. that's true, but i'd use flash as an
example here too. it takes quite a commitment to learn how to use
flash, and that doesn't seem to have stopped a lot of graphic workers
think they're hypertext authors (and a lot of hypertext authors think
they're graphic artists). the tools to write interactive quicktime
are the same price as flash, and if you haven't used flash are no
harder to use (they are if you step in with the flash paradigm), and
the scripting language is certainly no harder than actionscript, and
i reckon it's easier to point a camera and record than to make vector
graphics :-)
this is what i mean by colonisation, flash is interactive, writing in
flash is brilliant, i think flash is crucial because (my mantra) it
has let a lot of people write interactive graphic content. all my
students want to learn how to write in flash, not look at yet another
kewl flash web site. i am suggesting the same thing can happen with
video, and flash mx is not the answer (it isn't interactive video).
but i'm getting rather sorta devil's advocate here. and a few have
sent me stuff back channel saying they're enjoying the stuff but, i
know there are lots of people on this list who do a lot of flash
work. so what do *you* think when i say you're not really doing
interactive video? what do you think interactive video might be if we
used flash as a sort of model of doing? if you were told that you
could script video in *exactly* the same way as you can script flash
what things would you want to make?
or would you all prefer me to show and discuss an example/s so that
all this heady grandstanding comes back to earth?