The
Interface
While it may seem converting videos into Flash may be
confusing, Flix makes the task easy. The interface seems
to play a large part in making the program easy to use.
All of the major options that a developer would use can
be found on the first tab itself. You can specify the
video file and customize the output formats, hyperlinks,
and more without having to switch screens at all.
For greater control over your movie, you
can use the remaining three tabs to change the audio
format, video size, and more. I'll discuss the other
tab, the Vectorize tab, later in this review.
[ the
flix interface ]
Encoding a Movie
The primary purpose of Flix is to convert various media
formats into the Flash SWF format. If that was Flix's
purpose, Flix does an outstanding job of empowering you
to do that. In a matter of few seconds, you can be
encoding your video to the Flash SWF format.
To start, I created a video file
including digital video scenes. I exported the video
into the QuickTime format. Click
here to view the
QuickTime movie before it was encoded into SWF.
As mentioned previously, encoding a
video into Flix is very simple.
The next few
pages will go into detail about the program. Use the
arrow keys below to navigate through this review. I
simply clicked the Browse button next to Input, selected
the QuickTime video, selected a preset, and pressed
Encode! The entire process took only about 10 seconds,
and the encoding process took 5 seconds! Quite
impressive.
I encoded my video to the SWF format into a 256k/sec
format, but it scales down to 128k/sec. If you have a
broadband connection, you will be able to see the video
with decent clarity. To not leave you modem-users
stranded, I have provided a 56k version of the movie as
well. Choose your connection speed to view the SWF
encoded video:
Vectorizing Video
A new features Flix 2.1 sports is the ability to have
video vectorized. When you vectorize a video, you
convert the video's frames into a series of mathematical
shapes and lines. If you ever see the cut-scenes in
CBS's Monday night sitcom Becker, you will see the
vectorized video. Besides the fact vectorized video
looks really cool, it might decrease the overall size of
the animation. The draw back with vector videos is that
your videos won't have the quality of actual videos.
Flix includes a tool that converts video into a vector
format for you. To vectorize a video, all you need to do
is simply check the Vectorize box:
[ vectorizing video in
Flix is as easy as checking a box ]
Once you encode your video into a vector format, your
animation will look consistently blocky as if someone
used water colored paint to animate you. I'm sure you
are wondering how the vectorized video looks;
click here to download it.
Read on for more information about Flix 2.1 and my
[kirupa] conclusions of the program.
|
Flix 2.1
- Review
