Publishing to Flash

This feature enables the user to save their screencast in the F4V Flash format. This is a highly compressed format most suitable for internet publication.

This feature produces both a Flash video and the necessary components for hosting the video on your website.

After selecting the Publish to Flash option, you are presented with a settings dialog.

Figure 51. Flash Settings Window

Save As. Enter the name of your screencast here. The default name is the same as your project name. The file extension is applied automatically based on your choice of preset.

Where. Select to determine the location of your video after encoding.

Player. Choose between three standard Flash player skins to determine how the video controls are presented on your web site.

Encoding: Automatic for Web. Select to use the automatic Flash presets. This formats the video as 320 x 240, 30 FPS, and 900 KPBPS.

Encoding: Custom. Select to configure your own settings.

Width. This field determines the width of your video in pixels.

Height. This field determines the height of your video in pixels.

Frame Rate. This field determines the number of frames in your video per second. The North American NTSC standard is 29.97 (often rounded up to 30) while the European PAL standard is 25. The range for this field is 1-100.

Data Rate. Data rate sets the amount of information required to process the video per second. Setting a low data rate is ideal for streaming with slow internet connections, but a low data rate may impair image quality. An acceptable data rate depends on the content of the video and user preference. The range for this field is 10 to 10,000.

Contents of Flash folder. This feature produces a Flash folder consisting of:

•	index.html, an HTML page containing a player showing movie.f4v. You may edit this file to suit your design requirements, or use it as a template for incorporating the video in a different Web page.

•	movie.f4v, the screencast published in Flash

•	player.swf, the player itself

•	a /com directory containing the skin for the player

•	README.txt.

How to Publish Your video to a Local Web Server

If you have a Web server on the same computer as ScreenFlow, you can place the output directory in (a subdirectory of) /Library/WebServer/Documents/ and have your video immediately accessible to the world.

Example: If you have placed your output in /Library/WebServer/Documents/prettyvideo/ on webserver.comp.com, opening http://webserver.comp.com/prettyvideo/ in a Web browser will show your video.