So… You have created video with Final Cut, iMovie or whatever and produced an MOV file. Now, are you ready to convert it into FLV?
If you have Adobe Flash, you can convert MOV files into FLV in 2 ways or more. When you install Flash 8, you will get a flash component named ‘FLV.component’ in Library/QuickTime. And you can access this component with QuickTime Pro or Flash 8 VideoEncoder, which comes with the Flash package. Furthermore, the default compressor included in this component is On2 VP6. By the way, the latest version of Adobe Flash for Mac is 8 and is not in Universal Binary.
And if you have Sorenson Squeeze 4 from Sorenson Media, it will give you another option for the flv compression. It adds an FLV comressor named ‘Sorenson Spark’ to the list.
Now, you may probably want to ask, “What are the differences between On2 VP6 and Sorenson Spark”? Sorenson Media is expensive. So an additional spending of $400 on top of Flash must give you better video quality, right? But not quite… We will illustrate our points with specific numbers in an article or a video totorial soon, but here are our findings.
These findings are based on the conversion of the same MOV file into FLV at the following bitrates: 400, 600, 800, 1,000, 1,200 and 1,400 Kbps. The size of the MOV file is 11.8 MB. The length of video is 9’40. And the resolution is 720 x 540 pixels.
By the way, if you have an Intel Mac machine, your Universal version of QuickTime Pro or Final Cut Pro will not access FLV Component. In that case, a possible solution to converting MOV into FLV is to use the Power PC version of QuickTime Pro and run it with Rosetta. This is just a theory. And we don’t own an Intel Mac machine. So we don’t know if this approach works.
Adobe Flash 8 is a product of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
On2 VP6 is a technology developed by On2 Technologies.
Sorenson Squeeze 4 is a product of Sonreson Media, Inc.