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How to create Flash TV Commercial

By Ko Fai Godfrey Ko

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 29Aug2009 Word count: 701 Viewed: 1712 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Despite the growing popularity of the Internet and online video services such as YouTube, traditional TV broadcast commercial is still considered as the most effective mass-market advertising format. Even Google has launched their Google Video Adwords service to help small business to buy TV airtime at cheaper prices.

Although originally built to create vector-based web animation, Adobe Flash can also be used to create animation for video and television. You can use Flash to produce high quality animation and output to video format for showing on DVD or as a TV commercial, which can be a short ten second TV commercial or feature-length cartoon animation.

By using Flash to create video file, you can create TV commercial with a low budget -- there is no need to hire a whole video production team and actors to do the video filming.

Flash exports AVI and QuickTime movie files, both with or without sound. You can then import these formats directly into many standard video editing programs and then output them to tape or CD.

The following are few important factors you need to take into consideration, when creating a Flash TV commercial, which includes display resolution, screen size, frame rate, color and video format required when you output from Flash.

-- Display resolution

Display resolution refers to the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. Usually televisions are of the following resolutions:

* SDTV: 480i (NTSC, 720x480 split into two 240-line fields)

* SDTV: 576i (PAL, 720x576 split into two 288-line fields)

* EDTV: 480p (NTSC, 720x480)

* EDTV: 576p (PAL, 720x576) * HDTV: 720p (1280x720)

* HDTV: 1080i (1280x1080, 1440x1080, or 1920x1080 split into two 540-line fields)

* HDTV: 1080p (1920x1080 progressive scan)

Output your flash animation to an SWF, animated GIF, AVI or QuickTime file. These formats show you the speed of your animation better than Flash movies inside the Flash editor.

Even with a high end graphics card, Flash movies played inside the Flash editor often run a bit slower than the stated frame rate.

--- Frame rate

Frame rate is the measurement of the frequency (rate) at which an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames. Frame rate is most often expressed in frames per second (FPS) and in progressive-scan monitors as hertz (Hz). The standard recommended frame rate is 30 frames per second for NTSC, and 24 frames per second for PAL.

-- Screen Size

TV screen size is often different from your standard compute monitor. When creating a flash commercial, you should maintain an aspect ratio of 4:3 to avoid any stretching in the post-production changes. 720 x 540 at 30 frames per second (fps) is a fairly standard stage size for NTSC. For PAL use 768 x 576 at 25fps.

Flash is a vector based program, therefore if you design the flash ad using vector images, their quality will be the same regardless of final screen size output. However if you are going to use a lot of raster based images in your production, like pngs and jpgs, then it becomes more important that you use the images in highest possible resolution, or it will look blurred in your final product.

--- TV Safe Color

Many color used in Flash, such as the red color, are too bright when broadcast on television. You should choose television-safe colors, or use a graphic software program to create a television-safe palette.

--- Output your flash animation into Video Format

You should export the flash movie file into standard video file format such as AVI, WMV or MPEG for TV broadcasting.

The steps are very easy to follow. In Adobe Flash, simply select [File->Export->Export Movie] and choose the exported movie option, and then the conversion is complete.

The display resolution, frame rate and video format used might vary from different TV broadcasting companies. Therefore you should always check for video file format details first before working on the flash movie.

Starting a Flash TV commercial from scratch is very time-consuming and complicated. If you need to create a Flash commercial quickly, you can consider to use ready-made flash templates, which is usually available with full source code file, so that you can edit it in Adobe flash, and replace the template images and text with your own.

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