A Little on Flash Video Cue Points.

Filed under Flash, Work by Chad | 3 comments


So we’re working on a pretty big project (anyone who knows me knows this already, sorry for the duplication of stories), this project consists of nearly 200 video files strung together via a number of interactions and user paths.

These clips have to have cue points (between 2-10 cue points per video). Some of these cue points are needed to be jump points to move the playhead, and some of them trigger events onscreen… Flash Video accepts a couple different types of video cue points, “Navigation” and “Events”…

From the Flash docs:

  • Event cue points are used to trigger ActionScript methods when the cue point is reached, and let you synchronize the video playback to other events within the Flash presentation.
  • Navigation cue points are used for navigation and seeking, and to trigger ActionScript methods when the cue point is reached. Embedding a navigation cue point inserts a keyframe at that point in the video clip to enable viewers to seek to that place in the video.
  • NOTE   Adding additional keyframes can lower the overall quality of a video clip. For this reason, navigation cue points should only be used when users will need to seek to a particular place within the video. For more information on keyframes, and their effect on video playback, see Keyframes.

So, yeah, we know what they are and what they do, my main question is, beyond the metatdata aspect of being able to have some cue points be tagged as “navigation” and some as “events” are there any reasons to not simply just use navigation event types? You can successuly use “navigation” cue points to trigger actions, plus they also insert an additional cue point to allow for better cue point jumping… so what’s the downside? As long as you wouldn’t have a cue point every other frame or something, what’s the real downside to just using “navigation” type cue points in this case?

Posted on June 5, 2007


3 comments

  1. Juha Heiskanen Jan 21

    Hi !
    importing footage (WMVHD) to CS3 and trying to create cuepoints CS3 crashes every time after 3-5 cuepoint adding..
    I’ve rendered many different versions of wmv but always same scrash. Nvidia FX1300, Win XP SP2.. should I reinstall CS3 ?

  2. Jane May 8

    Hey, you sound like you know about cue points in FLVs? I’ve got some cue points set in a little 320×240 FLV in the top corner of my screen and I’m trying to work out how to get some wording to pop up elsewhere on the screen when the FLV gets to cuepoint1, then wait…. then pop the next bit of text at cuepoint2, etc. I’ve come from a Director background, where you simply put the command “Wait for next cue point” in the tempo timeline and that was it…. seems Flash isn’t going to be quite so easy. Pretty please could you give me a wee little bit of advice about how to do it? TTTTAAAA Love ya x

  3. Chad May 8

    Jane,
    You can use Event CuePoints to trigger events or fire any other actionScript off via functions etc… take a look here for some examples.

    http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quickstart/metadata_cue_points/

    http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=663087

    http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/213/1/Using-Media-CuePoints-in-Flash-MX-2004-Professional/Page1.html

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