评测:On2 Flix Pro 8 for Flash 8

大约十年前, 我很荣幸请到了达伦·贾尔斯, Terran联合创始人, 在我主持的一个关于数字视频格式的小组中. Terran had recently launched 更清洁的—a program originally intended as an in-house solution for Giles’ video production company to convert various video files into a format that would allow post-production editing. 更清洁的 grew into a powerful program that converts or transcodes between many codecs and formats; an upcoming review of the newest version of 更清洁的 (now an Autodesk product) can be found in next month’s inaugural issue of 流媒体 magazine.

Beyond the all-in-one transcoding tools, however, sits a very specialized set of compression tools. These tools are often sold directly from the codec manufacturer—such as Sorenson Squeeze or early Real compression tools—and are optimized for eking the optimal video output from one particular codec.

Such is the case with Flix Pro 8 (and its sister product, Flix Exporter 8) for the VP6 video codec. 更广为人知的是Flash 8视频, but also being integrated into many other video communications tools such as Skype, On2 VP6编解码器及其后继产品, VP7编解码器, are turning heads in the video industry for their ability to provide high-quality images at low bitrates. 鉴于Flash Player的重要用户基础, Flash 8 video has also rapidly caught the interest of Web developers intent on delivering video as part of the total interactive Web experience.

Flix Pro is a product of On2 Technologies, the creator of VP6 / Flash 8. 像这样, the company is best positioned to market a product that is designed to create optimal Flash8 video.

界面相当简单和直观. A user starts on the "file" tab by browsing for a video file (such as AVI, QuickTime, 或其他格式)，然后选择目标位置, 如果需要，重命名目标文件. The user then chooses from a series of video and audio export options, determining if the video file needs to be SWF (self-contained Flash file) or FLV (a Flash8 video file that will be later embedded into a separate SWF file). Users can also choose to export to Flash MX SWF or FLV files, or even legacy Flash 3 – 6 files. 用户应该这么想吗, 可以指定链接，并与视频文件导出集成, including target window designation (a very useful function for Web developers).

Beyond this basic file setup, Flix Pro also allows the user to set up audio and video parameters. Of particular help for the evaluation files I used for the review was the "constrain proportions" option on the video tab: my test files are all native HDV 1080i MPEG-2 Long GOP. This means they were shot and edited at a full HDTV resolution of 1920x1080. 虽然这个像素尺寸对于HD-DVD或蓝光高清电视传输来说是很好的, it is too large for standard Web delivery; so the "constrain proportions" option allowed me to resize the Flash8 video file at will, picking an optimum size for Web delivery while still retaining proper widescreen proportions.

当按下编码按钮时, Flix Pro launches a separate window that provides a progress bar and a robust set of monitoring tools, 显示帧大小(最小和最大), 平均帧长, 平均SWF比特率(对Web交付至关重要), 以及用于Flash Player播放的估计RAM使用量.

最后一个特性很有帮助, but I wasn’t able to find the parameters that allowed variation on the amount of estimated RAM used. The one flaw—perhaps a safety feature that On2 implemented—is the fact that the encode will pause and wait for a user prompt if the estimated RAM usage rises above 50MB.

对于复杂的转码，输出速度快得惊人, 略快于等效的Sorenson 3从更清洁的输出, 但比传统的Windows Media编码时间要长一些. 一旦编码完成, Flix Pro can be set to automatically play the finished output as well as alert the user to its completion.

For those users who would rather not create a master output file (which I did with my test HDV files) and would rather just output Flash 8 files directly from within a mainstream video editing tool, On2销售Flix出口商. 这个程序与使用QuickTime插件的任何程序一起工作, 这意味着Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, 更清洁的, and several other programs can directly access the underlying On2 export settings to optimize output directly to Flash 8.

My test with Final Cut Pro showed that Flix Exporter was able to output a Flash 8 file in about 80% of the time it would take to output a master HDV file and then encode it with Flix Pro. 更大的好处, 虽然, 是否有能力加速整个工作流程, 快速输出QuickTime参考文件从Final Cut Pro, launching 更清洁的 and using Flix Exporter within 更清洁的 to output versions of a single file in various Flash 8 bitrates and parameters.

总之, Flix Pro and Flix Exporter appear to provide a better quality Flash 8 video output than do the integrated Flash 8 video exporters in Adobe Premiere 2.0和Macromedia Flash由Adobe. 虽然这是意料之中的, since On2 is more adept at optimizing its own codec for a variety of source video file formats, the question that each user will need to ask is whether or not the superior output quality of Flix Pro outweighs the cost ($249) of purchasing this standalone Flash 8 transcoding tool.