QuickTime and Flash: A beautiful marriage for interactive video

Years ago, technology wizards predicted a world of interactive television just around the corner. The only catch was that most people don't watch television to interact with it. They just want to tune in and let it wash over them.

The World Wide Web has changed the prospects for interactive video. Unlike TV, people are used to interactivity when they sit at their computers.

With the latest versions of QuickTime and Flash, you can create interactive video. If you can output a QuickTime movie from your favorite video editing package, you are half way home. Couple that with even basic Flash skills, and you have the complete package. Put your finished work on your Web site, and you have your own interactive TV station. True, it isn't what the experts expected. But it is interactive television nevertheless.

In this tutorial, we will add basic interactivity to a QuickTime 4 movie using Flash 4. I'm not going to get too fancy here. We will add a basic scene jump to a preexisting movie. I'm assuming that you already have a suitable movie to start with and you have a basic understanding of Flash. If you have the basics down, you can use these same techniques to pull off most of the interactive capabilities of Flash right inside your finished QuickTime movie.

After importing your QuickTime into Flash, your movie will be represented with a single keyframe...

Your first step in making interactive QuickTime video is to import a QuickTime video into Flash. You will need to have QuickTime 4 installed to import your work into Flash 4 and export your finished QuickTime movie when you are done.

My first task is to set the stage, pardon the pun, for my existing QuickTime movie. In Flash 4, I pull down the "Modify" menu to "Movie." My QuickTime movie is 192 pixels wide by 160 pixels tall. So I set my Flash movie parameters to the same height and width.

...So just add frames (press "F5") until you see the "X."

Now that everything is at the right size for our movie, import your QuickTime file by pulling down the "File" menu and choosing "Import." Your movie will appear on the first frame of a layer. So that I can keep track of things, I label the layer "QuickTime Movie."

Your movie will occupy one keyframe in Flash. But we know that there is more there than just one frame. By adding frames to the "QuickTime Movie" layer timeline, it becomes possible to see all of the frames of the movie right in the Flash timeline. At the Flash default of 12 frames per second, my QuickTime movie occupies just over 300 frames. I jump ahead to frame 305, choose the frame, and press "F5" on the keyboard (or pulldown the "Insert" menu to "Frame"). Flash fills in the frames from 1 to 305. Now as I step through the frames in the Flash timeline, I also step through the QuickTime movie itself. At frame 3, I discover a green "X" across my movie window. This means that I am now at the end of my movie. I delete the extra green "X" frames and I am now ready to make the movie interactive.