FotoMagico -> Flash Movie (swf or flv)??

For some reason, an eHow article dated December, 2010 claims that one should be able to save a FotoMagico slideshow in Adobe Flash format (flv or swf). Here is the link to their article: http://www.ehow.com/how_7649455_turn-fotomagico-slideshow-flash-file.html

This doesn’t jibe with FotoMagico’s normal method of “sharing” a slideshow, and in fact, I can find no “format pulldown” in the Save As… dialog as they suggest.

That said, it would be awesome to be able to save a slideshow to Adobe Flash format and get a top-notch quality slide show up on the web. For example, the following slideshow with audio is an Adobe Flash slideshow http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12618167 is of excellent quality, far better than what can be achieved in a QT movie.

I would really love to be able to share my slideshows with my friends, but if they don’t have Macs, the only formats that I can currently send to them or post on my website are pretty hopeless as far as quality goes. I really won’t allow my photography to be shown that way. I would love to see FotoMagico provide either a stand-alone Windows player or output for Adobe Flash swf file of similar quality to the BBC example shown above.

= Ed =

Currently there is no flash export available, but there are many converters available on the web, this was the first google result: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php?topic=13007.0

Sadly, all of those will only convert a video file to swf format. Any video file created from FotoMagico, by your own estimations, will be of relatively poor quality. For me, there is nothing magical about using Flash or streaming video to display the same low quality file. My post is about a QUALITY web version. As I mentioned in my original post, the whole point of going directly to a Flash file is to maintain the image quality at the same high level that the stand-alone app provides under Mac OSX (as shown in the BBC example that I cited).

Since you are from Boinx, am I to assume that the official policy is that quality output to anything other than a Mac is low priority? Otherwise, while I appreciate the rapid response, your alternative solution really doesn’t address my concern. I am well aware of how to do a Google search. I know how to deal with web video. I am looking for a solution that will allow my photos to maintain their high quality in a web presentation. Did FotoMagico once have this feature as implied by the eHow post? Are there any plans to add such a feature. To me, this is one area that FotoMagico is badly lacking - quality, platform-agnostic output.

= Ed =

A web-based export in the same quality of a show directly out of FotoMagico is hardly possible for my understanding. The standalone player contains the entire playback engine, that’s why it is Mac only.
Apple does not support but actively attacks flash, even Adobe is going away from flash more and more. We believe that the future is HTML5. I can’t tell everything, but of course we are working on export methods that are ready for the future. Due to the technical complexity this is not something we can release within a few days or weeks though but we definitely have plans. No flash plans right now though.

I don’t know about that “eHow” feature, maybe one of my colleagues that is longer with the company does.

“A web-based export in the same quality of a show directly out of FotoMagico is hardly possible for my understanding.”

I suggest you check out the BBC slideshow I linked above and perhaps that might change your mind. I believe that this slideshow is of sufficient quality for my needs. It is Flash based.

= Ed =

Yes it looks good, but flash is not the future. Even if we started today, a flash export can not be incorporated in a short time. And we don’t want to invest much time in a dying technology.

We are working on a much better web export than we have today though.

That’s great news! I agree about the issues with Flash, but until html5 is more accepted, I just don’t know what else would work. Hope to see the web solution soon, because a video just doesn’t cut it, IMHO.

= Ed =

FLV to SWF Converter is the best video to flash converter which can convert the existing video to flash video SWF and FLV so that you can add your Video to Website and Blog.

http://www.swftoaviconverter.net/convert_flv_to_swf.html

And at the same time FLV to SWF Converterautomatically generates an HTML webpage embeded video to save programming work for Flash making newbies. With video to flash converter, you can convert almost all video formats: AVI, MPEG, MPG, Quicktime(MOV), WMV, M4V, ASF, MKV, RM, RMVB, 3GP, 3G2, DV, FLV, HD video to Flash SWF/FLV on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

I know this post is from quite a while back, but does anyone have any updates or new ways to have the high quality videos on the web? I know on the FotoMagico 4 homepage they have a high quality slideshow / video, how is this done? I’m using high quality images like what they’ve got on their homepage, but the quality isn’t as good and colors aren’t as consistent as they should be. Any help is much appreciated!

Agreed. For a professional photographer this is useless unless there is a high quality slideshow for the web - that everyone can access (Flash or html5). It is really very simple, and min-boggling that Boinx has still not made a high quality web solution. Right now, I have to use ShowItWeb 2.7 to create slideshows for our clients. If they want to purchase an HD DVD, then I have to remake it in Fotomagico, which is a huge pain. The problem is that when Fotomagico makes a video, it resamples the images and compresses them - which equals a loss of quality. A flash or html5 show for the web pulls from the original folder of web-optimized images. Fotomagico, can’t you make a simple html5 web output? It would be so easy!! No need to resample the images. We create the web-optimize folder, then make the slideshow in Fotomagico, and then export it for html 5. PLEASE!!!