Can I get any sillier? Who knows, but I think I’ll probably try.
This is my first real shot at using movie-footage with Flash. I started out using 8Ball, the next version of the Flash software, but then discovered that its lovely compression rates aren’t compatible with Flash Player 7. Bah humbug. So I had to go and re-import everything in Flash 7 to get it working for everyone else.
I downloaded the Titanic trailer, editted it into sections using Quicktime Pro. I converted the sections into a .avi file so I could rip the soundtrack off of them and mix it with the voiceover sections (I use Cool Edit Pro for sound editting, and it can’t rip the soundtrack from Quicktime files, only .avi files). Going back to the Quicktime versions, I then published then exported them as an image sequence. This publishes one image per-frame of film. I then opened those images in Photoshop and individually added the lettuce by hand to the frames that I wanted it in. I then used Quicktime to open the editted images as single movie, compiled them into a new film and saved them ready to be imported into Flash. Phew!
If anyone’s interested, it’s running at 12 frames per second and the total file size is around 960k. By dropping the frame rate it meant I could keep the movie effect but still have a reasonable size after publishing it.