All Instructional Videos:
Introduction to Streaming
How to Embed Live Stream Code
How to Embed Archive Codes
How to Use Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder
Uploading FLV files to Sunday Streams
Converting to FLV files and editing FLV files
Why and How to Make Local Backups
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Transcript: How to Convert to and Edit FLV Files
In an earlier video, I showed you how you can upload flv files onto Sunday Streams and make it into a public archive so your visitors can watch it (See:
Uploading FLV files to Sunday Streams). In this video I am going to show you how to convert files on your computer of various formats into flv files so that you can upload them.
One great tool for doing that is WinFF, and it is available at
www.WinFF.org. Basically, download it and install it on your computer and you’ll start it up and it’ll look something like this. All you do to use this program is you click to add the input file you want, specify the output details you want, flv in our case. Then you hit the covert button. So I am going to go ahead and show this as an example, here. I am going to add--I am just dragging it in. You could click the add button or you could just drag it into this region here. I am adding a sample.f4v file, and this file was created by Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder when I specified I wanted to make a backup copy on my local machine of what I was broadcasting. The advantage of this is if the Internet went down while I was broadcasting, this file would not be impacted where as the archive that was on the server would be impacted by if your local Internet connection has some troubles. This could be a good, clean file put up there in place of the corrupted archive. You could put this nice, clean one, this clean file as the archive. First, I want to convert to an flv format, so here is the input file, sample.f4v. Specify the output to be an flv file. To do that you select websites and then you select here, since mine is 320x240, I am going to select this particular flv output. Then it is already. I can hit convert and the conversion process would start.
Although before I do that, I want to briefly mention a couple other options you can specify various options for your video. For example, this is 320x240, and so if I want to specify that...Although in this particular case I think it would figure it out because input files are 320x240, but if for some reason you were trying to convert, say, DVD footage that is at a much higher video size and you want to reduce it in size down to 320x240 you’ll want to specify that here. In this case, I don’t need it, but I can leave it. It doesn’t really hurt to leave it 320x240. You could also select various audio features. Here’s a useful one. If you want to make the volume a little louder or softer you can do that here. You can also crop it. You can specify the various time to start at a certain time and end at a certain time so you don’t have to convert the entire video, you can just covert a portion of the video you are interested in. Here are some other custom options that you can do with ffmpeg commands.
Basically, I am ready to go ahead and ready to hit convert, although I am not going to do that because it uses a lot of resources on my local machine here and it might impact the quality of this video I am trying to produce for you here. But what will happen when you do hit convert, is a command line window will pop open kind of giving you a status of what is going on and everything is happening and then when it is done it is going to say press any key to continue. This takes, depending on the size of your video, it may take quite a while to convert it for you, you know 10 or 20 minutes or even more, so just don’t be alarmed if it does take a while. That’s basically it.
And also you can covert multiple files at the same time. You can add many—I just had one file here, but you can add a whole number of files on here as well—into this area and covert them at the same time.
So, I’d like to show you another useful tool here. I find the Moyea flv Editor Lite software useful for basic editing of flv files, and it is free software too. You can get this free software by visiting
www.exp-flv.com and clicking the download for the free lite version. Or if you search Google for free flv editor, it should appear at the top of the list. Once you install it on your computer, you should get something that looks like this. The way it works—there’s a lot of options here some are part of the free version; some are part of the paid version. Everything I am going to show you is part of the free version.
Basically, what you do is you import files and then you can edit them and then you export files to the flv. And that is the basics of how it works. I am going to go ahead and import files. I am going to drag the file that I want to import right into here. I am dragging the sample.flv file that I made before. Now I want to do some basic edits of that. The editing window is down towards the bottom, so I am going to pull my window up so I can see everything. So, I am going to drag this sample.flv file into my editing area so I can edit it a bit. First, I am going to try doing a cut operation, so get to the point where I want to cut. So I am going to cut this file right at this location. Sounds good. I am going to go ahead and hit cut, and I am going to delete this portion here. So now I can go ahead and export this. So I have basically just cut a portion of the end file off. But what I am going to do instead is drag in another video file, a different one and kind of merge that onto this. Dragging another file here. Now I am going to pull this one down into the timeline window--bump it all the way over. So, now I have kind of merged these two files. If I export that, what I’ll have—I am going to kind of go up to the top here and go to export. If I export now, I am going to have the first portion of this one file that I created and trimmed off merged together with the full version of this file that I brought it in, and that’s what’s going to happen when I click on export to FLV. I’ll call this one—merge. I merged these two together, so—congratulations. All right, finish. So basically I’ve just shown a basic use of this free flv editor.
So, that concludes the video demonstration where I’ve shown you how to concert your video files to flv and shown you how to do some basic flv editing. Thank you very much.
