Video Sync Issues with Flash AS3

It’s been almost a year exactly since my last update. I guess I’ve been pretty preoccupied. I wanted to do a post about an age old problem very often encountered in Flash – compositing video so that overlaying elements sync perfectly with a video. In essence, getting the true current frame of an FLV or F4V. Specifically the problem I want to talk about tackling is having an image be composited as if it were in the video. I think a great example of this is a site we (as in Firstborn, not me) did for 5 React a year or so ago. There are a couple of solutions to solve this problem that work almost perfectly 99% of the time. In general, they usually involve an XML file that contains corner points for each frame of how an image should be transformed to match the video. For live video (no CG) tracking is set up in After Effects and then the cue points are exported. While After Effects doesn’t have a native export cue points as XML option, the keyframe data can be copied & pasted out as plain text, and then you can just run a simple RegEx to convert it to XML. This is all pretty simple and isn’t the problem, the issue lies with not being able to get the exact frame that a video is displaying.

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