Creating Automatic Transcripts in Flash Video Using Adobe CS4

The basis of the Flash application is the FLVPlayback component, a video player that comes with the Flash authoring environment. The other main visual element is a TextArea component to hold the scrolling transcript.

The cue points in the FLV file are navigation cue points and, therefore, are searchable. Just to show that searching does work, I included code that creates a search button (in the upper left of the Flash Player window, labeled Test Button). Click the button to search for the first occurrence of the word "permaculture" in the video.

Basically, a searchable transcript is just a series of such buttons, though visually, you’ll probably want it to look like ordinary text, perhaps with words or phrases highlighting when you mouse over them.

In practice, you’ll probably want to search to the time of the cue point, not the text, since searching on the text finds the first occurrence only. So what you’d want is a series of buttons with the transcription text as the button label and the time where that text occurs as the "go to" point for the seekToNavCuePoint command. You’d probably want to automate the creation of these buttons based on information loaded from the XML file. I didn’t undertake that for this tutorial.

Look in Flash help for details on using the seekToNavCuePoint command. Note that when seeking on a time, you can seek on a round number lower than the actual cue point time; the player should seek to the next cue point after the time you specify. For instance, if the actual cue point is at 27.845, you could search on 27. In practice, you’ll need a few seconds of preroll; otherwise, the player may overshoot the desired cue point. Even if the seek were more precise, you’d probably want some preroll to let viewers get into the flow of what’s being said.

4.  Publish
• Go to File > Publish Settings. On the Formats tab, make sure that both Flash and HTML are selected. On the Flash tab, select Flash Player 9 or 10 and ActionScript 3.0. (Flash Player versions prior to 9 do not support ActionScript 3.0, so they won't work with the code provided in this tutorial
• Click Publish.
That’s it! Deploy your SWF, HTML, and FLV files, and you should have a working application.

(Note: This application was tested successfully with Windows XP, version 2002, service pack 3. On a Vista laptop connected via Wi-Fi, the video failed to auto-play—I had to click the Play button—but, otherwise, it worked correctly. A Vista issue?)