An Old Article Not Up to Date and No One Needs

Wednesday February 03, 2021

Estimated Reading Time: 1 minutes

As of January 21st, Flash is dead. I made my career creating Flash (and Director!) interactions. I remember in Spring semester of 1998 staying up through the night to learn how to mimic the look of GaboCorp's all Flash site.

Fast forward ten years and I had moved from agency work to being an internal designer at Black \& Decker. I was generating dozens and dozens of instructional videos that got placed in online learning courses for the sales force. I was deep into learning AppleScript to automate different parts of work flows (mostly resizing graphics, converting audio, etc) and wondered if I could drop the videos I was making in Final Cut Pro and Compressor into a script that would convert to (at the time) standard FLV files. I finally found a solution using the traditionally Linux-based tool FFmpeg, it's OSX shareware-version, and some AppleScript shell scripts. I wrote what I came up with at Using Applescript and FFmpeg (through ffmpegX) to create Flash Video Files (FLV).

This became the highest trafficked page on my site. In some re-vamp of gregwalsh.com, I must have deleted it. I was rebuilding my blog engine and happened to find it in an archive. Even though Flash and FLVs aren't that important anymore, I thought it was important to keep it posted. You never know if some unfortunate socio-technical history PhD student will need to make something like this happen.