image output from flash 8

[manovotny]

alright brains, start cookin'!

here's the skinny on what i'm trying to do... i'm building a program/site (in flash) that will allow a user to create a photo album online. i wanna take what they make online in the flash site and get it into some form of high-quality media (illustrator, photoshop, pdf, jpg, etc. file) that could be printed and look very professional.

now... i know flash can't do anything close to that on it's own, but can it be partnered with something to accomplish this?! coldfusion, flashpaper, java, .net, acrobat (distiller or something) to get the job done?!

c'mon folks... whatcha all thinkin'?! am i insane for thinking it's possible?!


: : michael

[Noct]

Well, you could definately build the dynamic photo album in Flash. The part that doesn't make a lot of sense if what you want to do with it. If they added the images themselves...why would you need to create "high-quality media" from their results? The images they uploaded into their album would already be there...are you suggesting you would then rebuild those images into another format?
It isn't like you are going to get an increased quality to them by processing them through something, if anything, they will just degrade.

If you need the user to actually "create" art in Flash, that would be a different story, but if they are creating just an album of photos that already exits...why would you need to do anything other then print out the results of the album?

Or are you asking if it would be possible to take the "presentation" created by your app, and then convert the entire presentation into a format that could be loaded in another app, like PS, Illus, etc??

[manovotny]

ok... more of "the big picture"...

i'm working on a project. the project goal is to streamline photographers, storage, and printing. the general "flow" would be for a photographer to go shoot a wedding or something like that. our photographers would then come home and upload their images to our server.

now... the photographers will be able to use this "app" i'm trying to build to create a photo album using 1) page templates we've already built and 2) the images uploaded by the photographer. flash makes a sweet and spiffy front-end for building this albim.

once the photographers build the album in flash, i want to be able to output something that could be sent to a professional printer, so qulaity is of the highest importance!

the reason for doing all of this?! to make it streamline and accessable to our photographers via a browser. that's the goal, al least...

does that help explain what's going on?


: : michael

[Noct]

Kinda, but I'm still not clear on what your output actually is; Just giant image files of each page of the "album"?

output something that could be sent to a professional printer
Here is where your making me wonder about the plausability of all of this.
Print is just leaps and bounds beyond web when it comes to image size/quality. Im not a photographer, but I would imagine they don't love the idea of compressing thier photos before they upload them. So..now your dealing with uncompressed print resolution photos getting uploaded to your server. That is a ton of data to move around, both bandwidth wise, and on the processor running the flash app.

Maybe you could think about using a thumbnail type of system where the photogs upload compressed images that are more like placeholders. Then you could send the original photos on a disk at full quality along with this album that has all the art in place.

Because even beyond the file sizes, getting images OUT of flash is not easy. It requires outside architechture, and is extremely slow, even with "small" images. I can't imagine how hard it would be to process an image the size of a photoAlbum page with full quality images contained within it.

By the way, if you want a taste of what is involved in getting Flash to output an image, read some of these:

http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=128600&highlight=save
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=90159&highlight=save
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=128136&highlight=save
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=128404&highlight=save