Now that I have the full Master Collection of Creative Suite 5, I’ve been using some of the great collaborative features. One that I really liked is cue points. One of my clients had videos of someone speaking, and they wanted animated text to appear next to him. As he spoke certain phrases, the wording needed to appear.

After Effects and Flash made this a piece of cake. I brought 6 short videos into After Effects and created a separate composition for each one. I then added 4 or 5 cue points to each comp, where the speaker was saying certain phrases. I exported each comp to a Flash video (FLV) and brought those into Flash projects. A few lines of ActionScript 3 had Flash read each cue point and place the play head at a frame label that had the same name.

Here’s the code:

import fl.video.MetadataEvent;
video_MC.speakerFLV.addEventListener(MetadataEvent.CUE_POINT, playCuePoint);
function playCuePoint(event:MetadataEvent):void {
    gotoAndPlay(event.info.name);
}

The instance of the FLVplayer object is called speakerFLV, and that’s inside a movie clip called video_MC. The key is the last line of code: gotoAndPlay(event.info.name). If I created a cue point called Hello, this script will detect it, put the play head at a frame label called Hello, and play the animation (text animating in, then animating out). Since this happened 4-5 times in each video, I simply put a stop() command between each sequence. You can see it working at www.vision2voice.com.

Occasionally, I’d lose my place as to where each cue point was — maybe I’d forget if there were 4 or 5 or what their names were or where they were in the movie. When the FLV player was selected, the Properties panel listed them:

Do you notice the plus and minus signs in the panel? You can create your own cue points in the video. But where the cue points embedded in After Effects can be used in any application (even those not from Adobe), the cue points created in this panel will only be recognized by Flash. But maybe that’s all you need.

If you read some of Adobe’s advertising of Creative Suite 4 or 5, there’s a good chance you came across something called Dynamic Link. The idea is very cool: for example, they say you can take a timeline from Premiere Pro and place it in an After Effects composition as though it’s a movie clip, and edit it. So there’s no need to render in Premiere Pro and then render a second time in After Effects. Dynamic Link will also let you go in the other direction: take an After Effects comp and place it in a Premiere Pro timeline. Or use Sound Booth to edit audio tracks of Premiere Pro or After Effects without having to render out and re-placing.

But Adobe seems to have omitted a big, fat asterisk that says “Dynamic Link may not work.” The secret is that it works only if you bought the applications as a suite. And even if you bought Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and other Adobe applications in a suite, if you added Premiere Pro, After Effects or Sound Booth later, you can forget about Dynamic Link.

What’s especially irritating is that Adobe charges more for these applications separately. So you end up paying more to get less. My hope that they would fix this in CS5 went unrealized, and some product listings of CS5 now list Dynamic Link, as though it’s a product. Does that mean this is a feature, not a bug?