Play flash one video on top of another?

Question

I'm looking at a project that requires the ability to play one flash video over the top of another... sort of like an animated watermark, where the video on top has transparent regions ans may not be the same width/height as the one underneath.

Using Flash/Flex, can this be done in a web-app at real time? Or would you have to use an offline server app?

EDIT: This is not an HTML question. It's about making a simple video-editing kind of tool solely in Flex. Maybe I want to overlay a video of a galloping horse over a video of passing scenery or something. Ultimately, being able to output a single mixed video is useful, but for video editing that's too slow, real-time playback as the position of the overlay video is changed would be needed. Hope this clarifies things somewhat?

Answer 1

I haven't done much flash work lately, but what I remember of flash (and I assume this is part of flex) you could draw in several files and place them on different levels, like a z-index.

If you need some sort of real-time keying or something of that nature, that is beyond my knowledge of flash.

You may be able to use CSS with z-indexing to do this through basic HTML/CSS means as well. But I would look to having flash do all the heavy lifting of layering, if you can.

Answer 2

I don't think you'll get such features,

Well, I am thinking, why you need to play flash files overlapped on each other .. If you want some water mark (static or Dynamic content), you can have it in a single flash file, you need not overlap the two files for that ..

Even if it was possible to make two flash files overlap on web-page, it is not recommended as good practice, because it needs lot of data to be transfered over to browser(in worst case, 2 files, so double the data), in-turn introducing more delay to load the page.. it is a degradation to your own web-page .. Instead try to merge files (image or flash) to save the amount of memory to be transfered via browser ..

Answer 3

Put the 2 videos on different layers inside your fla. The video files will have to be .flvs. Make sure the alpha channel is encoded in the video that's meant to go on top... this is done using your encoding program, like Flash Video Encoder. This is probably why it's not working for you right now.