I'm a bit of of a Microfilmmaker anomaly. Almost everything I make these days is made to be squashed down for the web. The silver-screen is not even part of my thought process. At the day job I have to crunch down tons of videos, in a ton of different ways, with variances of quality, size, and players. For Flash encoding I use the efficient but pricey On2 Flix Pro Suite. And while it does its job, it lacks some features that I find essential to my workflow (like batch processing and custom-saved encoding settings). This absence makes the chore of encoding quite exhausting.
So when a new contender like Moyea approaches, it's an understatement to say that I'm freaking ecstatic. Moyea is a software company that has been developing Flash video encoding software for Windows machines for six versions now. For their first foray into the Mac universe I was lucky enough to be able to test this amazing encoding suite on two different Macs: an Intel box running Snow Leopard, and a Power PC running Tiger. While a bit far from being 100% on version 1.0, Flash Video MX for Mac delivers some impressive results and a silly amount of options.
When you open Moyea Flash MX Pro for Mac you are greeted with this screen. Choose wisely. One of the annoying things I found about this is that if you choose 'Convert Video & Audio' but decide later that you want to create a player, you have to start over.
Ease of Use
Using Moyea's Flash Video MX involves working between two competing forces: extreme ease of use and glitchy tendencies. Good thing the former trumps the latter. As I mentioned before, I had the luxury of using Moyea Flash Video MX on two Mac operating systems: Tiger and Snow Leopard. While Tiger had some rather odd glitches, like having to add at least two video clips to even get to the settings menu, Snow Leopard was definitely more stable. (Note: In the process of writing this review Moyea has released an update of this software which phases Tiger completely out, therefore taking care of most of the glitches I encountered.) The rest of the glitches are rather harmless, things like design of the program not quite fitting in where it should. Most of the glitches don't get in the way of the functionality , which is what makes it passable.
Here's the simple interface, and pretty much the instructions to do anything. Open as many videos as you want on the left side. There's even a handy merge function if you want to take several video clips and encode them into one flash file.
For raw encoding purposes, Moyea offers three really nice quick settings: High, Medium, and Low Quality. From that point on, you can create your own profiles and formulas. I can't tell you how great this is considering the alternative. On2 offers many different presets but no option to save. For someone like me, who is constantly tweaking settings for different forms of deliverables, the ability to save my settings is a godsend.
