OSX Lion and exporting for iPhone

Question

There was a thread about how when trying to set and/or publish for iPhone or edit its settings, Flash CS5 immediately crashes. The problem has been experienced by many Mac OSX Lion users and they talked about it in this unresolved thread: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/888198#3851750 but still no updates from Adobe. Adobe sent me a response to my Support ticket that "it's an Actionscript 3 coding issue" then closed it so I couldn't reply. Ummmm, NO it isn't a coding issue, I tried to export an FLA file with no code in it. That's a really bad way to do business, Adobe. But since they're not going to be helpful (and probably lose me as a customer) has anyone else found a workaround for this?

Answer 1

ccroo wrote:
The aspect ratio of the iphone screen is 480 x 320, but that size is not an option when exporting for iPhone using Compressor. You have to use a custom setting.
Why is this the case?
You have to understand that the Apple-provided presets are good launching points, not end-all, be-all settings.
And iPhones do support material encoded as 640 pixels wide so the preset for VGA (up to 640x480) works fine for most people. I personally rarely use anything smaller than the VGA setting for Apple Devices as I find that's the perfect middle ground for iPods, iPhones and AppleTV.
If you (understandably) need to limit your file and frame sizes, adjusting the device setting in Compressor to iPhone (Local/WiFi) does the trick - fitting your movie into a 480 pixel-wide frame size and capping the video data rate at 1000 Kbps.
Letterboxing - as in hard mattes - is not needed when encoding for Apple Devices. In fact, if you have letterboxing in your source media, use the Geometry pane to crop out the Letterbox Area of Source. That will provide you with a better quality encode and the preset will know to adjust your output frame size, so you need not worry about distorting your movie.