If your videographer shoots in HD that's fine. You'll get best quality if you reference the video file into the flash with LoadMC (defunct:LoadMovie) instead of embedding it. it will be played without having to be compressed by sorensen spark (and so, at the resolution/size you specify in flash). Embedding it will ruin your resolutions for rasters and video, even if you chose the highest raster quality when you go to publish (you should definitely be using highest quality publish settings, check those too). Any video input resolution will work, as you can scale or otherwise manipulate the incoming video the same way you would scale/color/mask/rotate any MC object in flash. Pretty Rad stuff. Loading Movie clips is blindly done ...since it wont show the movie until published...but if you know what size and location to set in the properties dialog, it can be as exactly positioned as you like. I sometimes setup a dummy MC on the video layer for arrangement purposes that has the same dimensions i want from my vid and load the MC into that target MC with actionscript.
Timing is also harder to do blind, but nothign a few blank frames here or there won't fix. (video length in seconds x flash movie framerate = time as flash frames)
It's not a professional video tool. Complex video action slows it down tons. Otherwise for most multimedia presentations it scales cleanly to any size i've ever tried. Frames may skip when flash is loading huge files <so preloading your video is a sharp move
> or trying to render overly compley animations (multiple color and shape tweens over each other)
Academic: HD has a framerate of ~29 frames/second for 1080p and upto 60 for 720p (1080i and 720i are not mentioned because interlacing is lower quality)720p is able to be played faster and therefore show sports and hummingbirds better. 1080 is slower fps but higher resolution...better for panoramas and detailed images.
ANY FRAME RATE YOU SET YOUR FLASH TO IS FINE, but know that you WILL HAVE A LIMIT and that if you get the framerates matched you will not miss any frames. I use 15fps because it renders faster and is divisible into the framerates of both 720 and 1080. If you want the HD video to play full quality (not skipping frames) then set your FLA to the same framerate as the HD movie and it will be shown as such. 15FPS looks good enough for me and most passive tradeshow viewers.
Rant:As for Flash being a web-only platform...that's bollocks. It's grown up a whole lot from it's humble web-banner beginnings. It's on cell-phones, has an extensible object oriented java-derived coding language, etc. It's main limitation is with more complex animations that require lots of layered effects to be rendered...especially when they are overlaid over video or otherwise complex motion graphics. For cleanly laid-out prentations it's a marvel. It's highly portable and fast if use it to do what it does best.
i'll shut up now.