How to render a video with images loading externally?

[voidzero]

Hi Guys,

Firstly a big hello from India. I am essentially a Flash Actionscript developer and a complete AE n00b who has been handed an interesting brief which i've been trying to break into plausible steps. The objective is to render a slideshow (video) of user uploaded images with simplistic transitions from one image to another, the number of images may vary but the transitions are predefined. The biggest challenge i'm facing here is that I need to do the rendering server side. I have a LOT of questions here and it'll be a big help even if I find answers to some of them here.

Q1] Can AE run on a "web server"? I might be able to use a dedicated PC running AE as the server if required.
Q2] Can I write a script that will handle creation of a new project, parse through the image data (number of images, path to the images etc.), load the user uploaded images into the project, animate the transitions (fade-in) between each image and finally render the video?
Q3] How can the image filenames be passed to AE from Flash? Can I do it using a XML file?

Any help is highly appreciated.

Cheers!
Abhishek

[lloydalvarez]

Regardless of whether you can get it to work technically. After Effects' EULA specifically prohibits AE from being run in the way you describe so you would need to get a special license from Adobe to be able to run this service.