Here’s a Handy chart on Adobe.com, for determining the optimal video frame size for web playback.

I had the pleasure of presenting last week to the FlashFocused user group in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was a lucky coincidence that my family summertime visit happened to be on the week of their monthly meeting. Yay syncronicity!

I gave them the lowdown on Flash video, of course — a topic that happened to be quite relevant for many of the members who attended. For those of you who have been waiting patiently for me to post the code examples and presentation notes, here they are!

–> Presentation [PDF] <–

–> Source files [ZIP] <–

Thanks for your patience, and for having me present to your group. And thanks to Misty for grabbing a copy of my book for a giveaway, as well! You guys rock.

Thanks to everyone who attended my session today, “Custom Video Players for Videophobes”. As promised, here are the slides, source files, and links.

–> Presentation [PDF] <--

--> Source files [ZIP] <--

The pre-built video players I mentioned are:

• FLVPlayer PRO component http://www.flashloaded.com/flashcomponents/flvplayerpro/
• JW FLV Media Player http://jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player
• flowplayer http://www.flowplayer.org

Be sure to check out the Adobe Developer Connection for additional tutorials and tools for Flash Video.

If you missed this year’s Flashbelt, be sure to mark your calendar for next year! This is truly the conference not to be missed… great networking, fantastic speakers, laid-back vibe. Dave, you’ve done it again! Midwest is the best

Last night I gave a talk about the new FMS3 to my friends at FlashCodersNY. (“uncensored” refers to the fact that last time I talked about FMS3, a few weeks ago, I couldn’t talk about most of the details!) I basically outlined the new features, what I thought about them, and how they might be helpful/valuable. I included a bunch of info from the upcoming whitepaper I wrote for Adobe, which should be publishing to the Developer Center shortly. (Will let you all know when it does!) In the meantime, here is the preso for reference.

I exported this to a SWF from Keynote, so you’ll have to click to move forward through the slides, and there’s no back button (grr). But anyway, here it is.

What if you could create a dynamic Flash website without compiling, and without writing a lick of ActionScript?

And what if I told you that this site was fully standards-compliant, readable and indexable by search engines?

And what if this magic SWF-creator was completely open-source and available now?

Well, believe it my friends — Wrapper is here!

My friend and fellow FlashCodersNY member, Tyler Larson, has finally released his baby into the world, and has graciously decided to make it open-source. He presented to FCNY last night, explaining both the implementation and some of the inner workings, and showing some amazing examples.

An ActionScript 3 HTML/CSS rendering engine, Wrapper makes it simple to create attractive, functional, full-Flash websites using just standard HTML/CSS markup. Now, this may be hard to ‘wrap’ your head around at first, as it was for me, but once you see it in action, you begin to understand the power it gives you, and why Tyler’s been tirelessly working on it for lo these many months.

To see it in action, go to Tyler’s site: http://www.motionandcolor.com/
This site is constructed using Wrapper. Looks like a normal, slick site, right? Remarkably, the whole thing is a SWF, which was constructed using HTML/CSS (view the source).

Very basically, this is how it works: When this page is loaded into the browser, a javascript file, wrapper.js, is loaded. This file “eats” your HTML/CSS and renders all of your content into a SWF, which (using the standard SWFObject method) replaces the HTML and fills the browser window. All this happens instantaneously, as Wrapper is nicely optimized at a lean, mean 22k.

Some of the major benefits of Wrapper include:

• Dynamic loading of custom fonts, by importing a SWF with that font embedded
• Bitmap fills (and notice the nice smooth gradient background on the sample link above)
• Filters (shadows, glows, etc.)
• Draw shapes (basic primitives such as circles, squares, rounded rectangles, etc.)
• Standards-compliant
• Content can be indexed by search engines
• Can set up and call custom methods for more advanced interaction and functionality
• Open-source and free
• And much more, once you get under the hood…

So, if you’re interested in streamlining the development of Flash-based websites and want to produce Flash sites that are fully indexable and standards-compliant, check out Wrapper at Google Code:
http://code.google.com/p/htmlwrapper/

or at OSFlash

http://osflash.org/projects/wrapper

p.s. There’s even a simple WordPress Theme example. Amazing stuff, Tyler, you rock!

I just had the pleasure of presenting at the Digital Media Festival, an annual festival geared toward animators, digital effects artists, and video professionals. There was a great turnout on the exhibition floor, often with standing-room only attendance for the numerous free sessions at the Adobe booth. The masterclass sessions were also well-attended; I presented full-hour sessions on Flash Media Server, Flash video basics, and a session on Flash video: beyond the basics which explored the possibilities of alpha channel compositing, metadata and cuepoints among other features.

It was truly a pleasure to be working with Adobe to present intro sessions at their booth, as well as being a part of this diverse conference. As promised, I’ve uploaded copies of my presentations for reference, as well as all of the source code for examples shown.

http://www.flashconnections.com/dmf_2007/

Thanks to everyone; I hope you found the sessions inspirational as well as informative!

Now, I’m finally off to my honeymoon for a couple of glorious weeks “down under.” Have fun, and keep Flashing!

cheers // Lisa

What can I say about FOTB08… John Davey knows how to put on a conference. It was a solid 4 days of workshops, sessions, networking, commiserating, and drinking of pints. Lots and lots of pints.

The speaker lineup was stellar. It was truly an honor to be a part of it this year. So when I say DON’T EVEN THINK about missing it next year, I mean it! It’s planned for late September, so watch http://www.flashonthebeach.com for official info soon.

Thanks to everyone who attended my session, Fun with Flash Media Server. And oh boy was it fun… especially when we all lost the internet connection when it was time to demo my app. Ah well, gotta live life on the edge, right?! So to help make up for that, I’ve left the demo app running for you to play with; just please be kind to my server.

You can also download the source files for the application. Just remember to change the NetConnection URI to your own FMS server. (If you don’t want to set up your own version of FMS, the code is also compatible with other streaming servers such as RED5 or Wowza; or you could sign up for a dev account with Influxis). The presentation itself is available for reference as well, as promised.
See you next year (or sooner, if you happen to be in Sydney… that’s where I’m headed next. Will be arriving there this Sunday for the Digital Media Festival)!

cheers

// Lisa

Whew. What a whirlwind conference! MAX is winding down, and I’m on my way out of town… but before I go, as promised, here is a PDF of the presentation. Thanks to everyone who attended; I hope you found it interesting and enlightening! I’ll be presenting a version of this session at Flash in the Can Hollywood in a couple of weeks, for those who missed it!

DOWNLOAD PDF

The brilliant minds of Flash developers are always working… More proof here, on FlashcomGuru, where xmoov has developed an improved solution for emulating streaming’s smooth seeking, for progressive download video delivery. Like the solution mentioned in our book, this is PHP-based, and allows you to skip around freely within a progressive video, even if that portion of the video file has not yet been downloaded. He’s open-sourced the code, and also offers a plug-and-play version for a small fee, (UPDATE: contact the developer for pricing) if you don’t want to get your hands dirty with PHP.

The updated source by xmoov.com is available from FlashComGuru’s site.

I’m back in NYC and recovering from my week at the Wedding and Event Videographer’s Association conference in Vegas. Whew! What an event. Jam-packed with useful sessions on everything from business tips, hands-on tech, to creative shooting techniques, and more.

It was my pleasure to have presented a couple of sessions on Flash basics for videographers. Thanks to all who attended; I hope you all learned a thing or two, and now feel confident that you can create your own video player in Flash!

As promised, here is my presentation in PDF format.

In the presentation, I demonstrated the creation of a simple video player using the pre-built components that come with Flash CS3. You can easily add a logo to this in Flash, as I demonstrated in my talk. You can then use that as a template for all of your videos you wish to play on your site. You can even customize each on from there with the name of the newlyweds, or whatever you wish!

The links to the prebuilt players (with playlists) I suggested, for quick reference, are:

Proxus Player: http://www.flvplayer.com [requires Flash authoring tool to create player]

FLVPlayerPRO: http://www.flashloaded.com [requires Flash authoring tool to create player]

JW FLV Player: http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player [DOES NOT require Flash authoring tool]

And, of course, don’t forget to check out the free Flash Media Encoder, which you can use to broadcast LIVE from your events.