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.

On2 has announced today that they will add support for the H.264 codec (widely used for HD and mobile content, including iPods and iPhones) in their Flix video encoder. This additional transcoding format will be an available as an upgrade in Q4 2007. With companies such as On2 being compelled to support the iPhone video format, one wonders who’s going to blink first — will Adobe give in and add a codec, as Flashers have been clammering for, or will Apple finally support Flash on iPhones?! Somethin’s gotta give.

Finally! FMS developers now have a handy tool for writing communication ActionScript, thanks to Darren Lee — the Flash Media Server Eclipse Plugin

Features:

• Outline View
• Code Complete
• Output Console
• Auto Insert
• Import AS2
• Error checking

See a demo screencast here: http://fczone.com/eclipse/demo/

A tool to enhance FMS development workflow has sorely been needed. Darren has really outdone himself with this — it certainly helps that he has an amazing amount of first-hand knowledge about what FMS developers need. The code completion alone will save me tons of time, not to mention the tricked-out Output Console and error checking.
This is a test-build release, so be sure to check for the latest updates. Thanks, Darren! You rock.

Harley fans have proven to be bandwidth hogs — forcing Google to expand their “unlimited bandwidth” to accommodate the live stream from this year’s festival in Sturgis. Harley-Davidson is offering a GoogleGadget that streams live video via Flash; from what I can tell, using origin-edge Flash Media Server setup through Akamai. Carmichael Lynch (Minneapolis, MN) is the agency; but it’s not clear if the development was done in-house.

They are even streaming live video through banner ads on sites such as MSN, Yahoo, Univision and AOL for up to 10 hours a day. It’s great to see FMS being used for large-scale advertising efforts — leave it to Harley to have the cahones to do it! Bravo!

More info at MediaPost (login required).

Get your Harley GoogleGadget >> here <<.

We’re excited to be part of FitC again this year — and it’s shaping up to be yet another fantastic conference. Renee will be presenting “Flash Video Crash Course” and I’ll be “Demystifying FLV Encoding.” FitC is always chock-full of motivating and educational sessions, and a great group of people — don’t miss it!
Check out the details >> here <<… and when you decide to get your ticket, use this code for a discount:
10% discount code: HD777
See you in Hollywood!

The latest update to the Flash Player brings serious video quality improvements, for those who have the right hardware. In this video interview with Tinic Uro of Adobe, he discusses the specifics. Here are the highlights:

• Core renderer will now support multi-core hardware, giving us fully multi-threaded performance (so, if you have the right system, full-screen HD Flash video can be amazing quality, and screaming fast).
• The native resolution of the video in Flash is scaled up to full-screen through hardware acceleration.
• This hardware acceleration is implemented using OpenGL on Mac and Direct3D/DirectDraw on Windows.

Pretty exciting stuff, even though most of us don’t have the hardware to experience it just yet. Just more proof that Adobe is serious about video.

I ran across this free video player, called video.maru, that allows you to play FLVs without using the FLVPlayback component, and without writing even one line of ActionScript.

http://polygeek.com/videomaru/

Seems like a good solution for those who just don’t want to deal with AS, period. His implementation is really quite clever, and pretty intuitive. Worth a look for those just getting started with Flash video and know they don’t want too many custom features.

Our book is now available on Amazon, and will be “wherever books are sold” very soon! We worked really hard on this book, and tried to include everything you need to create Flash video applications in the real world. You’ll find all sorts of solutions to problems you’ll invariably encounter out there. Clients that may not know what they want. Video that’s blocky and choppy. Slow internet connections. Transitions, filters, thumbnail snapshots, streaming, progressive, videoconferencing… we cover it all. In both AS2 and AS3. It took a few years off our lives, but here it is!
Details over here >>

Wow. Renee and I just returned from Minneapolis, where we were speaking at the Flashbelt conference. What an incredible event! A relatively small conference, with less than 500 attendees… and an all-star lineup of speakers. From Andre Michele to Josh Davis; from Jared Tarbell to Geoff Sterns. The feel of the conference was very open and friendly, with inspirational and informative dialog during and after sessions, and over drinks at the incredible after parties. The midwest knows how to do it up right.

We gave two sessions: Renee and I presented “Flash Video: The Basics and Beyond!” and I presented “Flash Video Crash Course.” As promised, here are the examples and resources from the talks [BEYOND talk to come]. Thanks to all that attended!

http://www.flashconnections.com/flashbelt07/

UPDATE :: ARCHIVED SESSIONS ARE HERE: http://osflash.org/ofla2 // lisa

FYI — for those of you who don’t like spending $$$ on in-person conferences, or feel insecure if you’re too far away from your desk, here’s an online alternative.

Register here: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/%7Etangrif/OFLA2/Register.html

**
The second Open Source Flash Conference will be held on June 15th. The conference will start by 11:00 am Eastern Time. This conference is completely free and to attend you only need a computer , the internet and flash installed on your computer.

Here is the link for the conference

https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/r45637951/

SPEAKERS

* Aral Balkan 11:00
o Introduction

* Ralph Hauwert 11:15
o Papervision 3D

* Firdosh Tangri 12:00
o ASWing Component Framework

* John Grden 12:45
o The Red5 Project

* BREAK 1:30

* Igor Costa 2:00
o Flex Applications using Flex 2 SDK and Granite Data Services

* Aral Balkan 3:00
o SWX

* Nicolas Cannasse 4:00
o Haxe Programming Language

* Cortlandt Winters 5:00
o OpenLazlo and comparisons between Laszlo, Flash, Flex and Haxe/Actionstep.

Looks interesting. I’m especially interested in the Red5 and PaperVision3D sessions. Hope to (virtually) see some of you there. Vivé la open source!