Still more Flash video wonderfulness « Teaching Online Journalism

Still more Flash video wonderfulness

October 24, 2006

Tom Green’s article The Rise of Flash Video, Part 2, is online now. I blogged about Part 1 earlier this month.

Green also has free Flash tutorials on his Web site.

I recently found Green’s excellent how-to about creating a talking-head Flash video on the Adobe Web site.

I have a lot of Flash books in my personal library, but maybe I’m going to have to buy one of Green’s too. Maybe Foundation Flash 8 Video.

In Part 2 of his article, he gets down to brass tacks. The New York Times (video page), The Washington Post (video page) and Vodafone (video page):

… make exceptional use of Flash, so the real question should be this this: If it can be this good, why isn’t everybody doing it?

… It isn’t the technology. It is the person that encoded the video in the first place who made the mistake. The thing that sets these notable Flash video providers apart from the teen-aged head-banger on YouTube, GoogleVideo, or MySpace is incredibly simple: These video providers care about quality, intimately understand the technology, and, most important of all, they keep an eye on the pipe (the data pipe, that is).

Green also explains how you do that (keep your eye on the pipe):

Broadly, there are two types of codecs out there: lossy and lossless. As the name implies, the lossy codecs shrink the video file dramatically by dropping detail, like creating a JPEG image from a RAW photo. For our purposes, Spark, Squeeze, and ON2VP6 are the most important of the lossy codecs, because they the ones used to create the FLV file used in Flash. The result is a very small file size.

Lossless codecs lose very little information, if any, and the resulting files are quite large. When it comes to Flash video, large is a good thing before conversion, and a really bad thing at run time.

The basic rule of thumb for preparing videos for Flash is this: Start with as much detail as you can get. Make sure your original video is encoded with a lossless codec before you begin to convert it to FLV for Flash distribution.

I don’t know Green personally, but I’m starting to believe he really knows Flash video! I remember when I first started reading about video codecs back in 1999. Wow, my head was hurting! But the pain only lasts a short while. The more you learn, the better your online video will be.

Technorati tags: video | multimedia | Flash | online media