If you’re looking for a concise overview of Flash video and how to incorporate it into a website, this book is for you. At fewer than 100 pages, plenty of graphics, and large text, this Visual QuickProject Guide is a fast read, and a companion website provides source files so you can follow along with the book exercises using the same files depicted in the book.
Although the book’s intent is to provide a basic introduction to Flash video, even readers like myself who have prior knowledge of the subject may well pick up a few tips. CS3’s Flash Video Encoder is now the Adobe Media Encoder in CS4, and several of the CS3 dialog boxes depicted in the book are different from those in CS4. These differences are not enough to make the book’s exercises unworkable in CS4, however.
Chapters 1 and 2 explain how to import videos into the Flash Video Encoder/Adobe Media Encoder, and how to use the Encoder to crop videos, resize videos, and trim time at the beginning and/or end of videos.
Chapter 3 offers an overview of a few different audio and video compression settings, including Sorenson Spark and On2 VP6 video codecs, and explains how to save different settings as profiles to be reused later. Chapter 3 concludes with a good synopsis of the differences between several audio compression settings as well as various video codecs.
In Chapter 4, you finally get to produce the Flash video (FLV) files using the profiles created earlier, and in Chapter 5, you embed these videos into a website and choose a skin for the video controls. The book instructs readers to create a new “Page from Sample” using a “Starter Page (Theme)”, but web page themes are a Dreamweaver CS3 feature no longer available in Dreamweaver CS4. As an easy workaround in CS4, create a new HTML document using the “3 column elastic, header and footer” layout. That gets you close enough to the layout shown in the screenshots in the book to emulate the design of the Theme chosen by the author.
The final chapter in the book, Chapter 6, explains how to optimize the Flash videos for viewing on a computer with a high-speed connection as well as for viewing on a mobile device. The chapter very briefly introduces Adobe Device Central, which allows you to preview your content on various simulated mobile devices. Chapter 6 wraps up with directions for uploading your new site to a server, so you can share your videos with the world.
ISBN: ISBN-10: 0321535235
ISBN-13: 978-0321535238
Author: David Karlins
Purchase: Amazon
Reviewed by Paula Borchardt