I've been an audio and video nut for years. Long before I worked for Macromedia (and now Adobe), I was a professional musician. I learned all the right ways to set up a studio by doing it the wrong way far more times than I'd care to admit. My first few contract jobs as a visual effects artist taught me a lifetime's worth of lessons on how to work effectively with video and film. Now as the bar is lowered more and more with respect to getting video online, my own tips, tricks, and best practices for optimizing video for online delivery may help you out as you start to incorporate time-based media into your artistic projects.

In the following recorded presentation, I talk about workflows and best practices for producing online-delivered video using Adobe After Effects 7 and Macromedia Flash Professional 8 (see Figure 1). I step through video optimization tips across all phases of a production schedule: preproduction, principal photography, editing, postproduction, compression, and both progressive and streaming online delivery. I hope this presentation helps you visualize—and efficiently produce—rich, interactive, compelling video experiences for use in your Flash applications and projects.

Figure 1. Removing greenscreen backgrounds in Adobe After Effects 7

Watch the Breeze seminar

Note: Presentation duration is 1:20 including Q & A.

General outline

I've broken down my presentation into the following topics, at these rough starting times, so you can watch just the parts that apply to you at the moment:

• Start: Introduction and shooting considerations
• 10 min.: Planning the shoot
• 18 min.: Phases of production
• 22 min.: Acquiring video for the web
• 30 min.: Editing
• 32 min.: Keying (green/bluescreen removal)
• 45 min.: Color correction and interlacing
• 46 min.: Exporting from After Effects
• 48 min.: Flash video codecs (and comparing codecs)
• 52 min.: Encoding your FLV file
• 53 min.: Key encoding definitions
• 56 min.: Serving up your masterpiece and video delivery recommendations
• 1 hr.: Survey questions and Q & A

Requirements

To follow this presentation you may want to install the following software:

After Effects 7

• Try (win)
• Try (mac)
• Buy

Flash Professional 8

• Try
• Buy

About the author