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Video Questions.

D

dwill0611

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 29, 2008
9
0
Hi I am making an introduction video for my site (viewed at www.rlcvidor.com) and I can see it perfectly and it works great on Mac. The PROBLEM is that the viewers are not primarily mac, but rather Windows. And when viewed on my PC i had to download quicktime, which isnt a problem for me, but for others it may be. I also tried converting the file to .avi and it still required quicktime. I am trying to make it more of a "flash type video" to add dynamics to sites.

Any Thoughts would be VERY Helpful!

------
David Willis
 
Video is definitely one of the harder things to get working cross browsers and OSes, especially if you want it to standard code that will validate. I generally stay away from video for those reasons ... and I have no goo videos. From what I've read though Flash-based video playing has the best support and I hear version 9 now does h.264 video, which is cool.

Here's a decent looking page for it, http://www.jakeludington.com/mac/20060507_flash_movie_conversion_for_mac_os_x.html
From Adobe ($50) - http://www.flashvideostudio.com/
 
Did I forget to mention I am working with Iweb.

I am not sure how to do flash content in Iweb.

-David
 
I agree with angelwatt,
Adding video can be hard work and some visitors will always need to download a player, even with flash.

I think flash has the largest coverage, it used to be 98% and I guess it must still be close to that. But you will find that a lot of users are slow at up dating there flash plugin so try and use one or two version old to get more people without having make them download the new player if you can. (some features are only in the new versions)

Next up is the problem with ie not allowing flash and other active items to start without the user clicking on them. Most web designers use a script to load the active part so that is will start automatically.

In iWeb you can now add your own html code i think so you should be able to use this if you are okay with code.
Plus I found this page which may be useful too.
http://www.verticalmoon.com/tutorials/general/iweb/iweb.htm

I'd be glad to help out a little more if you like.
Do you have Adobe Flash?
 
Nope. All I have is Adobe Photoshop. I created the "movie" with Imovie.

A second question is - I have seen people do things like whats on my site, and it come up as a picture file. What is that? Mainly I want it to do what it does (like a "flash type" intro) but without being a movie... if that makes any sense.

-------
David Willis
 
dwill0611 said:
Nope. All I have is Adobe Photoshop. I created the "movie" with Imovie.

A second question is - I have seen people do things like whats on my site, and it come up as a picture file. What is that? Mainly I want it to do what it does (like a "flash type" intro) but without being a movie... if that makes any sense.

-------
David Willis
Click to expand...

Okay, if you wanted to use flash (and this would be a small file size) you would need to use some kind of tool to convert your QT movie into a flash movie, as angelwatt suggested.

If by picture file you mean a .gif or .jpg file then you can make an animated gif. These can get quite large in file size if you have too many frames in the animation. You can try it out by...

1. draw each frame for the animation in photoshop export as an animated gif
2. export the frames from QT and put them back together in photoshop.

Try to cut down the number of frames to a minimum so that it is okay to download.

Here's a page I found on animated gif's in Photoshop.
http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/build_animated_gifs_in_photoshop.html
You could also try a demo of Fireworks as it has good gif animation tools.

BTW jpeg cannot be animated.

Stuart
 
Hi David,
I'm not sure if this is what you wanted but I have downloaded your movie and taken the last frame and pasted it into a Fireworks image.
I then cut the image into 4 pieces, 1 for the logo, first text, second text and the third text.
I than animated each part over 10 frames with a 7/100 of a second delay to change from 0 to 100 opacity. 40 frames in total.
Your original movie was quite large and resized, I guess in the html code. That full size animated gif is here...
http://www.utobia.co.jp/ricvidortest.gif
It is 554.73k and will take 89 seconds to load over 56kbps.
On your web site the size is 441x248, if I reduce the size to that, the file size is 155.79k and will take 25 seconds to load over 56kbps, it's here for you to check...
http://www.utobia.co.jp/ricvidortest-sm.gif
Still a little large for most visitors.

You could reduce the number of colors to help bring the file size down or making it in flash may reduce the file size too.

Let me know what you think.

Stuart
 
Awesome! It looks great.

Now.. I just need to learn how to do that. Haha. I'll read that article on animated Gifs. That seems like the best one for me. The quicktime stuff doesnt bother me as much however, the guy that is approving the website doesnt have quicktime on his computer. So Its hard to show him haha. .Gif seems to be more universal than .mov.

------
David Willis
 
which version of photoshop are they using. The one that I have doesnt have that option to do all of the animation stuff...

i feel like such a bother haha.
 
dwill0611 said:
which version of photoshop are they using. The one that I have doesnt have that option to do all of the animation stuff...

i feel like such a bother haha.
Click to expand...

It looks like one of the CS versions (from the blue square icon I'd say CS3). If you have an older version the animation tools were in Image Ready which I think came bundled with Photoshop.

There are some free tools online just for making animated gifs, just try a Google search for "animated gif tools".

The tools will make it easier to do the animation, first you set up how the animation will start. Your image (or part of it, do the logo then the each text line) with 0% opacity, then you set up the last frame, your image with 100% opacity. The program then works out all the frames in between, this is know as 'tweening'.

I use Fireworks for my internet stuff, it has a wizard for doing simple animation. If you can get a demo version from Adobe I'll send you the file I made, sorry but it will not open as an animation in PS.

Good luck with it, once you have done one you'll think why did I think it was so hard. But try it a few times (change how many colors you use, and how many frames) to try and bring the file size down.

This is basically how you do simple animation in Flash too.
 
Hi David,

Just to give you an idea of how much smaller Flash is, and why most people use it for animation, here is your small movie as a Flash file.

Remember your small gif was 155.79k and took 25 seconds to load.

The Flash file is 14.73k and takes 1.9 seconds to load.

Stuart
 
wow Thanks a Bunch! This really helps. I messed around and made an animated Gif the Other day! I really appreciate it! Doing a flash file would be faster but i'll do that after i get the hand of .gifs. Thanks Again!
 
dwill0611 said:
wow Thanks a Bunch! This really helps. I messed around and made an animated Gif the Other day! I really appreciate it! Doing a flash file would be faster but i'll do that after i get the hand of .gifs. Thanks Again!
Click to expand...

You're welcome

Please use the Flash file if you like. :)
 
the only problem with the flash i have, is that I can't put it into Iweb.

Any thoughts?
 
Ah I see.

I made and posted a .gif intro based on the one you sent me earlier. Only i made myself do the whole thing by myself. haha

I love the 7/100 of a second and 10 frames idea. I had tried like the 1/10 a little and 9 frames. but none ever worked.
this does.

thanks alot
check it out again.. rlcvidor.com
 
dwill0611 said:
Ah I see.

I made and posted a .gif intro based on the one you sent me earlier. Only i made myself do the whole thing by myself. haha

I love the 7/100 of a second and 10 frames idea. I had tried like the 1/10 a little and 9 frames. but none ever worked.
this does.

thanks alot
check it out again.. rlcvidor.com
Click to expand...

David, that's great work. It didn't take you long to learn gif animation after all.
Well Done!
 
thanks!
I have one more problem.
I'm also trying to design a website for me as well. And i am making an introduction "video" using the animation GIF. Now, I am trying to do a lightening bolt thing, and it goes too slow. In the preview it flashes down really fast... But in the actual Web Browser its slow and looks laggy. all the settings within the animation are right, and Its not a big file, I scaled it down.

Any thoughts on how to make it faster within the browser?
 
dwill0611 said:
thanks!
I have one more problem.
I'm also trying to design a website for me as well. And i am making an introduction "video" using the animation GIF. Now, I am trying to do a lightening bolt thing, and it goes too slow. In the preview it flashes down really fast... But in the actual Web Browser its slow and looks laggy. all the settings within the animation are right, and Its not a big file, I scaled it down.

Any thoughts on how to make it faster within the browser?
Click to expand...

With a gif each frame will play when downloaded, one picture/frame by one picture/frame. So if the first frame takes one second to show and the next frame also takes a second to download then that is when it will show, one second later and so on. If your animation is set to show frames sooner they will not do so until all the frames are loaded and it is on its second run through (if it is set to repeat). On you computer the whole gif is loaded and it will play at the right speed from the get go.
This is most likely the cause, there are two ways to try to avoid this, although this is one of the reasons Flash took over for animation.
1. Reduce the file size so that each frame will download more quickly. Do this by reducing the number of colors used, making the movie smaller in dimensions.
2. Try to do what we do in Flash and 'pre-load' the movie, have a long delay on the first frame so that the following frames have time to download before they are asked to play.

To help reduce the file size you could also try removing frames from the animation, film has 25 frames per second that fools our eyes into seeing fluid movement. But this is way to big for the net and especially gif. Flash with modern computers and broadband uses around 18 frames per second but we used to use around 12 frames per second and still do if we can as this speeds up the download. I would say that if you can get 12 or 14 frames per second in a gif you are doing well but you should be able to reduce that a little. What will happen is that the animation will become jerky, not fluid. Also try not to make the movie too long. Gif animation has it's limits and they are quite low.
 
This gif only has 5 frames, the first will show for half a second to help give time for the second frame to load. The second, third and fourth frames have a blur on the lightening bolt to help fool the viewers eye to smooth out the motion even though they are set at 10 frames a second and the bolt moves a long way between frames. The last frame contains a 'sharp' bolt image. The colors have been reduced to 128 colors which still works okay with the gradient colors. You could go to fewer colors if the colors were solid.

lightening.gif
 
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