Advice on size and quality of video/animation

[kev]

Hi all, A client has asked me to include a short video of a person walking on the screen and doing several interactions, like picking up the logo, kicking a ball etc. I am planning on shooting the video of a person against a white wall, so to eleminate as much background as possible, as the background of the website will be white also.

What i am after is any advice, tips and best settings to get good quality video with a sensible Kb size.

Here's what i have so far from other threads, capture the video and save it as a quicktime file, then import the quicktime file into flash, then have each seperate video as an MC an I can add the ineratcions within these.

Is this all there is to it?

Now apart from compression, is there any other way to cut the size down, monochrome or b/w maybe?

Any advice from anyone who has done this before would be a great help.

Flash 5 btw

Thanks

kev

[.soulty]

i dont think flash 5 can import or compress video into flash. :-\

[prstudio]

I'm going to end up having the same question as him in about a week. I'm going to forum search though in the meantime lol.

[kev]

The way I am doing it at the moment is to get my video as an .avi (short clips only) then using Bink/Smacker software to convert each frame into a jpeg, I then open up the jpeg's into Photoshop and put them all in a layered document. Then i can edit each image i.e take the background out add effect etc (time consuming, but worth the result). Then resave each layer as a jpeg.

Then finally import the the series of jpeg's into flash and when played you have your video!

So I guess my question really is how to reduce the size of each image without compromisng to much quality!

Thanks

[themachine37]

just get flix, it will work much better

[kev]

Hi themachine37, i have Flix already, but I don't think much of the quality and file size!

I was just wondering if anyone had experimented with this before, to get some pro's or cons :)

Cheers, keep em coming

Cheers

[DDD]

dude try to get your hands on After Effects. And what you will want to do is called chroma-keying or keying. You can remove your talent from the bgrd. I am experimenting with this now for a client. Take it from me. The way you are about to try to do it will be time consuming and will not produce good results. Since you will have "jumps" in your frames from where you thought something was exact and it is not. And you do not want to use a white bgrd especially if you will be removing colors. Your talent may have white on or white teeth and yu may accidently remove those. Try a very ugly green bgrd. That is why Hollywood uses green for this type of stuff to. But that is just my opinion I have tried your way to no avail AE is the way to go.

[.soulty]

you took the words out of my mouth 3d-iva, lol :P.

After effects is a major time saver, and you can add a bit of effects on the vids as well.

:: You can use a Blue screen or a green screen (blue or green background), and key those out in after effects as 3d-iva mentioned.

[DDD]

oh yeah and lighting is going to be the other key factor. And I used a high quality JVC DV camera. ANd I am having troubles with the way DV handles colors and video. Not sure why though. Just giving you a heads up on the troubles I am having.

[kev]

Thanks for the advice guyz, Yeah After Effects has been mentioned before! So what is the difference between Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premier? Can you edit and create with both?

AS with with my way :) it is really long, but it's only 60 frames and the animation will be on a white website, so it blends in ok, but I understand totaly about the green background also blue they use also I think. My server is down at the moment so i can't upload anything, when I do I'll post the results!

There is a web design company (Forget the address now) which uses a siloute of a man for each transition, he jumps up and down. pushes MC across the screnn etc, works really well! Can you create a siloute in After Effects?

Cheers again

[.soulty]

Difference with after effects and premier. well with each new version they both get pretty similar, but generally after effects is a post effects application , which means you can compose videos and place effects on imported vids. Its more a effect application while premier is more used to put together video from dv cameras and imported footage. Premier has more options in importing video from external hardware (digital DV's cams).

You can apply transitions and effects in premier as well. But after effects allows you more "artistic license" to create and achieve more animation effects.

[.soulty]

You can have a siloutte effect created in aftereffects and im pretty sure you can do it in the newer versions of premier.

[kev]

Ah I see, I'll have to approach my client and see what he wants as each package is around £650! Which will price the job up a bit! Can't wait to try it though, I think I'll see if there is a trial version at Adobe!

Cheers and take care

[DDD]

I believe there is. http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/main.html

good luck

[kev]

First test!
Go here http://www.realitydesigns.co.uk/vectortest/kick.html

The html will apear blank for a little while until it has loaded, to lazy to add a loader

This was 168k in size and consists of 70 frames of vector in flash.

I used flix to convert it to vector and imported it as an importable .swf.

Then just deleted unwanted bits directly from flash.

This is still not as good as I would like, but it's a start! I'll keeo you all posted on beeter tests!

let me know what you think!


also - here is the site mt client saw - http://www.triplandesign.com

This work's really well and does not seem to take ages to load either!

Cheers

[DDD]

you are using the right tool then If you just wanted that vector look. I think I miss understood you....Good job

[kev]

Thanks, well you did not mis-understand me, because at first I never thought it was vector :)

I keep going and try and get it looking more smooth :)