Last week at Adobe MAX during my session, I announced the soft launch of videoRx.com, my own personal project for the last year. It’s an online video encoding and (in the future) deployment solution—I’m teaming up with Influxis to enable near-seamless deployment of high quality multi bitrate video streams. Essentially, the site allows you to upload large high quality video source files (via an AIR app), and create targeted video output for a web or desktop project. I wrote a custom app (in C++) that runs on the server to analyze the video for complexity in order to build smart presets for video output. Right now, FLV and H.264 video output is supported, but I’ll eventually add support for WMV. I use more than one commercial encoder on the back end, and I’m using WebORB for PHP for most client-server interaction. The UI needs a lot of work, and you can probably tell right away that’s all Flex 3.x SDK. Anyone can sign up to use the service, and since it’s still in testing, anyone who signs up for an account automatically gets credits to download encoded video, complete with a SWFObject-enabled Flash SWF for playback.

I’d love any feedback on video quality that’s created by the system, so go ahead and sign up for an account at http://www.videoRx.com!

P.S. You can see parts of videoRx.com in action during my Adobe MAX 2009 session, “HD Experiences on the Web”.

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If you missed my session at Flashbelt or want to watch it online, check out the Acrobat Connect recording here:

http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p60867419/

Many thanks to Dave Schroeder for the sixth Flashbelt! I’m honored to be part of the tradition.

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This year at the Flashbelt conference, I’m doing a brand new workshop specifically geared to the economic climate that is currently surrounding the multimedia and online industry. Here it is:

Save Yourself Now: What Your Boss Won’t Tell You

In this full-day workshop, Robert Reinhardt teaches you how to build up your self-defense skills as an independent contractor for multimedia/web design and development. If you’re considering venturing out on your own or don’t expect your current employer to watch your back much longer, this workshop is for you. Learn the do’s and don’ts of running your own consulting business without breaking the bank or jeopardizing your future options. This workshop is geared to experienced web design or development professionals who are confident in their skills and yearn to expand their current prospects.

By luck or circumstance, Robert has preserved his career autonomy over twelve years of varied job roles and responsibilities, including teaching, writing and consulting. Robert’s experience with both small and large projects has helped him develop strategies that reduce frustration and anxiety—for clients and production teams.

In addition to his freelance work and evolving his own company, Robert has experience working in-house for companies of various sizes. In one five-year stint, he built a team of just two Flash developers in a small start-up to a full-blown department for a multinational agency. Pulling from personal experience and specific case studies of real world projects, here’s a brief overview of topics Robert covers in the workshop:

• Picking a legal entity for your business, from sole proprietorship to S-corp
• Determining hourly rates or project rates, and when to call in for backup
• Managing your projects on the fly, including open source tools for version control, report tracking, and time tracking
• Setting up production for Flash CS4, Flex Builder, and FDT
• Tapping third party Flash resources, from open source libraries to licensed components
• Improving your own brand through writing skills, from maximizing your tweets to writing published works
• Leveraging the potential of social networking to further your business and career goals.

If you think this is the workshop for you, register and sign up for the “Freelancing Workshop” (not my preferred choice of words) at the Flashbelt site. If you’d be interested in attending an online version of this workshop, post a comment.

Tonight, I’ll be giving a 15 minute sneak peek at some of the material I’ll be covering at the Flashbelt workshop.

Watch the recorded event here:

http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p33706601/

I presented this session to the FlashMN user group in Minneapolis. Hope to see you there!

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Definitely was not the worst of times in Amsterdam last week, where I presented my Personal Brand Building session to an audience nestled in a room at the Ariana Room of the Dylan Hotel, with sweet fireplaces and funky wall textures. My flight left Portland (PDX) at 4:00pm Saturday afternoon, and I landed in Amsterdam about 9 or 10 hours later–10:00am Amsterdam time, Sunday morning. I ran into Sam Agesilas at the train ticket kiosk located in the airport, and we took the train into Central Station. Ok, I actually don’t have a ton of time this morning to do a run through of the entire trip, but it was short and sweet. I spent most of my free time with Richard Blakely and Jerry Chabolla from Influxis, along with their newest recruit, Sean McCracken. I did have to work on chapters for my Video for Flash CS4 book (Adobe Press) as well as pressing client work for a substantial portion of my non-conference time.

I delivered my Personal Brand Building session on Tuesday at 12:30pm, and managed to do a pretty decent recording via Acrobat Connect:

http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/p57973590/

I’ve also posted a PDF version of my slides here:

http://www.flashsupport.com/2009/fitc/FITC_Amsterdam_Personal_Branding.pdf

Note that I have modified one of the last slides that used the acronym “swear”–many thanks to Erik de Vreede for recommending a change to “sweat” where the “r” (for RSS) is changed to a “t” for teach. Definitely makes more sense given the rest of my presentation.

Many thanks to the sponsors of the two parties–Influxis and Media Temple–for an awesome time. Of course, a huge thank you to Shawn Pucknell at FITC for inviting me and organizing such a fun event.

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While I’ve helped other people create HTML-based emails, I haven’t had to do it for myself. After a lot of tests on various email clients, I finally released my first newsletter to about 6500 e-mail addresses, collected from my registration database at FlashSupport.com, old mailing lists I use to run, and LinkedIn.com. You can view the mailing online. I used poMMo to manage the announcement mailing list. So far, it’s been a great tool with excellent administration features, including subscription management.

Fill out the subscription form if you’d like to receive future announcements.

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You can view my session, Encoding Video for the Highest Quality and Performance, on the Adobe Groups web site at:

http://groups.adobe.com/posts/d3a78258e3

In this presentation, I talk about the importance of various video and audio encoding settings found across video encoders, especially for AVC/H.264 video.

You need to login to Adobe Groups with your Adobe ID to view the video. You can also directly open the Brightcove video player with the following URL, but the video scales to the size of your browser window:

< View video in new browser window >

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I’ve finally posted some dates for online seminars to be presented via Adobe Acrobat Connect. My first two seminars will be about Video for Flash. For details, visit the workshop page at:

http://www.theMakers.com/services/workshops/

Hope to see a lot of new faces online!

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On the weekend of September 13 and 14, I’m scheduled to teach my (favourite) two day workshop on Flash Video! Details can be found on the Rich Media Institute site at:

http://www.richmediainstitute.com/flash_video

Hope to see you there!

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Dave Schroeder at Flashbelt just added a new Flash Video workshop that I’ll be teaching in June. For more details, check out my speaker and session details at: 

http://www.flashbelt.com/#/speakers/

Post a comment if you plan on attending!

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The FITC organizers sent me the attendee feedback for my sessions at FITC Hollywood this past October. Here’s the breakdown:

New Features of Flash - Full Day Workshop

Attendee ratings:

• Was the speaker knowledgeable on the topic presented? = 10.00
• Did the session meet your expectations? = 9.80
• Did the speaker present the material in a clear and well-organized way? = 9.80
• Please rate the overall effectiveness of the speaker. = 9.80
• This session will affect the way I work: = 9.20
• Over all average = 9.72

Attendee comments:

• Great presentation!
• Very enthusiastic and very informative

Deploying Video - FLVPlayback Component  (1 hour session)

Attendee ratings:

• Was the speaker knowledgeable on the topic presented? = 9.83
• Did the session meet your expectations? = 9.61
• Did the speaker present the material in a clear and well-organized way? = 9.67
• Please rate the overall effectiveness of the speaker. = 9.56
• This session will affect the way I work: = 9.00
• Over all average = 9.53

Attendee comments:

• This guy needs a bigger stage.
• sharp fast knowledgeable A+
• I thought this was going to be more hands on…but it was cool
• I got free sh*t. 
• Robert is the greatest
• thanks for putting those tools online 

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