The update to my original Adobe Press book on video and Flash is finally available in bookstores! The new edition has a different title too: Video with Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Studio Techniques. I’ve updated this book to cover the Flash CS4 IDE, as well as adding important updates that weren’t released when the last edition went to print:

• AVC/H.264 encoding tips, including coverage of CABAC, B-frames, and Main/High profiles
• Discussion of my new Web Video Bitrate Starter application, which helps you get started with the right video and audio bitrate for your preferred video dimensions, frame rate, video codec, and audio codec.
• Updates to chapters covering real-time streaming (via RTMP) and Flash Media Server (FMS) 3.5 dynamic streaming

I also created a video encoding tutorial covering Flash-compatible output for DesignProVideo.com. If you’d rather learn by watching step-by-step how to create high quality video, or you want to augment the coverage of my book with more hands-on examples, then you’ll like this video training. But don’t take my word on it–just read this review on the forums at DesignProVideo.

Gotta get back to a client job–it’s a pretty sweet AIR app. More details when the product has been launched this summer.

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.

Michael Hurwicz wrote a well-balanced review of my Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Video Studio Techniques book on CreativeCOW.net. Check it out!

http://chartjunk.karmanaut.com/taxplans/

Oops, I copied and pasted the wrong URL! That’s the difference between Obama and McCain’s tax plans. I meant this link:

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/hurwicz_michael/flash_cs3.php

My editor at Peachpit sent me the URL to a

If you purchased my new Flash Video book online as a PDF (or if you’ve lost or damaged your original DVD-ROM), you can download the > 7 GB of files from my Amazon.com S3 account. Because I have to pay for this hosting based on a per-GB fee, please e-mail me directly to get the URLs to the content. I will likely send you a “word challenge” where you have to tell me the [insert random number here] word on page [insert random book page here] to verify your ownership.

In the near future, I’ll have an online request form setup that randomly generates the word challenge and submits the data to me via email. (Check back!)

If you’re looking for some source video files to practice video encoding, you can check out the links to various clips from archive.org that I included in my new Flash Video book. I love browsing archive.org for documentaries created in the 1940s through 60s.

In my new Adobe Press book, Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Video Studio Techniques, I provide an Excel spreadsheet (.xls file) to help readers compute video and audio bitrates for Flash Video (FLV) files. I finally had enough spare time to build a Flash version (.swf file) that runs in Flash Player 9.0.45 or higher.

I’ve also built Windows and Mac projector versions of the FLV Bitrate Calculator. Enjoy!

UPDATE:

You can find an updated AIR application version of the bitrate calculator, featuring improved calculations for AVC/H.264, here:

http://www.flashsupport.com/resources

This week, Peachpit released my newest book, Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Video Studio Techniques! I’m incredibly proud of this new book, and part of its cost is due to the huge DVD-9 disc (8.5 gigs of content! lots of HD video samples to play with) included with the book. You can order the book on Amazon.com at the link below:

http://astore.amazon.com/onsite/detail/0321480376/

(Amazon.com might still list it as a pre-order, but the books started shipping to distributors on Monday.)

If you have any questions about the book, feel free to ask!

I’m near the end of writing a new book for Adobe Press, Flash Video Studio Techniques, part of the Studio Techniques series. Here’s one of the examples from Chapter 11, “Creating an Interactive Video Host”:

http://www.flashsupport.com/books/fvst/files/ch11/VideoWords_AS3.html

This example uses ActionScript 3.0 and embedded cue points. Some of the new Flash CS3 UI components are also integrated in the example. I’ll post more examples from the book soon.

It’s nice to know that after writing this book for nearly 8 years that it’s still in the top 20 list for multimedia web books at Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books /4181/ref=pd_ts_b_nav/002-2744138-3600000

Thank you to all of our readers who have encouraged us to keep writing the book. We enjoy it immensely.