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

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!

I finally figured out what was wrong with the settings on dataride.com that caused iknowbetter.com to fail! So, I fixed the bad setting (BAD SETTINGS! BAD!) and now it’s live again!! Check out my latest video post:

http://www.iknowbetter.com/showpost.cfm?postID=174

Hopefully, I’ll have some time before summer is over to get a much more simplified UI in place.

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!

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:

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

I contributed a new post to the Influxis.com blog today:

http://labs.influxis.com/?p=30

Check out my 16x table displaying optimal sizes for Flash Video dimensions. Enjoy!

I was asked by Sorenson to provide my quick tips for Sorenson Squeeze 4.5 for their November newsletter, and I just found the newsletter in my inbox! You can view the newsletter online to forward to a friend. Two out of five tips were included in this month’s newsletter, with the remaining three to be posted in the December newsletter:

1. DO determine a proper bitrate (or data rate) for your Flash Video content. Squeeze includes several presets for Flash Video to get your started. If you need a wide range of data rates for your deployment, encode several FLV files by applying multiple presets to the same source file.
2. DON’T be tempted to change the image quality setting in your compression preset(s), especially if you will be deploying your Flash Video with a streaming service provider such as Akamai, Limelight, or a Flash Media Server hosting company like Influxis.com. The image quality setting will override the bitrate value you’ve specified for the preset, or alter the frame rate if you elect to drop frames to maintain image quality. Neither of these outcomes is desirable.

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.