At a recent Adobe MAX conference, I was quietly sitting in a comfy chair absorbing the information overload, when an attendee from my session earlier that day plunked herself down beside me and shared her own Flash video story. Her clients, seeing all of those gorgeous sites out there that use Flash video, wanted to jump on the bandwagon, too. They said what I have heard all too often: “I have the stuff on DVD.”
This meant she’d need to obtain the source files from the studio or shop that created the videos, convert the videos to the FLV format used by Flash, and post them to the client’s site. Inevitably, a couple of days later, the client phones, complaining that:

* The videos have been resized down to 320 by 240 from their original size of 848 by 480.
* The video they gave you was sharp and the one they are looking at is fuzzy.
* The full screen version of the video looks horrible and pixelated.

Having experienced this, she was wondering if it was worth all the aggravation, and said, “What am I doing wrong?”

My answer was, “Nothing.” Those issues won’t go away, because moving from High Definition (HD) to FLV means a loss of quality. It is similar to moving a Photoshop high-resolution TIFF image to the JPG format—the loss in quality can’t be avoided.

This is a conversation that I have all too frequently, as web developers cope with an increasing demand from their clients to incorporate video into their sites.

Wouldn’t it be great if that conversation was a thing of the past? Don’t you wish you could take source video and simply heave it onto a website and have it play at full size, at full sharpness, and not have to worry about bandwidth, resolution, and file size? The news is that your wish may have been granted.

Adobe released a beta of the Flash Player this past August and, in the process, may have kicked off yet another web video revolution by making the whole process of putting high definition video on the web incredibly easy. How? By allowing us to use .mov files—which anyone on a Mac or Windows can create using Quicktime Pro, or anyone with an HD camera and video editing software can make with ease.

It’s all still in beta, and, yes, you should still learn how to put video on the web effectively using Flash, Flix, or Sorenson Squeeze, but right down the road are some incredible changes that will make the process of putting video on the web not only easier, but result in much higher quality than we could have expected even six months ago.

Labels: adobe flash, flash 9, flash player 9