This Yellowknife municipal election website I have been working on for the past couple of weeks required shooting/processing and uploading 19, 5-minute videos. Since Flash video is installed in all modern browsers and accessible to the largest audience (99 per cent), it is the way to go for online video.
Making the videos is easy in the Flash interface because you are guided through the process. Go to the menu: File>Import>Import Video. The first question is: where is your flv file located. If you want to test video locally, you can browse to the video on your desktop. But if you do this, you will need to go into the Component Inspector later before you publish your Flash movie, and change the file path to where the flv is on the server once you have uploaded your flv video.
Component inspector - change the file path to server here if you used local file.
So the best way is to avoid using local files and instead have your flv file already uploaded so you can point to the path.
Best to have FLV file online and select its path on import so you don't have to readjust later in Component Inspector.
You can still test locally by pressing Cmd, Return (Control>Test Movie), but once you publish you won’t be able to test the swf/html files created until they are uploaded.
This is the only tricky step. The rest is just picking options for your Flash skin: colour, under or over video, which controls do you want. Then test and publish (checking Publish Settings to make sure the file size will be OK for your audience.
Once you hit “Publish,” three files will be created: swf, skin swf, and the html code you will need to add to your page to run the Flash. Integrate the html into your page, and upload all three file (because the flv should already be up!)
With the massive increase in online video, I wasn’t surprised to see a story on mediapost.com saying it is the fastest growing medium in the world.
The story cited a new report from social media research consultancy Trendstream and research firm Lightspeed, giving stats such as:
In one week in January, 97 million Americans viewed a streaming clip online – as many as are tuning into any major broadcast network
With 72 per cent of U.S. web users watching clips online, web video outstrips both blogging and social networking, and is now the leading “social-media platform”
With 49 million active Web users – 32 per cent – uploading content in January 2009, users of all ages now generate far more content than traditional broadcasters and collectively contribute the majority of video content to the web
Meanwhile the world’s most popular video-sharing site, YouTube had a 1,700 per cent jump in mobile video uploads over the past six months.
YouTube has shown phenomenal growth over the past few years. In mid-2007, six hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Now, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. In fact, as I write this blog “uploaded youtube” is a trending topic on Twitter.
In my hometown of Yellowknife I have seen the growth of online video. Here are a few businesses that prominently feature online video. Let me know what I am missing:
CBC North – runs its full Northbeat news show as well as numerous shorter news videos
Kellett Communications – offers full gamut of filmmaking and effects, strives to make communication interactive, weave it in and out of all media, especially online content
I had to check out Netvibes after reading a story about Kris Krug on Techvibes. Netvibes is a “multi-lingual Ajax-based personalized start page or personal web portal.”
Once I discovered the fun feeds on Kris’s page I figured I needed a page of my own. Since I use several social media channels, why not pull them all together. So I added my blog RSS, Flickr photo stream, YouTube videos and Twitter stream. As well, I created another page to capture similar feeds but using keyword “Yellowknife.”
http://www.netvibes.com/liz-hargreaves
This tool is a great asset to aggregate social media and other feeds. The Twitter widget was (and still is!) hanging, so I clicked “Add a feed” instead and pasted in the feed URLs, that works fine.
I also created a tab to stream some of Yellowknife’s social media scene, which is interesting. I like the hourly weather tweets, you get to see the trends better than just static temperature check.
I love Netvibes because it makes it so easy to pull in multiple feeds and present them in attractive ways. Which feeds should I add next?
Merv Hardie ferry opening, May 2003. Plenty of 'bergs still in the Mackenzie River.
I am just writing a quick post to let you know it may be a couple of weeks until I blog again as we are in the midst of moving to Yellowknife, NT. The journey is more than 2,000 km so we are packing light, whatever we can fit in the car or send through Canada Post.
In the meantime, I will tweet our progress from my twitter account as we head north.
Not sure of our exact arrival date as we are waiting for enough ice to melt on the Mackenzie River for the ferry to resume operations. Strangely, this was the same situation the first time we moved to Yellowknife (view as pictured above). I was advised not to wear a seatbelt on the ferry as it slowed down escape – yikes! There was a lookout guy on a hill with a radio to warn the ferry operator about impending icebergs. That’s why ferry service can be erratic first few days open, until the river clears of ice.
So my next blog will be from Yellowknife, probably with an accompanying bison photo
