This week I have been working on improving the 'Moving Image' section of photoneil.com. When I first built the site (designed and built by 76 Creative) the Moving Image page featured Neil's video showreel, since then video has become a more prominent aspect of his work so I have created a video gallery page for the site, allowing him to showcase a range of his video work under different categories.

As this video gallery uses seperate pages for the video list and the player itself I programmed it in PHP using the Longtail / JW Player to play the flv videos. For more information about encoding video for Flash as flv see my article: Encoding FLV

The video gallery also offers the option to download higher quality Quicktime Movies of each video. I encoded the quicktimes using the mpeg-4 codec and reducing the frame size slightly to allow for higher picture and sound quality while keeping the filesizes reasonable for a download.

Check it out: www.photoneil.com/movingimage.php

The Freaks on Snow are Eurpope's N° 1 Ski and Snowboard Showteam. This video was taken on a Canon digital Camera in Zell Am See in Austria. Check out their cunning stunts!

This website for media production company Toba Film is a Flash microsite with html as a backup for users without the flash plugin and for search engines. It features a scrolling thumnail bar from which you can select a video to watch, each thumbnail is a slideshow featuring images from the video. The videos are encoded as flv (Flash Video). The video playlist is fully dynamic so that new videos can be added easily.

Check it out: www.tobafilm.com

This is the first part in a series of articles I will be writing on encoding Flash Video (flv files) using the Adobe CS3 Video Encoder. I intend to cover all aspects of flv encoding to help you to attain the best results possible. If you are using another software to encode your flv files, such as Adobe After Effects or Final Cut Pro, many of the principles will be the same.

Read on…

This site, built for photographer Neil Stewart, is the first site 76 Creative have launched this year. Built with PHP, it features categorized thumbnail galleries, the usual biog, links and contact information, and also a moving image section with an embedded Flash Video (flv). All of the navigation for the site is done using images to create the hand written look that we were going for, it uses a javascript to give the mouseover effect for the images. For me, this is one of the best designed sites I have worked on so far, as it has a distinctive style, yet it's simple and functional.

Check it out: www.photoneil.com