Website samples in flash?
 

Hi guys,

I am new to website design and videography. There have been a few sample clips posted on this forum, and the quality was absolutely amazing (resolution vs size etc). I'm not sure, but I think it was done using flash? Can this be done? I would like to create samples for my website, but thus far all I can get is choppy, low res stuff for the size I need using mpeg, wmv or avi. I would love to be able to get the quality I have seen on the website (unfortunately I cannot remember who posted what, as I emailed them to ask how they did it, but got no response).

Any help would be appreciated.

Jason

people often think about flash video as if it was something particular, but flash video does not exist.
flash is a technology that allow to play content easily, provided you have dowloaded the flash player.
In this regard, flash is not different than media player from Microsoft or quicktime player from Apple or real player from Real Technology or DivX player etc.....
So the first step, if you want good video on web page is to trade between size, quality, download time, features etc....
By these times, some codec (the core of your video) are giving excellent quality. Mpeg4 is almost everywhere in its new H264 version, that you can find in various flavour in windows media, quicktime or flash video.
Then you need to choose among features of the player (the way it can be embedded in pages, on which platform it is available, the way it can be served , the way you can control it, etc...).
microsoft media gives almost the best quality, but can be difficult to play on linux and mac (same for quicktime, since it is not installed on all windows machine by default). Real player is really out of the market now.
DivX is great but, again , the player and codec must be manually installed.
Flash is a good player, compatible with almost all platform (but you can still produce and play crappy video in flash format) and can easily customized.
So the flash itself has no real link with the content you play with. video for flash come in SWF format, but usually they are converted to FLV format. The FLV format is just a video with the player embedded.
the company On2 is producing a codec called VP6 that support transparent video in flash player. this is a very important feature, missing in almost all other players. But today most flash video are made of standard mpeg4.
Today, most home connection can support medium bandwith supporting excellent video quality. the problem is that servers usually can not cope with high bandwith video if thousand of requests occurs at same time.
Most of hosting servers are not video servers, and are busy to serve web pages, ftp, mail.
The best guess is to design the web page with the video you need as good as you can , then test it on your server. if it cause problem, decrease bandwith of video and try again.