Medellin Travel Story Slideshow/Vid (+poll)
23 Jul 2008 at 02:54 pm | Tagged as: personal, travel
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Update Aug. 3, 2008:I discovered, which many of you may have known, that the Flash 9 plugin, which has a 95% penetration worldwide, can actually playback any video file encoded in H.264. That means it can playback any H.264 encoded .MOV, M4V, MP4, or FLV through the Flash video player!
In a nutshell, you dont need to waste time outputting your video file to flv anymore. You can upload any of these formats, point your flash video player plugin to it, and it will play it back. High quality, quick turn around. Problem solved!
If you liked the SoundSlides version, it can be found here
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p.s. apologies to the band. I love your music. Please don’t sue me….
Sky,
Quick observations, image quality on SoundSlides really wins over QT, sound quality on QT beats SS. Overall I probably preferred the SS file over the QT photo because of the quality, image crispness, and lack of some of the Ken Burns; however, that’s not to say that I would use SS over QT. QT exports give you the ability to edit in Final Cut a lot quicker with more options (though I would cut down on the Ken Burns). So what I would try to do is find QT export settings that work better. So best of luck on that. By the way were you in Medellin during the Carlos Gardel festival?
Take it easy,
RG
I’ve never liked SS. Maybe its because I know Flash and can build a one-of faster than I can get SS to do what I want. We are having this same debate at my newspaper now. I want to scrap SS and do everything in flv format—mostly because of content management issues. Having to only deal with videos and slideshows is easier than writing code to embed .swf files. We have CMS for video and stills, but swf require one of us to design a page for every slideshow.
To Ryan’s point about image quality: it is possible to make photos in FCP look every bit as good as those in SS, it just takes a bit of tweaking and maybe that reinforces Ryan’s point even more.
I like Ken Burns. I know it’s trendy to hate on the KB effect right now, but the only people who don’t seem to like moving images is still image photographers. The effect needs to be used purposefully, and I think you have. Ryan makes a valid point though: it is easy to overdo it.
When you are doing many of these pieces—more than one a week—FCP and QT make production easier because of a basic audio editor being right there. SS requires a separate audio editor and makes things more complicated, I think because of the need to switch back and forth to get it sorted out right.
If you are a freelancer, or a photog who does one or two of these a month, then SS is the way to go. When you are producing three a week and dealing with content management, then FCP seems to be a better fit. When resumes come across the desk here, I check to make sure that the person who wants to do multimedia for us didn’t build their website with SS (it shows a serious deficit in knowledge I think). Fine for a photog, weak for a multimedia producer.
My two cents,
Wm
Hey guys, great comments and feedback! I am leaning towards doing everything in FCP for doing a lot of these, now it’s just a matter of a higher output setting and deciding on the best way to deliver it online with the least headaches (whether to have it stream off ultrafast servers from Vimeo with weaker quality, or host it myself at high quality, but with less bandwidth).
What is your preferred format for streaming? A straight .mov or .m4v file, or a self contained flv movie? I see people doing both…
Sky,
I don’t know if you recently posted the 3rd option of the flv output from the FCP file (or if I just overlooked it the first time) but that is the winner in my books…and the load time wasn’t bad at all on my cable connection. It has the right mix of quality and ease / power of editability in FCP. I would love to say go with flv all the way in-terms of streaming output but it can be picky but so can a mov or m4v (fluttering images etc…). For now though l like the output of your third option. And I really like how you conformed to keeping a 16:9 crop on that project, I will argue with anyone that in a multimedia situation a consistent crop is better than a custom crop for each image. Sorry I can’t give you a definitive answer, but it really is a matter of testing the different options. You got me hooked on the band by the way…
Ryan
Ryan
Sky, Without a doubt SS was the best option for me. I was able to skip through quickly if I wanted to, none of the others offered the option to view the images at MY OWN pace. Also, sounded great and image quality was very high. The quicktime movie had crap quality photos, immediate no for me. Don’t let your photos look like crap, simple logic. I waited for about a minute for the FLV to load and nothing happened, too slow and inconsistent unless you know your server is very powerful. I’m on a quick connection here in NY and did not load well at all, also no way to look at the images one by one at my own pace, if I want to skip ahead there’s no way to go image by image.
dustin
Dear Sky
I great job in Medellin, dude… nice pics and good song.
Best for you
AFr
Don’t have much to say about output formats, but the Bacilos? Oi. They broke up last year and they are Americans i think. Let’s get some Carlos Vives or Juanes at least for the sabor colombiano. Seriously though, some really nice images. That one couple really liked to make out eh? Thought I saw them in at least three photos. Who were you shooting this for? Was the slideshow your thing, or did you sell them that too? Hope all is well and glad to see you are getting around.
Steve
Buenas fotos Sky!
Felicitaciones!
La verdad es que cada día me sorprende más la magía que envuelve a este HERMOSO país que es Colombia, y en estas tomas no cabe duda de que hay mucho encanto y excelentes escenarios mezclados con la calidad y tú profesionalismo de corazón mis felicidades!!!