27th
July 2010
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Bringing your vision to life through a video can be satisfying, but once you have created what you set out to how are you going to go about sharing it on the internet? Have you efficiently encoded your video for online delivery? Expectations tend to shift from the quality of video expected from broadcast to what is acceptable to the online viewer.
Think of the process of making video solely for the web in two steps: acquisition and delivery. Acquisition is how the video is routed to the capturing system, edited and encoded into Internet friendly formats. While delivery is just that, the method in which you are distributing the content to your viewers. In this case your distribution is already taken into consideration with your use of the basekit system. First let’s tackle the acquisition of your video. It’s usually a good idea to shoot in a digital format since they are easier to transfer and share across the board. There are also methods of transferring old analog tapes (VHS) to a digital format through the use of video cards that can take a VCR’s video and audio as input, or a video tuner card that can tune to the TV channel that the VCR broadcasts on. Another nice alternative is a VCR or camcorder that can output on a firewire connection, and then capture to a firewire card in your PC or Mac. But for now I think we might want to concentrate on get the digital formats ready for distribution.
Now the software in which you use is entirely up to you. I prefer using After Effects and a piece of software by AVC called Any Video Converter. They have both free and professional versions of the software which allow you to import your video and export it back out into a variety of formats. The most popular formats in which I have found are Quicktime, MPEG, and now MP4’s.
Although you need to keep in mind what formats your user will be viewing the video in, HD video becoming more widely accepted across the web, you no longer have to stress out how the video will function in the player or worry about resolutions becoming to indecipherable. Choosing an appropriate bit rate is still key. Minimally, choose one that is modem-friendly — 28K or 56K — or that gives a higher-quality experience like 128K. If resources are available, 300K is a popular next step and yields strong results. Formatting the video at lower bit rates like this is more of a usability issue, since not all of your users will have high speed connections.
With the advent of HTML 5 being able to code video directly into your HTML, it provides a formidable contestant against the Flash video players market on the web. Granted the flash players are still somewhat of the favorite for distribution. But I could see a major shift in video distribution in the future with more users turning to their mobile devices to render content. And this is coming from myself being a Flash Evangelist. However I feel as if this squabble between Apple and Adobe cannot last forever, and we might see a happy medium between the two.
There are two way you can handle your delivery:
Through a standard web server. (HTTP Protocol)
Through a streaming media server. ( RTSP or other proprietary protocol)
Now in most cases your average user will not be able to tell the difference. Both methods will start playing soon after the clip starts downloading, and both methods will continue playing without pausing, so long as adequate bandwidth is available.
Media must be prepared differently to support these two delivery method because streaming servers place additional requirements on the media format. Software tools for preparing video usually support both types of delivery; you choose which type when you encode.
The primary advantages of standard web server media delivery are:
All media players are supported
Video is delivered without degradation
Video may be downloaded and saved on the viewer’s hard drive
Special preparation for streaming server is not required
The primary advantages of streaming media delivery are:
Viewers can fast forward and fast rewind in the media clip
Media can be copy protected so that viewers can’t copy it
Media can be more efficiently delivered on lower bandwidth
Video is somewhat less likely to pause or delay while playing
The standard web server method is commonly preferred unless you are providing a lengthy clip to a larger audience then I would look into streaming it. Hopefully you will find exactly what method and format work for you and the media you are trying to share.
This post was written by Joshua Rapp of Rappsody Studios – designing with beauty and function. Want to write a guest post for BaseKit? Get in touch!
23rd
April 2010
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The Background Widget is probably one of the more complex widgets that you can use within BaseKit. However, once you’ve got the hang of it it is one cooler elements you can use in your design.
In the above video we take you through how to use the widget effectively.
Once you drag the widget into place, most people try to expand the widget. You don’t need to. As it is a background widget it automatically expands when you add other widgets on top of it.
You can go into the setting for the widget at the bottom of the page and set the colour and corner radius to match the rest of your design.
Or you can upload your own images as bitmaps as use them as backgrounds. If you set them to ‘Flex’ as you add content they expand to fit – Cool huh!
You can also use the widget to fill entire columns with colour by removing the padding on the settings.
As always, if you have any questions give support@basekit.com an email – we’re here to help!
16th
April 2010
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We’ve just started working on BaseKit Academy, a place beyond the blog where you will be able to learn how to design and build great websites using BaseKit. BaseKiteers all over the world have been telling us about what they want to do with BaseKit and what we can do to support them. BaseKit Academy will bring together all the different strands of knowledge needed to support web designers and developers whatever their aspirations.
BaseKit will always be easy to learn and fun to use but without a good grounding in professional web development it is hard to get the best results from any web development platform. Not every BaseKit user is a professional but we know all our users aspire to create great sites.
In the short term we will be offering webinars and videos on the Basics of BaseKit that will go deeper than our current videos and support material. In the longer term BaseKit Academy will offer accreditation to individuals or businesses who want to use BaseKit as a major part of their Business. We will also be doing our best to make certain the academy is multi-lingual so let us know if you would like to become a BaseKit evangelist in your local language.
Even if you’re not using BaseKit, the Academy will have plenty of great material about the basics of building and managing website professionally. So if you want to learn about SEO, writing great web copy or the secrets of a fast-loading page then the academy will be worth signing up for.
Photo from Flickr User Laffy4K
16th
April 2010
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Error messages. Nobody likes them. And they’re even worse when there is no obvious solution. One of the most common errors that BaseKit will throw at a user is -
‘Region layers in your design overlap vertically’
This essentially means that your Photoshop design has layers on top of each other which is confusing the import into BaseKit. In the above video we show you how to resolve this issue and give you some hints and tips on how to hunt down stray pixels that may be affecting your import. We also show you how a misnamed layer may be the cause of the problem.
Of course, if you still have issues importing your PSD, get in contact with support@basekit.com – and we’ll happy to give you a hand.
