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Adobe Media Encoder is an underrated power-tool in the Adobe CS4 Suite that generates highly compressed, fast-downloading high quality, web-ready video in FLV and other web compatible formats. Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 includes little-appreciated features for embedding FLV videos in web pages and generating a variety of Flash Player skins with player controls. This course covers the entire process of converting a QuickTime or Windows Media video to a web-read Flash Video (FLV) file using Adobe Media Encoder, and then embedding that video in a Flash Player skin in Dreamweaver CS4. In addition, the course covers extracting audio tracks and high quality still photos from video, and provides a basic introduction to selecting video and audio compression for the web. Finally, the course covers providing iPod and iPhone friendly video.
Welcome to VTC's MasterClass! Adobe Media Encoder and Embedding Flash Video, that's FLV files, in Dreamweaver CS4. I'm your instructor, David Karlins. I'm the author of many books on Web Design, Dreamweaver, Flash Video and Digital Design. I'll tell you more about myself at the end of this class. There are three basic objectives for this course. First you will learn to produce video for the Web with Adobe Media encoder CS4. Second, you'll learn to use Adobe Media Encoder's editing tools to crop videos, to resize videos and to trim the starting and ending points for videos to shorten them. Finally, you'll learn to embed Flash video files in Dreamweaver CS4 and I'll show you how to generate Flash Player Skins. We'll take some detours along the way, learn some additional things, but these are the three basic objectives. We'll spend the bulk of our time in this course in Adobe Media Encoder CS4. There I will show you how to import media files from multiple formats. If you have a QuickTime video, a Windows Media video, or an audio file, I'll show you how to import them into CS4 and export them in different formats. I'll show you how to produce high-quality stills from your video. I'll show you how to extract audio tracks and mainly I'll show you how to export other video formats, in particular I'll show you how to compress your video from QuickTime or Windows Media to the FLV format. As I mentioned, Adobe Media Encoder has some minimal but effective editing tools. If you have a long video and you want to shorten it for the web, you can do that right in Media Encoder by trimming the beginning or the end of the video. You can also resize a video for the web, something you frequently will want to do; take a larger video, appropriate for a CD or a DVD and make it smaller for the web and you can do that either by cropping or by resizing. At the heart of this course I'll show you how to compress video for the web by exporting video to the FLV format. The FLV format's very popular. It's used on YouTube, it's used very widely on the web because it produces videos that download quickly, are small in file size and don't take up a lot of time so that people can see them and maintain high quality. Adobe Media Encoder also has a set of tools for separately compressing the audio track for your video. By compressing an audio track for the web you can also reduce the file size and download time for your video. It's a matter of balancing quality versus size. Higher quality audio tracks take longer to download but are more pleasant to listen to. In Dreamweaver CS4 I'll show you how to embed Flash video and generate Flash Player Skins like the one on the right. I'll also show you how to provide other popular online video formats. One particular challenge that we will discuss and solve in this course is that iPods and iPhones don't support Flash video, so for those environments in particular I'll show you how to embed QuickTime Movies and how to provide access to the popular H.264 format used in iPhones and iPods. I'll also show you how to upload your video to an ftp server both in Media Encoder and in Dreamweaver, so there are two alternatives for how to upload your video and I'll show you both of those. Here's what you'll need for this class. You do need to have Adobe Media Encoder CS4. That's included with Flash CS4 and most versions of the Adobe Creative Suite. You'll also need Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 and any video file. Now if you don't have a video file, no problem. I will show you how to get one in the course of this class. What skills do you need for this course? You do need to be comfortable with your Operating System. You need to be able to open files, rename files, access files. That's about it. If you have some exposure to Dreamweaver that will be a plus but it's not necessary. Any questions? Contact me: davidkarlins at gmail.com, or visit me at buildyourownwebsite.us, one of the many websites I maintain with resources for web developers like yourself.