Friday, November 7, 2008

Marketing Beyond Spam II

Transparent video overlays in Flash are getting to be pretty popular on websites, especially with on-site “avatars” that greet the viewer and hover over the content while they view. But the question is: how are they done? There are a number of methods using a variety of programs; the easiest way is what I call the “quick and dirty” version that uses Premiere to prep images for Flash before outputting to the web and using Wmode to overlay the video transparently.



For this lesson we’re going to cover the Premiere preparation alone. If you’re not familiar with Adobe Premiere, check out Gretchen Siegchrist’s tutorials on Desktop Video @ About.com.



Here’s the basic setup of what you’ll need: clean video of your video subject against a solid background that doesn’t share any colors with your video subject (bluescreen or greenscreen is best), imported into Premiere and dragged onto your Timeline. The higher quality your video, the better; we’re going to be reducing quality by exporting to a compressed/reduced image format, which means you’ll need the best video possible to start with in order to keep deterioration to a minimum.




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