Many of the sites/media that I design and develop are under lock and key as they are all live courses with enrolled students who pay top dollar for the education. As a result, most of my work can’t be seen in motion. This not only bums me out, but also has hindered the advancement of my career in some ways. So, I figured I make a demo reel of sorts that quickly takes people through a series of my best work. After many takes, I finally got what I wanted and am posting it here (and on the sidebar). I will be heading into the studio to do some voiceover work for it, but I won’t have time for several weeks. In the meantime, take a look at the demo, and please let me know what you think. I am certainly open to suggestions.
Archive for September, 2007
Demo Reel (Rough)
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007FMS2
Friday, September 7th, 2007We just installed a Flash Media Server at the office. After some introductory issues with getting the server installed, and a few getting it to play nicely with the flvPlayback component, it is now working like a champ. Here is a rundown of how we handled a few things.
First, the skin. We are using the flvPlayback component with a custom designed and developed skin. I opted to design an embedded skin by using the following components: Buffering Bar, Pause Button, Play Button, Seek Bar, and Volume Bar. I also coded a timer that keeps track of hours, minutes, and seconds for both current and total time. These are called by a function, set a variable, and are displayed on stage as dynamic text. The flv itself is loaded through a variable set in the HTML code that calls the swf itself. So, we basically have several different swf sizes for the video player: 320×240, 480×320, 480×360. We also have three sets of corresponding code snips. To use, the flv is uploaded to the FMS, the appropriate swf is dragged into the swf folder at the root of our course sites, the code is placed in the appropriate location within the HTML, and the variable in that code is changed to the rmtp:// path of the flv file. That’s it. Drag and drop custom flv player.
On the server-side, I have created an application for each course that uses the streaming server. It provides a way to distinguish videos from course to course, and seemed more intuitive than have one application with sub-folders. I made one change to the adapter.xml file to outline the port sequence. And added the main.asc file to the root of each of the applications. The logs are fairly extensive, but don’t provide a whole bunch of useful information for us from a technical support standpoint. They will be used primarily as reference, while our standard web server logs (which contain username information) will be our first line of defense. Speaking of the web server, it is being run on a second machine. Both sun boxes. One Solaris, One Linux.
That’s about it. Totally easy. I will write an update in a few weeks after we start pushing FMS a bit.
Good Dr. B
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007…Been wildly busy at work, so the music’s been on hold. Not to fear a new tune has arrived, and there should be more on the way soon. Enjoy.