Use The Right Tool For The Job
Bob Chambers
Today I got a call from someone who wanted to buy my latest Multimedia Toolbox CD, Creating Screen Capture Videos With Camtasia Studio. But he wanted to add a video clip to his streaming videos and wondered if I showed that on my CD. My answer was no. While I will be covering that in later Multimedia Toolbox videos, this one doesn't show how to add a video clip to your website. We then discussed his project and I found that he wanted to create some marital arts videos showing how-to do it at home. Well, I have taken both Karate and Judo so I know how important it is to really see just what your hands, feet, and body needs to be doing to get the various moves right. In fact, I once tired to understand some Karate moves by looking at a series of small pictures in Mass Oyama's book and was not very successful. So I told my potential customer that he might be better off doing his videos full screen and putting them on a DVD. The interesting thing is that he hadn't thought of doing that. Today using Flash videos, while good, is not the most efficient streaming video format. Both Windows Media and Real Media use smaller files. But to do a good job showing some of the Martial Arts moves even those might be hard pressed to create small enough files to be able to stream over dial up connections. And to put together an hour of video clips in Flash will give you some very large files. As an example, my Creating Screen Capture Videos With Camtasia Studio, http://www.flashpublishers.com/products/item5.cfm, has 2 hours and 20 minutes of screen captures. Those files are over 300 MB. Consider if only 100 people would download and watch those videos in a month, that would mean you'd be using 30 GB of bandwidth. Which might be your entire monthly allowance of bandwidth. But another reason for using the DVD approach is because of the preceived value that your customers place with that media. So before you blindly use the most popular format that everyone is using... consider if your project would be better if you used another format. By the way, some short streaming video clips on the Internet sales page would be very powerful in selling the final DVD.
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