Video tutorial *update

I started last week working on the templates to produce a series of hybrid HTML, screenshot, video tutorials. I have almost completed the 3dsmax DTS/DSQ animation enhanced tutorial. I used this existing tutorial as a test bed for the video add-on.

I must say it has proved to be more difficult than I had originally thought. The straight video is handled perfectly within Camtasia Studio. 10 minutes of video and audio from 3dsmax and windows in under 3 meg! Everything was going great until a file size problem arose when I tried to blend FRAPS video and audio with the Camtasia video. I think it was originally 50meg for 10 seconds of FRAPS video converted to .swf. Needless to say Camtasia Studio's lossless swf files are not suited for full motion game video. I did however want everything contained within a .swf file for cross compatibility and uniformity, so I kept hitting it until I found a working solution.

After many hours of testing different solutions I finally got about 20 seconds of game footage and audio into about a meg with awesome video quality. Not too bad, so be on the lookout for the beta tutorial. When I release it, I would appreciate some reports from low bandwidth users. (If there are any?) The video files stream in after you click the button, and I have no access to a slow connection to see how the loading routines work from a slow connection. The video clips are loaded from script, so I can't test them in the Flash bandwidth profiler :(

I've got all the videos completed for the beta tutorial; I think there is just under an hour of footage. Right now I'm just working on the movie controller, so expect an update within the week!

Again, please contact me if you have access to a slow dial-up connection and would be willing to test the streaming of some video clips for me.

Thanks,

B--
support@smdlabs.com