Enya is one of my favorites so when I decided to add a video to the site as part of the learning project I thought "Storms in Africa" would be a great choice.

This video was embedded in Flash and then was transferred here later. I have a video tutorial on how to convert any other video format into a Flash Video Format (FLV) which can then be embedded into a web site like this or played in a standalone player for the video. The tutorial video can be seen on the Layout page.

I hope you enjoy this video and please do take some time to visit Enya at www.enya.com

Preparing and Publishing the video

Preparing a video for a web page is not that difficult but experience obviously is the key to perfecting this art. In this project I decided that I wanted to add a video in a Flash format against other formats as AVI, MP4, Real, etc. This semester's project was on creating an interactive/multimedia web site with much emphasis on Flash from Adobe Macromedia. I tried different methods of incorporating movies and other multimedia using Flash and made a few simple animations with motion tween and/or ActionScripts.

Movies and other media files can be converted into a Flash fiIe which would then be inserted in the web page. The down side of the method is that the Flash movie would loop or play once depending on the options chosen at the time of saving the file. Embedding with progressive download was the best choice for me due to the traffic on my site and the size of the movie. There was the option of streaming the video but that is usually recommended for sites with very high traffic and movies that have large sizes. Embedding a file takes a reasonable amount of time to convert the file into the new format but the size of the video would ultimately determine how long it takes to complete.

Once the FLV file is complete, embedding it in the website is what can be a little tricky. Files can usually be inserted in Dreamweaver by selecting Insert > Media > Flash Video or Flash from the Menu bar but in this it did not work for me. I had to create a new page in Dreamweaver where I could insert the video using the same commands "Insert > Media > Flash Video" from the Menu bar. It worked on the blank page since there was no other conflicting data for the file. You can then copy the data strings that control the video from the coding view in Dreamweaver and the pasting it at the appropriate location in your page. Save and test the page.

Please look at the video on the Layout page where all the processes are shown but I do not have sound to explain the processes. I would update those videos and add sounds to them later.

Thanks for visiting my site.

Heindel.