Web and Video

The Cafe Townesend tutorials, much loved in Dreamweaver 8, have been updated for Dreamweaver CS3 by Jon Varese. You can find it in the Dreamweaver Developer Center here, starting with part 1:
Part 1: Setting up your site and project files

This is a five part tutorial, so it’s very comprehensive and a great place to start if you’re a web designer starting to work with Dreamweaver.

Here are the other parts:

• Part 2: Creating the page layout
• Part 3: Adding content to pages
• Part 4: Formatting your page with CSS
• Part 5: Publishing your website

Big shout out to Jon for his great work updating this series!

(19 votes, average: 3.95 out of 5)

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One of our readers let me know about a new site they have created that’s dedicated to Flash and math. You can find a whole bunch of excellent tutorials on using ActionScript 3.0 with Flash CS3. One such tutorial focuses on using the display hierarchy, the Stage, and depth management in ActionScript 3.0/Flash:

The types of display objects, the display hierarchy, and the depth management are very different in ActionScript 3 from the earlier versions of the language. In this tutorial, we talk about display objects, parent-child relationship, the Display List, and the mysterious Stage in AS3. We will illustrate the concepts using a simple example of an animated “solar system”.

And you can find it here: http://www.flashandmath.com/intermediate/children/index.html

But seriously - check out this site for a whole bunch more really useful tutorials on ActionScript 3.0 and Flash. It’s a great place to go if you’re new to and/or nervous about using or updating to AS3. Lots of samples, source files, code snippets, and hands-on steps to make things work.

(11 votes, average: 4.64 out of 5)

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This article outlines some of the key tasksfor editing audio in Soundbooth. In the words of the author (Jan Ozer):

In this tutorial, I’ll provide an overview of Soundbooth’s interface and then focus on how to accomplish common tasks like normalization, noise removal, and audio compression.

This article provides a solid and useful overview of various features such as the Record dialog, about removing random and consistent noises from a track, adjusting volume, and applying compression. If you’re unclear whether Soundbooth is for you, this article gives you a good idea of what the various features do, what they’re called, and what they look like. I believe it will give you a better understanding of what you can use the tools for, and if it’s enough to accomplish what you need to do with your audio files. It’s not exactly a tutorial, but it is a helpful overview article, and great if you’re new to Soundbooth (or say, got it in the Production suite and haven’t really used it yet).

You can find the article here on the Event DV website:

http://www.eventdv.net/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=38085

And hey, while I’m at it blogreaders - know of any good Soundbooth tutorials?

(6 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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I found a good tutorial on YouTube by Chad Perkins (of the brothers Perkins …) - it tells you how to export your video from Premiere to iPod.

If you want to put your video on an iPod or cell phones or YouTube, you’re one of those cool podcasters, just own an iPod and Premiere, whatever - this is a good tutorial for you:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1PmGWji4Szk

Chad also outlines how to export from After Effects too, and shows you some of the differences between the two programs.

I like his source footage too. Gotta love that actually-good free domain stuff. Good clip, Chad.  And a good video tutorial.

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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If you haven’t used CSS before, but want to start taking advantage of it in Dreamweaver CS3, this is the tutorial for you. It walks you through the fundamentals you need to start styling your documents.

This is what they say:

“This tutorial is designed to introduce the concepts of using CSS in Adobe Dreamweaver and HTML for web designers who are not familiar with CSS in web design.”

You will create a new file and add some styling, images, and even a menu to the page using the features found in Dreamweaver CS3.

If it’s for you, you can check it out here - CSS Basics in Dreamweaver

(11 votes, average: 4.45 out of 5)

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One of the funnest.. ahem… most fun new features in After Effects CS3 is the Puppet Tool. It makes animation incredibly easy. If you’ve tried to do character animation before.. especially with something like Flash.. you’ll know how hard it can be to create all those keyframes and then add motion tweens and shape tweens and try not to break them down the road and so on and so forth.  But the Puppet Tool makes it much easier - you’re pretty much clicking and dragging to make things happen, and often you can end up with something that looks really cool.

We already have a couple tutorials on using the Puppet Tool, but another one can’t hurt.  This one combines Motion with After Effects to create an interesting result.

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/geduldick_jim/Motion_AE.php 

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If you want to know more about audio in Premiere Pro, then check out this good video tutorial (podcast) from Aanarav Sareen over  at Creative Cow.

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/sareen_aanarav/aud_channel_mapping.php 

Aanarav covers some of the new things you can do with audio mapping introduced in Premiere Pro CS3, and he covers some of the changes you’ll find in the new version of Premiere. It’s short and sweet too, so head over to Creative Cow and check it out

(No Ratings Yet)

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A brand new Adobe User Group, dedicated to Fireworks, is starting in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first meeting is October 23rd, 2007 at 7:00pm here at Adobe’s 601 Townsend office in San Francisco.

To sign up for the group, and RSVP for the meeting, go to their website here:

http://www.fireonthebay.org/

The user group manager is really cool, and I plan to be there too. You’ll also get to hear Alan Musselman speak, but don’t let that deter you from showing up. (oh ha ha…) It should be a good meeting, hope to see you there!

(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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These are some very rough notes that I took at Erik Natzke’s session on online advertising at MAX 2007.

You want to make ads attractive and legitamite.

He has enjoyed trying to make advertisements fun, essentially bring the fun into the ad. You can have fun, playful ads that are functional.

Important to remember that you are sharing space on a page, so you  have to be graceful (more so than regular).

Want to tell a story, but needs to be precise, regardless of framerate or machine. So the story and message is still taught consistently, regardless of the machine.

Hard to get the vision across if numbers are in the way, so he built his own kind of Flash to have more control. So you have a canvas you can work from that’s appropriate.

You are limited to what you can do (for example, limited to 22K).

Need to use trial and error to get things right sometimes.

Can try designing everything on the stage, and then try things out.

Or, you can start with the minimum content, and then add what you can to that.

Optimization is important.

When an ad is for worldwide distribution, things can get more complex. For instance, you might need to make more changes, have a ton of different sizes of the ad.

Need to find a good workflow for the ad, because you might need to make all these changes.

Recommends keeping everything in a single FLA - all the SWFs that will be at each size are along the Timeline (helps you from going nuts).

Sometimes builds in intelligence where you can change the size of the SWF and the graphics do the right thing / resize / redistribute and such.

Trying to get away from keyframes and timeline animation - Easier to optimize, less time to develop, easier to work with, “keyframes can be all consuming” and “code is more interesting”.

Did a random animation using code - can feel more unique, real, is dynamic.

“Reflection - cause that’s what advertising is about”

Built a scrubber into an animation so can view the animation  like it’s in a video editor — then he can tweak the animation as necessary.

Personalities, people, and pets - character ads. These things commonly in ads.

Interaction results in more click throughs, people almost feel like they owe the company the click for a good experience.

(10 votes, average: 3.9 out of 5)

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