Slideshow animation - best practice

I want to emulate the slide effect that is on this page: http://www.excellentguesthouse.co.za/
I understand how to create it all through tweens, and how to loop it, using actionscript 2.
Can someone suggest to me how to go about it in a way that would make for the fastest loading solution?
I'm going to use one big image and have it loop between images with the cool animated transition effect, as well as with the transparent overlay button.
Is it possible to do an animated slideshow such as the one shown in the link, while not embedding the images in the swf?

just the images. im thinking of making the swf or flv in adobe after effects and then importing the frames into flash cs5 where I can make a transparent overlay button with an animation over the slideshow. I exported a 6 image slideshow out of adobe encore earlier just to test it and it used panning and zoom functions and still only output a 124 kb file, which is pretty small. So it's seeming like this can be done pretty easily.
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2012 21:36:33 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: slideshow animation - best practice
    Re: slideshow animation - best practice
    created by kglad in Flash Pro - General - View the full discussion
fastest loading of what? the main site and the slideshow images? just the main site? and yes, the images need not be in the swf.
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Hi,
Here are some of my suggestions:
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words, symbols, colours unique to your organisation.
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you would only do that if it makes your job easier. generally speaking, it would not.
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SAP BO Dashboards 4.1 best practice on layout and components

Dear SCN,
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Hi Suman,
Thanks for your answers.You answers and links which you have attached are helpful and It answered my questions related to canvas size and Connections.
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Hope these details will give clear picture of why I am looking for the Benchmark on No. of components .
I appreciate your help!
Thanks and Regards
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Best practice for putting together scenes in a Flash project?

Hi, I'm currently working on a flash project with the following characteristics:
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you would only do that if it makes your job easier. generally speaking, it would not.
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Titling Best Practices

Hello
Working with AE and Premier I am starting to wonder what the best way of titling my videos in Premier is.
When I use AE I can get all sorts of fancy results but sometimes the quality of the edges of the fonts and stuff looks jaggy.
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After I capture my footage in Premier I get it laid out and then I use AE to create Compositions that I import and drop into the video project in Premier and place it over the footage to create my titles. I have had differing success. Sometimes it is super crisp and sometimes it shows a case of the jaggies.
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I was thinking about taking the section of video where I want my titles and putting it in the AE project and then putting the AE comp into the timeline in premier in place of where I want the titles to go.
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Have you read the
"Best practices for creating text and vector graphics for video" section of After Effects CS3 Help on the Web?
If you don't feel like clicking, here's the body of that document:
"Text that looks good on your computer screen as you are creating it can sometimes look bad when viewed in a final output movie. These differences can arise from the device used to view the movie or from the compression scheme used to encode the movie. The same is true for other vector graphics, such as shapes in shape layers. Keep the following in mind as you create and animate text and vector graphics for video:
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* Avoid sharp color transitions, especially from one highly saturated color to its complementary color. Sharp color transitions are difficult for many compression schemessuch as those used by MPEG and JPEG standardsto encode. This can cause visual noise near sharp transitions. For analog television, the same sharp transitions can cause spikes outside the allowed range for the signal, also causing noise.
* When text will be over moving images, make sure that the text has a contrasting border (such as a glow or a stroke) so that the text is still readable when something the same color as the fill passes behind the text.
* Avoid thin horizontal elements, which can vanish from the frame if they happen to be on an even scan line during an odd field, or vice versa. The height of the horizontal bar in a capital H, for example, should be three pixels or greater. You can thicken horizontal elements by increasing font size, using a bold (or faux bold) style, or applying a stroke. (See Formatting characters.)
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Apply the Autoscroll - Vertical animation preset in the Behaviors category to quickly create a vertical text crawl.
Fortunately, many problems with text in video and compressed movie formats can be solved with one simple technique: Apply Fast Blur to the text layer, with a Blurriness setting between 1 and 2. A slight blur can soften color transitions and cause thin horizontal elements to expand."

Terabyte Plus Libraries - What is the Best Practice?

In my current Aperture library I have 150 gigs and I have only been using it for about a year. Previous to that I used iPhoto for a short time which still has a 60 gig library and previous to that I stored my images in file folders on a windows servers which I have around 500+ gig there. Then there are are those non electronic images which should be scanned in one day.....
My hope was to have import everything into one tool and eventually to have some better organization and management of my images. At the rate I am shooting now it won't be long before I break the terabyte mark and am wondering as I try to pull al these sources together what is the best Practice?
I know I can have more than one library now with Aperture, do folks manage their libraries by themes? Weddings, Family, Commercial, etc? I just picked up a 2 terabyte drive to start moving stuff off my Mac Book but am not sure if I should use the Archive tool to do this or break apart my images into libraries and store them them and just keep a working library on my Mac?
Within Aperture I am using the Project -> Album hierarchy to manage my shoots now as well.
Also, I don't have a ton of video yet, but have started shooting a little, plus have been making slideshows and books now, so I need to start planning for that as well. Just wondering what is the best, most efficient way of large data management with Aperture.
Thanks!

The solution is to avoid the (unfortunately default) Managed Masters and instead use a Referenced Masters Library kept on an internal drive. Back up originals prior to importing and keep Masters off the Library drive. That way the Aperture Library will remain small enough to live on a standard internal drive without overfilling it.
Note that working drives (as opposed to backup-only drives) should not be allowed to exceed ~70% full for ideal speed and stability.
Multiple Libraries is almost always poor images management in a digital world unless all rights to the images, including the right to simply view any image (such as security work), belong exclusively to the client. Usage of multiple Libraries is a big backward step into film-think and very significantly limits the power of digital images management.
-Allen

Bean load best practice

I am not new to Java, but up until now have been a programmer. I am now getting more into design and architecture and have a question about best practice. This question arises from a UML class I was taking. But in the class we stayed within the UML and did not get into implementation.
My Question
When creating classes and designing how they interact, what is the best practice for implementing associative relationships. For example, if I were modeling a Barn that contained Animals, I would create a Barn bean and an Animal bean. Since the Barn contained Animals I could create the code like this:
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And lazy initialization. Basically, unless the data is needed. Don't load it.

Best practice for this project?

Hello,
Total n00b here, so please bare with me!
I'm working on one of my first AE projects getting my feet wet as well as following along with some books and Lynda.com training vids, but I thought I'd post here as well.
The project I'm working on is nothing more than a glorified slideshow. Basically, it consists of a 30 different still images (each image is different). For each still, there is a basic title sequence (fades in/out), then the still fades in, there's a pan/zoom, then fades out, then on to the next one. Total time per still is 30-40 seconds. Finally, there will be a single audio track playing over the full piece. Like I said, pretty simple.
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Basically, I'm curious as to how to best deal with having this all reviewed, having to make changes, etc. For example, once I put the initial piece together, I'll render out a version for review. If I have to make a change to one of the sequences, is there a way to deal with this so I don't have to spend the time rendering the entire job out again, just for a short 1 second change to 1 sequence within the entire job? What's the best way to deal with this?
I'd love to hear what suggestions people may have!?
Thanks!
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My personal approach would be just one comp, one text layer, and one black solid layer under the text and on top of the images to control the fading (I got the impression you want to go blank, rather than transition directly from one image to another).
Create a new solid, set it to your BG color, and make it "comp size".
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Select them both and use the align window to center your text horz and vert (actually your centering it to the solid, which happens to be the size of your comp)
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I prefer this approach as it keeps everything in one comp where you can see it (handy for syncing to your music layer), and you dont have a bunch of duplicate title layers that are essentially the same thing.
As for needing to change just a small part of it, depends on your finally delivery format. If you are giving them one long file, and just need to change a small part in the middle, make the change, then import your last rendered animation (best way to import is to drag the file from an OS browser window to the AE project window).
Bring the old anim into your comp as the top layer, so AE doesnt have think much about constructing each frame, then go to the beginning of the part you have changed, and with this cover layer selected "ctrl shift D" to split the layer. Then move to the end of your fixed portion and with the 2nd half of you cover layer selected, "alt [" which will jump the beginning of the cover to there, so AE only has to deeply contemplate the frames that you have changed. Although with this project it shouldnt take long to render any how.
Well, thats my two cents, or more like a buck thirty five.

Best practices for handling elements and symbols (including preloading)

I am trying to learn Edge Animate and I have not seen enough animations to know how this is typically handled and I searched the forum and have not found an answer either.
If you have many different elements and symbols for a project, what is the best practice for having them appear, disappear, etc. on the timeline? I ask this question not only from a performance based perspective, but also keeping in mind the idea of preloading. This is a 2 part question:
Part 1: Using elements and symbols later in the timeline:
Since artwork is always imported directly to the stage in an "always on" status, should we place a visibility OFF on every item until we need it?
or should they be opacity 0 until I need them?
or should they be set to visibility hidden until I need them?
Which of these is the best option if you don't want the element / symbol visible until later in the timeline? Does it matter?
Part 2: Impact on page loading
Does the above question have any impact upon page loading speed
or is this something handled in preloading?
or do you need to make a special preloader?
Thanks for the help.

Hi, escargo-
Good questions!
Part 1: Using elements and symbols later in the timeline:
Since artwork is always imported directly to the stage in an "always on" status, should we place a visibility OFF on every item until we need it?
or should they be opacity 0 until I need them?
or should they be set to visibility hidden until I need them?
Which of these is the best option if you don't want the element / symbol visible until later in the timeline? Does it matter?
I would recommend that you set your visibility to "off" instead of simply changing the opacity. The reason I suggest this is that when your visibility is set to off, your object's hit points also disappear. If you have any type of interactivity, having the object still visible but with 0 opacity will interfere with anything you have underneath it in the display order.
Part 2: Impact on page loading
Does the above question have any impact upon page loading speed
or is this something handled in preloading?
or do you need to make a special preloader?
Thanks for the help.
No, none of this has any impact on page load. As you already noticed, all of the assets of your project will load before it displays. If you want only part of your composition to load, you may want to do what we call a multi-composition project. There's a sample of that in the Edge Animate API in the Advanced section, and plenty of posts in the forums (and one in the team's blog) explaining how to do that.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/edgeanimate/api/current/index.html
https://blogs.adobe.com/edge/
Hope that helps!
-Elaine

Best practices for image compression in dps

Hi! I have been reading up on best practices for image compression in dps, and I have read that the source assets of panoramas, image sequences, pan and zoom images, and audio skins are not resampled on upload. So you therefore need to resize them and compress them before dropping them into your article, because dps doesn't do it for you. Okay can do!
So then Im also reading that the source assets of slideshows, scrollable frames, and buttons ARE resampled as PNG images. Does this mean that DPS will compress them for you when you build the article? So does that mean I shouldn't bother going to the trouble of resizing these images at all? I can just pop in the 15mb 300dpi files used in the print magazine and dps will compress them upon building the article - and this will have no affect on file size?
And this is also the case with static background images?
Thanks for your help!

All images are automatically resampled based on the size of the folio you make. You can drop in whatever resolution image you want, it doesn't matter.
Neil

Best Practices for Professional video editing

Hi
I'd like to know your thoughts on what the most proffessional / effeciant method for editing are. At the moment, I archive all the footage from a DV tape through iMovie (I just find iMovie easier for doing this) save / archive all the imported segments of clips I need, name them, then import them into FCP
When I finish an edit I export and uncompressed Quicktime movie, then back up the entire project on an external drive
Is this good practise, Should I export the final edit to tape?
I've just started out as a video-maker as a paid proffession and I'd like to know the most 'by the book' methods
THanks
G5 Dual Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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Clearly label bins and use them wisely. For example, on a small project I might have a "video" bin, a "music" bin and a "graphics" bin. This saves searching through one large bin.
On larger projects, I try to think ahead to how I will edit and make bins accordingly. For example I might have bins as follows, interviews, b-roll location a, b-roll location b and so on. Then I'll have music bins, animation bins and still graphic bins. I generally try to save all to one hard drive which saves me looking through three or four drives. This isn't always possible depending upon the size of the project.
As for back-up. Lots of peope buy harddrives for each project and then store them until they need them next. Of course, keep all of your raw-footage and you can always re-digitize.
When I'm done with a project I save the completed project to tape...this is for dubs and library. I save the FCP information on a DVD and I burn the media from the drive, because I can't afford multiple hard drives. I would rather re-digitize my raw if I need to re-do the project in the future.
That's how I do it, but other editors have other methods. I would highly suggest digitizing in FCP and not i-movie, but that's entirely up to you. You're not doing anything "wrong."
G4 Dual Processor Mac OS X (10.4.1)
G4 Dual Processor Mac OS X (10.4.1)

Slideshow animation - best practice

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