FWA - All the Way

The FWA (Favourite Website Awards) is well-known among Web and multimedia communities -- its site welcomes 44,000 visitors a day and maintains a Google page rank of eight, in addition to listing some of the newest, ground-breaking Web sites on the Internet - not to mention updating that list daily.

Del Padre Digital's own site has received an FWA nod in the past, as has its client Robert Charles Photography. However, now the spotlight is on us in a different way.

A piece we wrote is currently the featured article at the FWA, looking at some of the innovative SEO-for-Flash things we're doing at delpadre.com and how it's made us one of the most searchable Flash sites on the Internet.

As part of the article, we spoke to Rostislav Hristov, creator of SWFAddress -- one of the tools we used when relaunching delpadre.com in June, 2008.

"[Del Padre] started developing their new site from scratch, and ended up with a solid base that can be extended even more in the future," Hristov said of delpadre.com's redesign.

We tend to agree.

View the printable version of the FWA article Flash Forward

Del Padre On Hand to Announce STEPS at ASTC, Philly

Del Padre Digital's Creative Director Mark Archer and Senior Programmer Joe Maki were recently among more than 1,800 science-center professionals from 31 countries, who gathered for the 2008 ASTC (Association of Science Technology Centers) annual conference, held at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pa.

Del Padre's Mark Archer meets and greets with Philly's resident Founding Father.

Archer and Maki attended as part of their involvement with the STEPS (Science Theater Educational Programming System) project, an application being developed by a collaborative of science and multimedia professionals, including the Space Science Institute of Boulder, Colo., the SETI institute in Mountain View, Calif., and NASA. STEPS will be for use by educators in museums across the country, and will create interactive presentations to help science educators of all types stage theatrical presentations for museum audiences.

Del Padre Digital has been tasked with developing the multimedia aspects of STEPS, utilizing the latest tools in digital design to create a software engine with groundbreaking, yet easy-to-use functionality.

The project is slated for completion in 2010, and the ASTC conference coincided with the end of the first development year of this three-year project. A trailer was also produced by the STEPS team and Del Padre Digital for the conference, giving what will be its key audience a first look at the developing platform. The video was filmed in part at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, one of the science centers that will utilize the final STEPS product.

A beta version of STEPS will be unveiled next year, at the ASTC conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

New website and new name

We are pleased to announce a new website and a new name. Del Padre Visual Productions is now Del Padre Digital. The name change reflects the constantly evolving technology we harness in our business. Established in 1991 as Del Padre Video Productions, the name was changed in 1995 to Del Padre Visual Productions to better describe our services when we embarked in the new world of multimedia and internet development.

Today all of our services from web design to high definition video production is digital hence the new name.

The new delpadre.com is the sixth incarnation of the Del Padre web presence. This site was intended to fulfill several key roles. First and foremost this site was intended to be an easily scalable, dynamic, and easily managed web presence for our company.

Beyond this however the site was developed with many other end goals in mind. Our company wanted to highlight the fact that Flash is a viable platform for an entire website. We wanted a flash site that could emulate an HTML one in basic functions such that have long been unsupported in Flash. Features such deep linking and browser back button support , fast loading dynamic content, coherent loading sequences so users can get to the most important information fastest, and the ability to optimize our site for search engines. We also wanted to capitalize on the raw power of the Flash platform with animation, integrated full screen video, fully dynamic and easily updatable content, with transitions and other subtleties to increase the flow of the site and enrich the user experience.

Technical Challenge

• Back button support/deep linking
  


• By taking advantage of the open source SWFAddress project we were able to create a flash website that could interface with the browsers history allowing the user to use the browsers back button as well as bookmark and link to specific sections of the flash movie.
  
• Dynamic content
  


• To avoid needing to edit the flash project to add updates to our site virtually all the content was made dynamic, pulling from external files that can be edited via our in browser Content Management System
  
  
  
  • All news and gallery information is pulled from external files when the respective page is accessed. Once it loads the contents of these files, any borders or styles are generated by ActionScript on the fly.
  
  
• Speed
  


• This site was built to run on any connection above 756Kbps. We didn’t want our visitors to have to wait for 30 seconds at a loading page, or bring their system to a crawl downloading numerous large assets at once. There were many different ways we came at this problem to solve it;
  


• The site is almost completely generated by action script; the initial timeline in the flash file is very small and has few assets on it. By having greater control over the exact order content was generated in we were able to streamline the loading order in many areas without having to extend the timeline or rely on timeline based tweens or dead space. We were also able to reuse much of the code, further reducing the overall files size of the project.
  


• We took load order into account when adding more bandwidth and processor intensive assets to the project, for example on the index page, rather than sharing the bandwidth among the gallery content, the full background video, and music files, the site doesn’t initialize loading the video and music assets until the gallery is loaded. Accessibility to the information was our top priority, if that information is good enough the user will be around long enough to see the flashier aspects of the site as well.


• Server side bandwidth controls, on a slow connection the music player was bringing the site to a halt whenever it started to cache a new song. To side step this problem the flash site posts the song file information to a PHP file which restricts the download speed to 16Kbps leaving a 4Kb buffer over what the song needs to play, but preventing a 2MB mp3 from hogging all the site bandwidth.


• Much of the content of the site is populated by ActionScript loops, by writing these loops to be as effective as possible we were able to increase overall load times of galleries


• Processor usage and Memory Leaks. Some aspects of our site had potential for high processor usage and memory leaks, however by actively managing what assets were enabled in the website at any given time we were able to strike a balance between file size and processor demand we were able to keep the system resource footprint of our site relatively low compared to similar websites.
  
  
• Public bookmarking has become a powerful and effective way to get a website noticed so we decided that lacking that support was not an option, this also pushed us to write a much more advanced URL handling system than the one included in the SWFAddress project. This new handling system allows the site to dynamically generate unique links to newly added content keeping our dynamic content source files much more manageable and easily updatable.
  
  
• Intelligent resizing, the site gives priority to certain elements and will attempt to keep them within the viewable area as long as possible when the browser window is resized, lower priority elements dynamically moved and the centering and scaling scheme is modified based on the current window size.
  
  Search Engine optimization was something that we intended to include from the start, and luckily SWFAddress comes with a good platform to do this from. Some aspects of the platform were modified to handle our different URL management system as well as much more dynamic SEO abilities.
  
  The entire site runs off index.php however .htaccess rewrites the URL header to reflect the current location in the website. Due to this, any static meta tag information we set in the index.php file would be repeated on every single page of the site, negatively effecting search engine rank. To overcome this we replaced the static information with PHP function calls which would determine what content was showing and update the Meta tags to match.
  
  
• SWFAddress also writes the contents of its data file to the index page as html so that anyone viewing the page without flash player or JavaScript can still view the exact same content as is in the flash site.
  
  All links in this no JavaScript mode will link to the proper flash page once JavaScript is enabled, this means any links a Search Engine crawls will link to the same section in the flash site.
  
  
• Benefits of this site include
  - Fast and easy updating of content from anywhere in the world.
  - User friendly, intuitive navigation that brings the user to the information they want
  - Search Engine optimized
  - All the power of flash without losing any functionality or benefits of an html site.

New Riley Martin site featured on the Howard Stern show.

The new Riley Martin website that we have been working on was featured on the Howard Stern Show this week. The Howard 100 news team said "Rileymartin.tv, you've got to check it out. Somebody creating what's billed as the Official Riley Martin site and doing one heck of a job on the design of the introduction"

Featuring information on The Coming Of Tan Audio Book, Riley Martin Symbols, Riley Martin Show Archives, Howard Stern Parodies and video downloads. Official Riley Martin merchandise including t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers and much more coming soon.

Stay tuned to Howard 100 for an exclusive news story about the new site next week. Check out the site for yourself at http://www.rileymartin.com/ and be sure to sign up for news updates!

It's been a while. Whats new at Del Padre Visual Productions

Thought I'd take a break from the usual format and use this Miniblog as a chance to tell you a little about what we've been up to. We just finished up a project with a company launching a new iPod product called George. It hasn't hit the stores yet, but if you want a sneak a peak you can check out our featured video. It's pretty wild. We combined Maya product renders with HD footage shot with Redrock Micro's M2 35mm lens rig. We also handled all creative and copywriting for the spot, making this a full branding effort. The company that created George is Boston-based Chestnut Hill Sound. They, and George, won best in show at Mac World back in January. Nice job guys.

I should also mention that we just won a pretty exciting award ourselves. This had to do with another special client of ours, Speakercraft. The project that we collaborated with Speakercraft on, a video to promote their new product, MODE, won the prestigious Telly award. To put this in perspective, past recipients include; Nike, CNN, HGTV, Microsoft, FX Networks, Comedy Central, etc. Not bad for a guy who was told he might not make it past Mrs. Stevenson's math class in the 6th grade! Needless to say, I am very proud of our team for this incredible national recognition.

You can read more about shooting with the M2 in the March issue of Studio Monthly. We wrote the cover feature reviewing the system and offered up some tips for shooting with a 35mm lens. You can also check out the footage online. Special thanks to Bob Zemba from Robert Charles Photography for the great production stills and lens insight.

Nino Del Padre
Del Padre Visual Productions
Helping Businesses Exceed Expectations

Don't fear Flash! Common web design misconceptions and the facts.

I am devoting the next several Mini Blogs to a topic that is near and dear to my heart: Adobe / Macromedia Flash. This has been a controversial subject as long as I can remember. I have been using Flash for about seven years now and I would like to share my experience with you and set the record straight about the misunderstandings and apprehensions people have about using it on their websites. Although there was much more skepticism five years ago regarding whether or not Flash is the future of the internet, today there is no doubt that it is here to stay as proven by the world's leading branding sites. So, for those of you who are not a computer geek like myself or have had a bad experience with Flash from a poorly designed site, long download times or gratuitous wiz bang intros, this one's for you. The truth is Flash is by far the most elegant, easy-to-use, cross-platform solution available as evident by its exclusive use by companies such as Taco Bell to Mercedes Benz.

I will be covering some of advantages of using Flash during the next few mini blogs and will also address the most common questions and misunderstandings people have like:

Visitors don't have the correct version of the Flash Player, or do not have it at all.

All Flash sites look too "Flashy", high tech or futuristic.

Flash sites take too long to download.

Search engines can't properly index Flash sites.

Let's start with the first one. Will site visitors need to download the plug-in to view the Flash content? Can it be seamless for site visitors and simple for you to implement? Can the player upgrade process friendlier? The answer is yes to all the above.

Microsoft first distributed the Macromedia Flash Player with its Windows 95 operating system. It included Flash Player 6 in every version of its Windows XP operating system and it's also distributed with the Apple Mac Operating System, including Mac OS X. And what about AOL? Flash has been installed as part of every version of the AOL client since 1999.

In April 2006, NPD Research conducted a study to determine what percentage of Web browsers have Macromedia Flash Player pre-installed. The results show that 97.7% of Web users can experience Macromedia Flash content without having to download and install a player.

In September 2005, Macromedia introduced Flash Player 8, which delivered revolutionary new expressiveness and rendering performance - including bitmap effects, filters, alpha video, and a new video codec for Flash video. All of these new features led to a rapid proliferation of Flash 8 content on the Internet, driving the fastest adoption of Flash Player in it's history.

Also introduced in Flash Player 8 is Express Install, an option for seamlessly upgrading visitors to the latest player version using a Flash-based experience automatically. Express Install allows you to use an in-context upgrade experience for your content so users never have to leave your site. It also lets you gracefully handle user cancellation and avoid system restarts.

Nino Del Padre

Del Padre Visual Productions

Helping Businesses Exceed Expectations

Taking full advantage of audio on the web.

People often ask about the music and sound effects we use when designing creative for the web. It's something we have put countless hours into and has long been an integral part of our design methodology, starting in the mock up phase. Pace, feel, tone, excitement and drama can be made or broken depending on the audio used. Often, music seems like an afterthought.

Let's look at some of the sources for music we use, and how we look at choosing audio elements. (Of course, we are talking for the web here, so bandwidth is still an issue.) The norm for a long time was to use a six or seven second loop because longer length music, say a full length track that might be two or three minutes long must fully download before it can be played, causing long waits across dial-up lines. However, with streaming audio in Flash we have had great results offering several long form music selections, via an MP3 audio player. This allows the site visitor to have complete control with the functionality of an Ipod type player, track selection, pause, play, rewind and volume. MP3's stream progressively meaning that it can start playing before it is fully downloaded. In the past, we often needed to use loops to keep file size manageable.

There are many sources for music for online use. The music used in any type of audio or visual product is called "Production Music" and there are two different methods of buying music. One is called "Buy-Out or Royalty Free Music" and the second is called "Needle-Drop Music Libraries" The two vary in both quality and price.

The more commonly known "Buy-Out or Royalty Free Music" allows you to purchase a single track or a collection of tracks, pay a one time fee and use it as many times you like in as many projects you like forever without incurring any other cost. This type of production music gives you the best value and ROI however it often comes at the expense of the quality of the music. You can find Royalty free music as low as $30.00 each or you could buy a whole disc with 15 to 20 tracks for about $80 to $150. This is not to say that all Buy-Out Royalty Free Music sucks and many libraries quality have greatly improved over the past 5 years buy if you want your site or production to evoke the emotion of a major motion picture and not sound like elevator music, you have to step up to a Needle-Drop music library.

The Cadillac of production music "Needle-drop libraries" is what you use when only the best and highest quality music will do. With a "needle-drop" library, you pay a fee for each composition you use, each and every time it is used in your production. There are many variables that go into pricing such as intended delivery platform of the project (i.e. a website, DVD, TV commercial, Radio Commercial), where the project will be shown (local, regionally, or nationally) and the amount of copies a non-broadcast project like a DVD will be duplicated and delivered. Individual needle-drop fees typically range from $100.00 per track, per use for a local commercial all the way up to $1500 and higher for a worldwide film trailer. Since we are talking about the internet you can expect to pay about $150 to $200 per track per year or buy what's called a "Production Blanket" and use it perpetually for a higher cost. Basically, you get what you pay for. Most of the music that these companies compose and sell can be heard in many national, big name television commercials and tons of major motion pictures and trailers.

Some examples of Needle-drop music can be heard in a few of our recent productions. This is a good example of not just how fantastic music can make a production sound great but it also illustrates how different cuts of music can make the same voice over and project take on a whole different feeling.

Sample 1
Sample 2
Sample 3

If you Google "production music" you will get 166,000,000 results so let me save you your sanity and give you a few links to the companies that we use and feel are the best.

Royalty Free Music
http://www.shockwave-sound.com/
These guys seem to have a good selection of royalty free music tracks and royalty free music loops that sounds really good.

http://www.soundrangers.com/
Offering Broadcast quality production music available as full cuts and loops. Instant downloads with selectable file format.

Needle-drop libraries
http://www.selectracks.com/
The current focus of the catalog is advertising and promo music with a special concentration on tracks for major motion picture advertising and high energy promos. Recent Projects include X-Men 3, Monster House, Sentinel, Zathura, Spiderman, Taking Lives, Robots and Smallville.

http://www.videohelper.com
This company is comprised of former video editors and producers from ABC News who decided to start a music production company to provide more appropriate music that producers could actually use. A tool that they offer "Look and Load" is a DVD based music browsing system that contains the entire library that features over 1000 titles and makes the phrase "we need to find a great piece of production music" less of a problem. Recent Projects include Batman Begins, Chicken Little, The DaVinci Code, Ice Age 2: The Meltdown and Minority Report.

Nino Del Padre
Del Padre Visual Productions
Helping Businesses Exceed Expectations

Microsoft patent dispute with software developer Eolas causing big problems for web developers

On 11 April 2006, Microsoft released its latest security patches that included a non security update for Internet Explorer which changes the way the browser interacts with ActiveX controls. The change was made to address patent litigation with Eolas Technologies. In short, Eolas holds the patent for how things like flash and QuickTime / Windows Mediaplayer videos are added to a website - in any browser. A federal court in Chicago has ruled that Microsoft must pay $521 million after finding that the software giant's Internet Explorer infringed on this patent.

What does it do and how does it affect you?

It prevents users from automatically interacting with an embedded object - like a flash movie. You have to activate it first. Now, instead of one click to get something like Adobe's Macromedia Flash player to do something, it may take two (or in the case of an ActiveX control that used to automatically load without any clicks, now a click will be required). Seen in the screen shot of Robert Charles Photography site (below) is an example of how end-users will be prompted to click again before an ActiveX control will begin to function. The user experience is far from ideal but Microsoft has no choice as a result of the defeat it was handed the lawsuit.



There is also the issue with the many sites that use Flash to play music. Stopping it is no longer a single click experience - Click activates it + Click "pause music".



Other applications affected by the Web browser patch include business software from Oracle's Siebel customer relationship management unit and certain Web applications that use specific versions of Java, including older versions of Google's Toolbar.

How does it affect video on your site?

This update has a more drastic and distracting affect on sites that have any embedded video (Real Video or Media Player etc.) will start to play. But the buttons to control the movie - something as simple like the volume control is inactive.



However when a page contains the widely used QuickTime format the user is treated to an alarming popup window that you have to ok before seeing any content at all as seen in the image below.



The web authoring community is very frustrated as this requires a huge amount of work on the part of Web author to change all of the pages they have created for past clients that involved Flash or any type of video.

The Solution

Microsoft has published several solutions for updating your web pages so that your interactive content will activate without requiring the user to click. These solutions, including a JavaScript-based solution, lets users interact with the content immediately. But in terms of complexity, this is quite simply disastrous.

The good news is there is a better solution for Flash and QuickTime content that we use at Del Padre Visual Productions called Deconcept's. FlashObject and QTObject. FlashObject is a small Javascript file used for embedding Macromedia Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly.

The Good News

This is actually a blessing in disguise. Using solutions like Deconcept’s FlashObject will allow web developers to provide better alternative content to visitors that don’t have the appropriate plug-in or video player. This has always been a big problem in the flash community. Some of the current problems that most sites are currently facing not including the new Active X Microsoft patch are:

There is no plug-in detection. - With no plug-in detection, users may see broken or no content, and if there is no plug-in installed at all, they will either get the 'ActiveX install' dialog box on IE —a box many users now fear because of rampant spyware and malware— or the 'strange puzzle piece' box in Mozilla based browsers. Neither of these plug-in install systems are very user friendly, and usually don't explain themselves very well as to what exactly a user is installing.

There is no content for search engine ranking - When people search for you in Google or other search engines, often the description text ends up showing up as "Detecting Flash Player" or even no description at all. This is a huge waste of prime website real estate that should be used to promote your company or products. Often times developers will not include a link to the other content in the site (since the Flash movie contains the links) so the rest of the site won't be indexed either.

Unreliable plug-in Detection - Often the detection only works with current versions of the Flash player, and needs to be manually updated as new versions of the plug-in are released.

Adds more code to the page - Making it even harder to update or change your content. This method also makes it harder for designers or other people that may be working with your pages to change or add Flash movies.

An overly complicated solution - Many Flash embedding scripts can grow to large file sizes or be overly complicated. FlashObject is designed to be simple and small.

Deconcepts FlashObject can be found here:
http://blog.deconcept.com/flashobject