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

Top 5 ways to improve search engine ranking

OK, so you have a website. Perhaps its a simple, small site that you might have even designed yourself or a high-end corporate website that was created by a professional design firm. Either scenario, creating a website is often a major investment in time and or money. So now that you have the site completed, online and you have submitted it to the major search engines but your not getting traffic, sales leads and brand awareness that you had hoped for.

This is where SEO comes in. SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. This is the process of structuring a web page so that it is found, read, and indexed by search engines in the most effective manner possible. Many people underestimate the importance Search Engine Optimization. I often hear "My website address is included in all of our advertising. Why wouldn't people be able to find it?" or "We have a corporate site and we dont sell products or services online so its not important that people find us outside of our businesses region" The problem is, how can you be sure that every potential customer has been reached by your advertising? And if you have a corporate / non e-commerce site its still important to rank well in the search engines to increase your businesses brand awareness and increase sales leads, which will lead to increased ROI from your corporate website.

SEO is a real art, and there are many SEO companies that make a living offering this service and charge big money for it and that sucks. Most of these people do little more than what I am about to outline here for free. The rules and process to obtain high rankings in search engines are continually changing and this article is not the end all and be all of optimizing your pages. However, I have decided to create a list of the top five most important and over looked factors in improving your search engine rankings in major engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. By following these 5 steps you will be able to allow your site to earn its keep so to speak, and it might even become a part of your full-time sales staff.

1. Forget keywords, keyphrases is where its at!

Even if you have no experience in SEO I am sure that you are familiar with the term Keywords. When I begin optimizing sites for search engines back in 1996, the thing to do back then was to create a list of relevant keywords and put them in your sites keyword Meta tags and in the page content and you would get some decent rankings. Now, things have changed and it is difficult if not impossible to get high rankings based on keywords. Instead, you need to think about keyphrases. Determine your Key Phrases; the easiest way to do this is to ask yourself "what would I search for to find a product or service like mine?" Use the Overture keyword tool together with the number of results on Google to find out what keywords are searched for and how many other websites are targeting them.

If your business is geographically restricted, then your keyphrases should reflect this. For example, if you are a real-estate broker in Springfield, Massachusetts, then the key phrase "buying real estate" is a waste of time; instead, the more specific phrase "buying real estate in Springfield, Massachusetts" is what you want to be thinking about.

2. The Title Tag

Without question the title tag of your page is the single most important factor to consider when optimizing your web page for the search engines. Its also the number one overlooked item that I often see when I am dealing with a site re-design and when browsing the web. Most engines & directories place a high level of importance on keywords that are found in your title tag. The title tag is also what the search engines usually use for the title of your listing in the search results. The title tag is what you see displayed at the top of the browser when you are on a web page. For instance if you are on our home page at www.delpadre.com you will see that the title reads "Interactive new media, web site design, Flash design, CD-ROM, video and 3D Animation"

The two biggest mistakes I see is that clients often only put the name of the site or business in the title or even worst some inexperienced designers leaving a default name in the title tag from the design software they are using like "Untitled Page" or "New Page 1". This will do you absolutely no good unless of course the name of the product or service you are selling is named "Untitled Page" or "New Page 1"!

3. The Description and Keyword Meta Tags

The Meta tags are also very important to getting good rankings, and on many search engines, the Meta Description tag is what gets displayed directly under the sites title tag. Meta tags were originally created to help search engines find out important information about your page that they might have had difficulty determining otherwise. For example, related keywords or a description of the page itself.

Google will often display the Description Meta tag's contents instead of displaying a fragment of the page. For instance if you take a look at this search for "High impact media production" our site is number 1 of 71 million results in Google because of the Title Tags keyphrases matching the Description Meta Tag. You will also notice that the words that Google used to determine the searched relevancy are highlighted like "Media", "Productions" and "High Impact". I recommend that your Description Meta tag not exceed 250 characters including spaces.

The other Meta tag is the Meta Keywords tag. What you do is take your keyphrases, and enter them in the order you think is most appropriate, separated by commas. Don't repeat a keyphrase, and don't repeat any individual word more than 5 times or so. Some engines like Google don't use the Keyword Meta Tag when crawling your site but many others do. You should only use the keyword phrases that you also used in the copy of your page, title tag, meta description, and other tags. I recommend that your Keywords Meta not exceed 1024 characters including spaces.

4. Page Content

The first paragraph of your page should recapitulate and expand upon everything in your title and meta tags. You need to have all those keyphrases in it. However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be written with them in mind. Text is what the search engines love to look at the most. The more relevant text you can write on each page the better it is for the search engines and the better it is for your end users.

For best results I recommend that each page you submit has at least 150 words of copy on it. It might be too much copy for some pages but the search engines really like it so you should do your best to increase the amount of copy where you can. This text should include your most important keyword phrases, but should remain logical & readable. Be sure to use those phrases that you have used in your other tags in steps 2 and 3. Optimizing your page copy is one of the most important things you could possibly do to improve your listings in the search engines.

5. Links, Links, Links

Many search engines use some sort of linking weight in their algorithm. Meaning, the more people that have links to your website the higher your results will appear in searches. So after you build this great website, let the world know about it. Contribute in blogs, forums, and message boards relating to your services or products. Write articles. Become an authority on what your website deals in and before you know it you will be getting those one-way links without even asking for them. Our site www.delpadre.com has been online since 1995 so we have built up a fair amount of incoming links from the web design community, inspirational sites and even personal websites and blogs from people that enjoy our work.

So thats it, these are my top 5. This does not even scratch the surface of what goes into a comprehensive internet marketing plan but its a good place to start. There are many other methods including optimizing and adding keyphrases in your "alt" images attribute, putting keywords in the actual name of the files and directories on your site and the actual domain name to name a few. As always, you are welcome to contact us directly and put our knowledge of Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization to work for you.

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