Rants,Raves and Ruminations

The other day a bunch us were hanging around the Captivate Club House when the subject of video in Captivate reared its ugly head. It seems you can’t avoid it. In fact Amazon, realizing its future rests on selling just one more item, will be running live video feeds of authors and others shilling their products on Amazon.com come June 1 of this year. I can hardly wait for Stephen King to kick off a buying frenzy when he offers his latest book and the adds, “but that isn’t all. If you buy this book, I’ll add a copy of the one that started it all, that’s right folks, I am going to kick in “Carrie” at no extra cost to you as a thank you for thinking of me.”

Anyway, there was a rather spirited discussion around using an AVI file in a Captivate movie. I happened to mention that doing that only bloats a Captivate SWF to the point where it flops around like a beached whale in Florida. I then made the mistake of mentioning that I had already gotten an FLV to stream into a Captivate movie so what’s the big deal? This got everyone’s attention and I, being on strike and having nothing else to do, I offered to whip up a “How To” on it. This prompted one of the guys to shoot me the following email:

Hey Tom

I'd definitely be interested in learning more about this. After all you are one of the Masters of Flash.

Best - Mark

That sort of thing, for the average guy, is enough to make them think their life is complete and that “mother I have come home to die.” For me, it makes me a bit uncomfortable because there are guys out there that can eat my lunch and scrape what’s left of me into the slop pail. Then again, being an author and flying all over creation to speak at Conferences and other gatherings of the clan is an unexpected perk. I will also admit it does tend to add the sheen of celebrity around you. When I see the sheen and feel the “Love Lust” start, I turn it off as fast I can because that sheen eventually ignites. I have seen far to many “stars” go into supernova and leave nothing behind but a black hole.

Which brings me back to the subject at hand. A couple of years back I happened to have been among the first to use Flash Video and to actually think, in public, that the run for QuickTime, RealMedia, Windows Media and other web streaming formats was over. I started seriously exploring the subject, playing with it, writing about it, demonstrating it and generally evangelizing what I called the “Death of QuickTime”. Flash 8’s video capabilities sort of validated my cries in the wilderness and now I am seen as some sort of video guru. Not quite.

In my eyes, the gurus are guys like Grant Skinner and Guy Watson. The stuff they are doing with video makes my brain hurt and teeth ache when I try to understand what they are doing. Every now and then I will swing by Iamstatic in Toronto to see what they are up and I always come out of that thinking, “Whoa, now that’s hard core.” When Mario Klingemann in Germany tosses up a way to do alpha video, without an alpha channel, you can do nothing more than shake your head and simply say, “Wow, where did that come from?” Wefail’s intro is nothing more than an overdose of brilliance and thumbing through some of the video stuff on the Macromedia Dev Center leaves me depressed because it shows me how much more I have to learn.

If I am not a “guru” or “Master of Flash” then what the hell am I? That’s easy, I am a teacher.

I have no problem with pointing at guys like Grant, Eric, Hoss,Josh, Guy and even “Tink” and tell you, and them, : “I am their set up guy”. They think this is rather hilarious but they realize it is true. This was sort of brought home to me this past October when Stuart McBride and I started talking about my SparkEurope marathon. Near the end of the discussions I pointed out to Stuart that he had enough stars at the conference to make the average person’s head swim so where did I fit? Stuart’s response caught me completely off guard, “I need a teacher and I keep hearing you are pretty good.”

I'll take that over being a guru.

Oh yeah, about that Captivate Video Tutorial? Pick it up here.