Customer Rating: 
Summary: Crystal-clear guide for getting Flash Video into your Website
Comment: I may be a "target user" for this excellent, step-by-step guide, Enhancing a Dreamweaver CS3 Web Site with Flash Video. Although I've been designing sites for a while, and I'm comfortable with Dreamweaver CS3, I've been nervous about adding Flash content - despite its visual pizzazz.
NOTE: This concise book does not teach you how to create a Flash video from scratch; rather, it assumes you already have a basic video ready to go. What it does do is explain in crystal-clear language - and show you with full-color illustrations - absolutely everything you need to know to get a Flash Video into a Dreamweaver site and bend it totally to your will: Yes! It is wisely focused on a single project: a site featuring two animated music videos (one with high-quality stereo, the other fast-loading but at "low" quality - that still sounds good). The guide shows you all of the steps needed to take your master video and then create both versions from it.
For that, you need a program I'd never touched - until now - the Flash Video Encoder, a wholly separate program from Flash CS3, although it comes bundled with it. The Encoder is what you use to prepare a video for Flash. It was great to have every (ahem!) "obvious" feature explained, because it wasn't so obvious to me. This book goes over everything, from explaining the various preferences to showing how to get the video into the Encoder. This book also explained how to trim, crop, and resize the video; even how to save your desired encoding settings so you can re-use them on future projects. The author makes clear the trade-offs between file size and quality, so you can decide what's best for your specific needs.
The second half of "Enhancing" shows you everything you need to know about using one of Dreamweaver's fully-styled templates to create your Flash Video-enhanced site. It's a good crash course in site design basics. Then it explains - always with both clear language and full illustrations - how to get both versions of your Flash video (high- and low-quality) into the site and working smoothly. It goes into every last detail, even how to set the appearance of the controller (so-called "skins"), test everything, preview your site not only for Web browsers but for cell phones, and upload it.
There are a couple of additional features that I also appreciate. The "Extra Bits," at the end of every chapter, go into more detail about key concepts. This information would be overkill in the ultra-clear and concise main text. But it's good to know; and it's certainly found its proper spot. You can think of the "Extra Bits" as footnotes on steroids - but healthy ones.
Also, you can download every file used in this project (except for the ones that come automatically with Adobe's software) in two forms: "raw" and ready for you to work on, using the book; and "finished," so you can see how it should be done. There's also a link to the completed - and beautiful - site.
After going through this book, not only do I feel relatively confident about editing and then placing Flash video in Dreamweaver sites, it seems I might just be ready to tackle Flash itself.
Thanks to author David Karlins for another first-rate guide.
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