BACKSTORY : part five

They say, "Pride goeth before a fall."

So with a good deal of confidence I decided to do my Christmas card for 2008 using Flash again with found images. I decieded to do the song, " Angels We have Heard on High." The images would be images of statues of angels I would find on Yahoo and Google. This seemed expediant because I had percastinated and Christmas was soon approaching. So I did my recording on my Timbre Hill Dulcimer ( http://www.timbrehilldulcimers.com/ ) my David Lynch soprano dulcimer ( http://www.strothers.com/SW_Dulcimers.htm ) and a harmonica using Audiocity and placed it on the sound track level in Flash. The recording is perhaps a little hot and the instruments need to be staggered. Edited all the pictures I had collected and put it together. Things went together pretty well after a few false starts. I had trouble using ... or should I say trying to use the transitions in Flash ... so I manually did them by twossing it in Photoshop and then keyframing the animatin. Then I tried to up load it.

It took forever.

It was hogging to much space. So I redid it. Still it bogged down. So I redid it again and still it was too slow. Talk about frustrated.

Then enlightenment came to me ... almost too late. First Flash works with images at 72dpi (dots per inch) I was importing images at 100dpi and scaling then in Flash to work. With 30 images this bogged down things when it came to streaming the film on the web. Secondly on the site I uploaded to, I was using Dreamweaver CS3 that works with Flash to upload the cartoon as a Flash document rather than converting it to a mp4. However best quality is the default that the web design program uploads the film ... so as I was trying to decrease the file size ... it was bringing it up.

So having to make compromise I upoaded to the site just in time for Christmas. It is still too hoggy so you have to let it load and then play. Sorry

http://www.fldulcimer.com/christmascard08.html