I found a short video at istock photos (less than 10 secs) and want to know if I can use it in a header. I've never purchased a video from istock and I don't even know which format I need it in...it asks if I want it in Quicktime, MP4 or wmv and to be honest, I have no idea. Will this cause a huge problem for visitors to my site? I wanted to have diamonds in the header and wanted them to merely sparkle, like with a flash...but couldn't find one and found the video instead. At the risk of sounding stupid, 'cause I am where this stuff is concerned, the preview of the video has a little gray 'player' around the image. Does it come with that and is there any way I can get rid of it? I just want the video image. Thanks bunches for any help anyone can provide. Honey
The web standard for browser-compatible video is .flv. To use it on your site, you will need to install a flash player and convert the video via Visual Hub. Another option would be to convert to animated gif and use that. The only way I know of to do that would be to get the quicktime version (if you have quicktime, it's free on Mac), save the video as "image sequence" (which will give you all the frames as separate .png images, which can then be opened in PS or Gimpshop and added, one at a time as layers. This would seem to be the only way to display a dynamic image without a player. This isn't as hard as it sounds, although a10-second video might have 300 frames, so that option might be labor intensive. I'm sure there's a better way, but it's hard to say. BTW-wmv is pretty high quality but only Windows Media player users would be able to see it. Quicktime the same . MP4 is generally lower quality but smaller memory. Edit: Actually, for a flash header you'd use .swf instead of .flv.
Yikes...that's what I was afraid of...that I wouldn't have a clue how to go about using it, never even mind altering it, LOL! Maybe I'd do better seeing what someone would charge me to create what I'm looking for? Honey
I'm not sure what you need exactly, but I think I could probably help with making something like that.