Video markup with schema.org

Since last year rich snippets has expanded their presence in most of search results. Content that includes restaurants, people, products,  recipes, businesses, organizations and events are using this markup for highlighting results on search engines.

Recently Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex has added support for schema.org video markup allowing you to index videos in a way that make your content relevant in search queries.  Just few properties are required and might look like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject">

  <h2>Video: <span itemprop="name">Title</span></h2>
  <meta itemprop="duration" content="T1M33S" />
  <meta itemprop="thumbnailURL" content="thumbnail.jpg" />
  <meta itemprop="embedURL"
    content="http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123" />
  <object ...>
    <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" ...>
  </object>
  <span itemprop="description">Video description</span>
</div>

After you create the markup for your page is appropriate to test them with Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool to make sure it's correctly working, there is an additional information that significantly contribute to enhance the ranking of your videos on search results:

• Do not use any type of javascript for loading your schema.org markup
• Submit your video sitemap to provide additional information about you video content
• Make sure your videos are publicly available

This video markup is also an important tool for reinforcing your SEO strategy, so keep it in mind every time you start up a SEO list.


Video results appears in search and also in video results, everyday millions of people find videos on search engines, definitely schema.org video markup will give them more accurate results and will reduce time in the search process.

Responsive Web Design / Development

Responsive web design has become viral on the web design scene on the last few months; many bloggers have shown their points of view related to the concept of developing a website design in a manner that helps lay out dimensions to get changed according to the user’s computer screen resolution.  Is commonly thought of as a design trend, but if we approach a different side of this coin, it allows the developer to create a site that is optimized for each platform, both in navigation, readability and load time.

Responsive web designing is a fully diverse designing version than the traditional web designing, With access to the Internet available on more than hundred  devices, the screen sizes on which people are experiencing websites have become extremely varied, as more and more devices are being released and browsers are adding more capabilities for CSS, and in particular the @media queries in CSS3. Developers must know about the pros and cons of responsive web designing and produce specifically targeted experience to your website visitors without having to maintain multiple websites for all devices.

Chromakey recipe

Chromakey is a vital part of our video projects, but in this magic chromakey world exists some essentials things we must to know, lighting is the most important factor in determining whether your key will look wonderful or terrible.
Place your subject at least 9 feet (3 meters) in front of your blue or green screen.

Your camera must be as far away as possible. This will result in a narrow lens angle.

Important: green or blue screen is out of focus, irregularities will be less visible; a smaller portion of the green or blue screen is visible, which is far easier to light evenly; your foreground subject doesn’t cast shadows on your background.

When you do blue screen, you might want to use an orange/yellow toned backlight. Not too colored, half CTO or Straw will do. This will reduce possible blue fringing in hair or clothes, because the color of this backlight is complementary to the blue. The result after you have keyed will look like a normal white backlight.
If you use green screen you can use a pale pink or magenta correction filter (1/4 or 1/2 minus green).

A simple chromakey recipe:

1. Set up a blue or green background of the type you are going to use in the shoot.
2. Light it evenly
3. Put your camera on manual iris
4. Place a white card directly on your background (you can also write the f-stop that you use on this card for reference). Make a series of recordings, about 10 sec each, at different f-stops, starting at the underexposed side. So f11, f8, f5.6, f4, f2.8, f2.
5. Capture the footage and put it in the timeline
6. Apply a color correction filter to the clip
7. In the effects palette click setup
8. Turn on the scopes and choose vectorscope and Y (luminance)
9. Locate that part of the clip where the white card just reaches 100% on the waveform monitor. It might be just below 100% at a certain f-stop and clipped to 100% in the next one. In that case it will be somewhere in between.

This basic steps will give you very nice kyes

Stream yourself

Nowadays show and produce videos on internet continues to both excite and frustrate minds, but if you want to keep struggling on the road, these are some useful tools for stream your videos:

Stream from the web:
www.ustream.com
www.livestream.com

Stream by your own:
VLC/Videolan
Windows Media Encoder
Star Media Center
Unreal Media Server

Flash Particles

Particles are part of the many interesting effects we can create in Flash. it has a number of native features to allow for 3D transformation and projection. You’ll find that this is a combination of using the Vector, Vector3D, Matrix3D, PerspectiveProjection, etc.

Sure you would like a realistic candle flame, or explosion, or smoke. but certainly this will take you a lot of time, there are some components like Partigen (i think this is some kind of Particle Illution variation) that help us to save time.

In my opinion particles scratch are the most effective, they have been made for an specific purpose and of course adapted to your project, so put your hands on work, refresh your math lessons and create some new brand effect.

Here is a very simple tutorial, it could help you with basic skills
Simple Particle Effect

Go straight to inspiration

Sometimes we’re inspired, sometimes we’re guided but sometimes we go straight to number one