A couple of advertising agencies have started making popular adverts available in Flash. There are two which I’ve recently enjoyed. This Advert for Tennents Lager has been on in cinemas recently (I go to the cinema quite a lot). It made me laugh a lot. The advert’s great, but the flash implementation isn’t so hot. For a kick off, it lookds like the video has been compressed and then re-compressed for Flash. There are some visible compression artifacts, which I’ve mainly seen in non-quicktime video. There is a link to an mpeg version (noice if you want to download and keep it) and I think that this might have been the version that was compressed for Flash. If you want to compress video for flash, start with as uncompressed an original as you can find, and then bring it into Flash (or, if you’re actually serious, Sorenson Squeeze) and compress it there. Squeeze can also output other video formats for you. It is well worth experimenting with the compression settings. It may be my browser settings but it seems not to know when it’s cached, and keep reloading every time I visit the page. The preloading is also a little uninspired, but since this is more of a press release than a consumer site, it’s maybe understandable. I’ve always loved the way that Looney Toons give you a game to play while the cartoon loads.
This advert for Honda cars (which is fabulous in itself – apparently the only bit of CGI in the whole thing is the exhaust rolling, linking two pieces of painstakingly set up pieces of genius) is part of a much better experience. it is built into a flash interface, which does not wait for the whole movie to download before playing, rather it buffers the appropriate amount of video and therefore starts much more quickly. It also gives me the opportunity to select a video quality appropriate for my bandwidth.