I’m designing a website for my Dad, but he wants something I don’t know how to do. He wants an actor to walk around the website and talk. He has recorded the actor in front of a green screen and is able to delete the background, but we don’t know to integrate this video into the website.
So basically the website will be the background with this dude walking around and talking. Do we use Shockwave or Flash or JavaScript or something else?
Thanks
That sounds a little annoying. But the easiest way would be to make the entire site in flash.
You need both flash and javascript to do this correctly. The area that the actor walks across will be blocked to clicks, so you need to limit this area to not cover navigation if this is constantly on screen.
The video needs to be saved to an alpha channel encoded file that can then be encoded into a on2 vp6 flv/swf (this is the only flash video codec that supports transparency).
The playback swf for the video needs to be embedded using wmode transparent. Ideally, have a javascript function in the page html that can be called from the swf via external interface on completion of the video - this function will remove the embedding div so that it doesn’t block interaction with the underlying html any longer than necessary. You’d also use javascript if you need to position or resize the embedding div dynamically.
Awesome. I think I’m just going to hang myself instead.
it’s not that hard but you have to export flash video from after effects with alpha channels enabled.Then stream it through flash on web page. It is easier then everyone is making it sound, you just need the right software to do it.
Alright I’ll forward this thread on to my dad and I’m sure he’ll be able to do it for his page now. Thanks to everyone for your quick feedback.
found a few tutorials that might hopefully give you a better idea of how to at least get the Flash video with the transparent background…
over 3 years old, so maybe a little dated…but still looks like it could be useful
http://www.pjenkins.co.uk/blog/index.php/2006/09/22/transparent-flash-video-for-a-website
part 2 of a 2-part tutorial…getting the video to flash. part one uses Premiere to create a GIF sequence of images instead of a video, so didn’t include that link thinking it might confuse things. it’s in the Related Articles list if you want to take a look anyway.
http://animation.about.com/od/flashanimationtutorials/ss/tranflashvideot.htm
I don’t really know javascript, so I won’t comment on that part. If I happen to find something on the web, I’ll be sure to post it here, though. 
If page is html you can make the flash background transparent by adding the wmode=transparent parameter inside html code, but note that some browsers (I think mozilla) will not allow users to click html content thrugh the transparent flash background, so is best to keep the actual flash width/height to minimum and maybe move the entire flash file inside html window with javascript.
That is probably how I would do it.
Or as someone mentioned above: make the whole page in flash, depending on what other content you have in side, this might be better solution.
If you want to see how to make flash files transparent: LINK.
That’s awesome…there’s so many ways to do something when designing features for a website!