DIY Transparent Video Greeter
Question: How do you make one of those transparent video greeters talk over a website or webpage? Is this a hard thing to do?
Answer: Seems like every website you visit nowadays has a video spokesperson telling you something the minute you visit. Statistics say that a live person talking to you will not only grab your attention immediately, it will reduce the bounce rate and increase sales- let alone look cool. Not sure what a transparent video greeter is? Take a look at liveonpage.com.
What always catches my attention when visiting these two sites is the fact there was an actual video over the web page and you could see right through it to the content under the video. You can start and stop the video and even scroll without moving the “spokesperson’s” position on the page.
This obviously happens with an Alpha Channel video but prior to the release of Flash 8 and the inclusion of Alpha channels in the FLV this sort of thing was rather complex. Now that flash has advanced features, it now turns out it is not terribly difficult to achieve. You just have to think a bit differently.
The key to the process lies in the Object/Embed tags used to embed a Flash SWF file in a web page.
They simply tell the browser how to handle the SWF file, which SWF to use , where it is, and its dimensions. One of the neat things about the Object tag is the ability to add parameters to the content enclosed in the tag. Combine that with an absolutely positioned div in a Layer and you have the ability to lay a SWF with an Alpha channel over your web page.
The rest of this article is contained in a tutorial package ready for download:
Unless things have changed, I don’t think Flash 8 is available for us on the Mac. Does your how-to on this “transparent video greeter” pertain to us FCP/Mac guys? How do we produce this effect?
Comments or additional questions?
Leave your response here