Flash and photos for real estate site

[northstar]

Hi, I have a real estate site and am looking for the simplest, cheapest way to post video tours of my listings. Is it feasible to use my digital camera, and convert the .mov file to flash, then embed the flash movie. Or is it necessary to invest in video equipment and editing software? I do not need excellent quality, but I do need large quanitities, so speed matters. Thanks in advance.

Cindy

[gorky]

As long as you have the right cables and some capture software, you can capture the movie and import it into flash.

Another way to do a tour would be to use images and either make a GIF animation which would be much smaller, or even a user-driven walkthrough where the viewer could progress forward, backward or look left, right using buttons and pictures, kind of like the old game "Myst" if you've ever played or heard of it. I'm just throwing out a suggestion, so I'm sorry if it doesn't suit your needs.

Back to video, you'll need to optimize the length of the videos as well as their quality in order to get the most beneficial size. Also, you're going to want to make sure that the flash-videos are hosted on a server with a good transfer rate, as you don't want viewers with fast connections having to wait for a slow server.

Hope this helps,

-Gorky