Everybody wants to make their office “greener” these days. We work hard at Tatu Digital to be as green as a office full of electricity guzzling computers and gadgets can be.
Another way is to support other businesses who are helping the world be a greener place. We came across a pretty cool stock agency that not only has archives full of vintage images, but they go he extra mile to go green too.
Alamy sent money to Climate Care to purchase carbon offsets and used the offsets to pay for a project to supply solar powered electric lanterns to low-income families in Kerala, India. How cool is that?

New to buying carbon offsets? You’re not alone, but it’s a booming business of late.

Here’s the deal.
Say you’re driving a relatively fuel efficient passenger car to work every day. You get about 30 mpg, and you’re driving 12,000 miles/year. Your commuting will release about 3.55 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year.
But wait, you can offset your carbon emissions by buying offsets. Your offsets are used for projects that actually reduce the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere, thereby zeroing out your shameful destruction of the environment.

While it seems like a bit like going to confession this actually DOES make a difference in the world. Carbon offset projects are for things like renewable energy, energy efficiency and reforestation projects. Often in under developing countries who need the help. As more and more people get a clue about global warming look for ways to reduce their climate impact, carbon offsets can provide an important solution to global warming.

It doesn’t mean you don’t have to conserve, but it does mean you can spend a little money to help others and maybe not feel so bad about driving that you can’t avoid.

Want to know more? Check out Carbon Fund or Treehugger.com (don’t giggle) for more info.

Everybody wants video on their website these days and with the broadband rates up to 90% at work and almost 70% at home why not?

The real question is; what format do you want it in?

There are a lot of options, all with different positive and negative virtues, but let’s cut to the important part.

Which format is most likely to be seen by your prospective audience?

Clearly Flash movies (FLVs) have the highest saturation level. Equally important is file size. Flash excels at crunching down the file size without loss of quality. That’s why sites like Youtube and Google convert videos into FLV’s for playback. It’s better, it’s faster and everybody can see it.

What if they don’t have the plugin?
While it’s true that some users will not have the Flash plug-in, the odds are even better they worn’t have the current plug-in of the other options either, and Adobe makes it super simple to download the free player. It’s a couple of clicks, no personal informations shared, no spam in your inbox, no long downloads just to view your movie. Did I say already that it’s also FREE?

So how do you do it?
Well, that depends on what format your movie is currently in. Some formats are easier to convert than others, and you may find it easier to convert them to a compatible format first. For example, Flash doesn’t like MP4’s yet. If you import an MP4 you are likely to get the video and no audio. If that happens, just convert the MP4 to a quicktime or WMV file and then import it.

If your movie in Quicktime it’s a snap to export it to FLV, then simply load your movie through a FLV player or import it into your Flash piece. Alternatively you can import a movie in WMV, MO, MPEG or AVI formats.

What about compression?
Flash Video Encoder exports encoded video using the On2 VP6 video codecto use with Flash Player 8. VP6 gives you great compression while maintaining the quality of the video. The omportant thing to note is that Flash will not improve the quality of your video. If it doesn’t look good in the format you’re importing it’s ot going to look any better in Flash. Also because compression works by removing frames of the screen if there is a lot of panning or alpaing in and out you may get pixellation at high comression ratios. If it does, dn’t squeeze it so hard!

There is more to this of course. Stay tuned for some tutorials on importing images and movies into Flash for the best compression, visual and audio quality.

In the meantime, don’t be afraid to experiment with differnet codecs and copression ratios until you get the quality and file size you need. Enjoy!