World Archives Project Video (Ancestry.de)

In 2008 Ancestry.com launched the World Archives Project, a collaborative effort to allow users to key records from historical records, the indexes of which are free for everyone.

Challenge - no resources for internationalization

The U.S. creatived team produced an "our vision" video, which was to be localized for each market, a time consuming task given long rendering times for video.

Solution - "fake" a video

Instead of waiting weeks for the U.S. team to create localized versions, I created an XML based slideshow in Flash that mimicked the video with parameters for transitions, etc.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<slides>
  <slide transition="" type="text" time="3">Menschenleben enthalten</slide>
  <slide transition="out" type="img" time="3">race.jpg</slide>
  <slide transition="" type="text" time="3">Im flüchtigen Gedächtnis</slide>
  <slide transition="in" type="img" time="3">newyork.jpg</slide>
  <slide transition="in" type="img" time="3">girls.jpg</slide>
  <slide transition="" type="text" time="3">Auf veränglichem Papier</slide>
  <slide transition="" type="swf" time="3">documents.swf</slide>
  <!-- etc. -->
</slides>

My "video" was coded in less than a week and is a fraction of the original 9 MB video.