Nothing special, move on, move on :) just thought I'd post it though.
You'll need the flash player 8 for this:
I really like that this can be done with nothing but actionscript and bitmaps.
I love watching the video banners that MM puts up, because so many ideas come to me as to how to spoof them!
Anyways, I had a few ideas on one of the latest video banners they have up and decided to put one into proof of concept. Proof of concept?.. hmm well, I went through the video shooting, graphics and video encoding etc to get it up for all to view.
This one spoofs the walking man that walks across the screen to pick up the Studio 8 box that is sitting on the floor.
I do have to say that this is one of the easier ideas that I picked, just due to lack of time to mess around with stuff like this. It's not quite up to snuff, but I like it :D
Anyways, if you got the Flash Player 8 plugin installed then here it is (if not, go install it and then view it, 'cause it needs v8 player to run..).
Let me know your thoughts if ya got 'em in the comments :)
Just a quick rundown of how I made it:
- Video was done with a green screen, chroma keyed in After Effects.
- The kicked box was done in Swift3D v4.5 (thanks to the new simple bitmap placing, creating the box was a snap) and then published out as a PNG sequence with alpha (the white halo was matted with AE and the shadow was added with a new light layer). I actually wish I spent a bit more time on the animation.. it looks funny still to me.
- The graphics for the box and logo was snagged from MM's site and "adjusted" in PS, brought into AE, added a drop shadow and just masked it on with the movement of the leg.
- The video is encoded for Flash8 and then I just used the netStream object to progressively load in the FLV.
Nothing special that's for sure, but I just love doing these spoofs :D
By the way MM, if you guys are offended or just don't want it up, let me know and I'll take it down right away.
I certainly hope so. Zinc is good at times but it still struggles to do what Screenweaver did *YEARS* ago. I can't wait to see Screenweaver 3 to come out as the extremely convenient asynchronous callbacks were great, and there are no problems with text issues like Zinc is riddled with. Not only that, the alpha apps were created beautifully.
Not only that, I really like the new price :D
The ony issue? a memory leak that slowly sucked up memory the longer you had the app open.
But in a way, hopefully this will get MDM to get their act together and actually fix the bugs that are bugging people the most instead of making workarounds that just cause more problems. No more monopoly guys! Screenweaver is BACK!
This video totally cracks me up :D
Good use of flash video in this instance.
When you get in, click on "showreel" and then Jebs Jobs in the list of the player.
(warning, long post..go get a coffee)
I couldn't help but respond to the couple of posts out there on flash video of late. The first one is Geoff's post about how flash video is taking a bit more precendence in their everyday work, and then how JD posts about what made him take notice of the post was exactly that. Not me, not even close... The one item that made me snicker and nod was the part where Geoff points out that flash video just isn't being used by the masses yet at all for "kooky amateur video".
Sure you have the "major" sites like Toyota, Sony etc doing Flash 8 video (before it's even released...), and then there are the all flash sites up until now for movies and games and whatnot that put some flash video in there, but for the most part "just normal movies" are almost always up in WMV, MOV or MPG.
When you go to sites that have funny movies, commercials, bloopers etc, they are most likely quicktime. Why is it that these people don't use flash video? Could it be the (up until flash 8 video) bloated size and crap quality? well.. maybe not crap, but it doesn't compare to any others. Is it perhaps because people just don't understand how to put Flash up? How about the HUGE misconception that the flash player isn't available enough/people don't have it installed so won't be able to see it? I think this one is a bit big. Also in relation to that problem, thanks to the crap flash stuff out there, people hate flash and install blockers specific to stop flash content!
Or how about that you have to go out and buy a completely seperate encoder just to create FLV files? That there is no FLV player that is used commonly used everywhere? Then, you go through the trouble of downloading the whole file from whatever page it is on, snag it from your cache (because nobody puts a link up to an FLV file, and it's not like you can right click a flash file and "save to disk") to view it offline, double click it and it doesn't play in anything..
At least when you go to a page with windows media or quicktime you are guaranteed a play/pause button, volume and playhead with some reference as to how much is loaded etc. It looks like a video player, it feels like a video player and this is what the masses are used to. This by far is not the fault of Flash but there are a lot of messed up video players out there, and they are all are slightly different. To the savvy of us it's nothing, but without a familiar interface it's tough to see what's up on the page when suddenly some vid shows up and all you want to do is stop it and the interface is completely different from what you may be used to. It would be smart of MM to make a free standalone player though... I wonder why they don't.
Of course, there are some great players out there, and some really nifty ideas but that's not the point. The point is that flash video has to get out there in a comfortable and intuitive way that everybody can understand. The way to play it is "normal", the way to upload it is "normal" etc. MM is trying hard to do this I think providing a new Flash video component that is easy to setup/skin and use though. Kudos there :).
Anyways, once that happens I think we'll see a lot more flash video out there especially with the leaps and bounds that it has made in the latest release. As much as I'm doing a bit of bashing on the flash video concept I'm all for it and I don't even remember the last time I uploaded an MPG/MOV/WMV file.
On the flip side:
What is the one MAJOR bonus that I can see with flash video? Being able to put in closed captioning (something that most video and now podcasting don't have at all) and timed animations. The interactivity is most definitely the biggest bonus for flash video, and that alone for us makes up the difference that we have to pay with bigger files to get the same quality that the other encoders enjoy. Of course that all changes now with the new encoder from ON2.
Anyways, just some thoughts at the moment that I had to pop out onto the blog. Hopefully that makes a few people think on what they are doing with vid out there.
A couple of days late in adding this to our blog but, we've been working on this renewal for months now and it's finally a reality!
MediaCreator.jp renewal is a complete identity, design and development renewal of Japan's largest web designer/developer tutorial community site 3E4D. We've been looking to do this for quite some time just due to the amount of work that would go into making any sitewide changes due to the over 1500 pages worth of content. This can now be done by adjusting just a few pages!
The site now runs off of asp and coldfusion, with flash remoting splattered all over the place for getting results in the tutorial search pod, download page, main poll on the home page and the administration for adding downloads, tutorials, and changing the poll.
All of the administration has now been moved to a standalone desktop application which takes advantage of Flash remoting. This in itself has made it infinitely easier to update and add to the site, which is the most important part of a community site. When content starts to get stale, people get bored, and we don't want that.
We also improved the performance greatly by reducing the amount of pages and the amount of code on the page that the web server has to serve. The site itself loads faster and getting to the tutorials and paging through them, the main part of the site, is extremely quick.
Adding in some upgrades to the forum, rebuilding the download area for direct linking, adding RSS feeds that people can use in RSS readers for keeping up with additions, improving viewing of all pieces all-round has made this renewal a major milestone with this community site.
The one are that we really wanted to improve was the tutorials which I think we have by adding a print only page for easy printing and giving the users a place to put comments and questions on the forum for each and every tutorial. I got that tip from flashcomguru which I thought was a great idea for organization. They load quicker and just in general are easier to view I think.
I've gotta say that I'm really really looking forward to see how much the community grows from this point on.
With over a hundred tutorials to port over yet we've still got a bit of work ahead of us but it's looking great even with what's in there up to this point. If you can read Japanese, or like to use translators to view it then check it out here.
Just a quick example of using the alpha channel in flash 8's video.
Link:
http://www.mediacreator.jp/forum/forum_posts.asp?FID=23&TID=59&PN=1&get=last
I gotta say I really like it. Coulda used it in my spoof I did a while back...
While taking a break from a *major* site renewal which I hope to post about in the next couple of days, I started going through some of my books that I still have in packed boxes from my move.
One that caught my eye was "In Search of Stupidity". I bought this book quite a while back from a review on somebody's blog.. I have no idea of who's anymore.. and read it through while on the train to work everyday in Japan.
I swear that I must have been the oddest foreigner (let alone person) on the train for that 2 weeks because I would just start giggling or snickering over some of the items that the author brought up. I'd literally have to close the book and look out the window or something to not burst out in laughter and be a total oddity. That along with the writing style, facts, points brought up, I definitely recommend this book to anybody that is around 26 to 40 and had their hands a bit dirty in the "techinical industry" while in school. A lot of the topics in the book will be very familiar and it will sort of "come together" and make some sense.
For example there is a section about the fall of Novell to Microsoft in the networking area and it really made me realize what a great decision I had made at the time because I was literally inches away from going towards Novell instead of Microsoft Server admin etc. I had the whole "network admin package" for studying. The author brings up this topic in pretty good detail and much humour, even reading it again now makes me laugh (good thing I'm at my desk this time). I didn't study it just due to the fact that it was insanely hard to manage and understand due to the lack of GUI. (for me at least)
There are a lot of good subjects and points brought up, if you have time to read a book for a few laughs and some interesting insight into what happened in the 80's and 90's in the techinical industry, pick it up and read it. It's a few years old now I think so getting a used one or borrowing from the library shouldn't be a problem if you're not up to buying it.