ThumbGenie 1.3.0 Update = Designerfied

There’s an updated version of ThumbGenie in the wild that sports a new skin designed by Nick Gorsline (aka Gorz). It was the first Flex component skin for Nick and first Illustrator-to-Flex workflow for moi. I think after after the experience we’re both looking forward to some Catalyst.

In addition to the new look, videos are now scaled in the preview window to match the output dimensions. This should make it easier to get a handle on what thumbnails of various sizes will actually look like.

Bilinear Resampling, ShaderJob, Pixel Bender And Flash Player

*Update*

Sometimes you’re an idiot and you spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel because you misread one little line of documentation. This is one of those times where I get to be that idiot. I invented a solution for bilinear resampling in Flash Player when I didn’t need to. You can actually get the same results pretty simply using just BitmapData.draw() method with smoothing on (I had read this didn’t work when down sizing), but it requires creating a temp BitmapData object if the source you’re feeding the BitmapData.draw() method is not another BitmapData object (i.e. a DisplayObject). Here’s what that scenario would look like.

            // source in this example is a DisplayObject
            var temp:BitmapData = new BitmapData( sourceWidth, sourceHeight );
            temp.draw( source );
 
            var output:BitmapData = new BitmapData( outputWidth, outputHeight );
 
            var matrix:Matrix = new Matrix();
            matrix.scale( outputWidth / sourceWidth, outputHeight / sourceHeight );
 
            output.draw( temp, matrix, null, null, null, true );
            temp.dispose();

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ThumbGenie 1.2 Now Supports Bilinear Image Resampling (improved scaling in non-geek speak)

One of the things that’s sort of sucked about ThumbGenie has been the quality of scaled thumbnails. The 640×360 image below was generated from a 960×540 video frame. Notice the edge degradation (jaggies) and poorly rendered text that results from the nearest neighbor scaling. (more…)

ThumbGenie 1.1.0 Now Generates Embed Code

I updated ThumbGenie over the weekend to support generation of embed code. Now, every time you create a thumbnail from an MPEG4-AVC file or SWF embed code will be generated. ThumbGenie ships with a default “object / embed” code template, but you can easily modify or replace the template with your own code. (more…)