Flex Basics – The Script Tag

Grasping the simple things is often the hardest part to getting up and running with Flex. For example, a friend of mine who I’ve been trying to pull over from the dark side (.Net guy) asked, “I’ve got an MXML Application with a button in it that I’d like to bind to a method–where’s the code behind.”

The simple answer of course is to point him to the “script” tag (let’s just forget code behind support was ever added to Flex). Rather than typing up a long winded response I made a quick and dirty Jing video to “show him around” Flex’s script tag (no deep explanation, I’m just teaching by “doing”).
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Pixel Bender + Video = Killer Runtime Effects

I’ve been playing with Pixel Bender a bit and noticed that there weren’t really any examples (I could find) that illustrated effects being applied to video. So I gathered together a whole slew of kernels from the interweb, downloaded a copy of Dancing Matt and shoehorned them into a media player that allows you to select and apply the effects during video playback. (more…)

After Effects Spotlight Effect

*Update*

I highly recommend you check out a much more recent tutorial I did that illustrates how to use After Effects’ built-in 3d spotlights.

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Sometimes you really just want to emphasize a particular area in a screencast which means if you’re like me its time to dust off your favorite compositor (After Effects in my case) and add a little visual magic. This short screencast (2:40) gives you a leg up if you’re chasing this technique. (more…)

The HTML 5 Hype Machine = Big Web Video Lie

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to survive all of the hype and misinformation surrounding HTML 5 video.

No mention of the 800 lbs. gorilla–codec licensing and royalties. Who is paying for all of this plugin killing? Are we relying on “proprietary” OS vendors such as Apple and Microsoft to provide a common set of codecs and foot the bill (where’s the gain in that)? What about open source solutions like FreeBSD, Linux and Open Solaris? Oh and there’s this little thing called mobile–given its ascendancy it might be the major player in this market by the time HTML 5 comes along. And you guessed it–that means some sort of standard set of codecs will need to be on all of these devices before the HTML 5 video tag means much of anything.

While we’re at it I should mention that HTML 5 developers will need a whole slew of low level media APIs that allow them to build interesting media centric functionality into their widgets and web applications. I mean, you want all those fancy playback controls, tagging ratings, searching, etc., right?

Get all of this squared away and maybe you could talk about the death of web plugins (hell, existing plugin vendors are probably more afraid of new plugins than they are of HTML 5).

Gulp, looks like the folks at Wired don’t really know what they’re talking about.

Wow – Interactive Video Manipulation

Holy sh*tola, I want all of this all of this stuff…yesterday:

Interactive Video Object Manipulation from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

Here’s the link to a bit more background + some academic papers the team behind these techniques has assembled.

http://www.adobe.com/technology/graphics/video_visualization_and_interaction.html

I see quite a few applications for screen video. For instance it would be great to associate a callout bubble with a window, or see a path that the mouse or a window followed, or reposition windows by intelligently looking forward and backward in the video–lot’s to chew on.