Make CMYK color wheel tool in AE & Flash

AEtuts has an interesting looking premium tutorial by Dave Scotland, Creating a CMYK Color Wheel Tool – AE Premium. Here's the preview:

motion.tv tonight: Flash + AE, Repousse, Boris

motion+connect has an online event tonight starting 7:30 pm MST.

Here's the a summary of the agenda; there's more detail on content and timing on the website:

• Flash Animation with After Effects with Stanton Cruse
• Using Repousse and 3D in Photoshop CS5 Extended, with Scott Valentine
• Paul Ezzy presents the new filters in Boris Continuum Complete 7 for After Effects and Premiere Pro, including a 3-way color grade filter with built-in keying and masking tools, a new video noise reduction tool, a spline-based warp filter, an audio-driven keyframe generator, a new OpenGL particle engine, and still and video morph technology.

Update: motion+connect posted the presentations from their Tuesday online event (via).

Google to Open-source VP8 + iPhone OS evil

There are more wrinkles ahead if NewTeeVee is right about Google to Open-source VP8 for HTML5 Video :

"a divide between which video format can be viewed in which browser. H.264-encoded HTML5 video can be viewed in Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome and in the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser from Microsoft. Meanwhile, Ogg Theora playback for HTML5 video is supported by Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Google hopes to stem that divide by making VP8 open source, providing a high-quality and open alternative to existing codecs. [...]

While an open-source VP8 could end concerns about H.264’s licensing issues and Theora’s quality, questions still remain about whether Google can provide a video standard on which everyone can agree. Microsoft only recently announced support for H.264 for HTML5 playback, and has never been quick to adopt open standards. And Apple, which has been the driving force behind HTML5 video and H.264 playback on the iPhone and iPad, might not be keen on the idea of switching up its codec support on those devices anytime soon."

Update: via @tgaul, iPhone OS 4.0: Now With Added Evil by James Higgs agrees with Steve Jobs on many points but says that Apple will make exceptions on certain development tools, invalidating Jobs' claims. He concludes that:

"What should be clear from this analysis is that the target of Apple’s hostility is not Adobe, but Google [soon an iPad rival too]. Taken together with iAds, section 3.3.1 is a way to preserve Apple’s current domination of the mobile app market. (Of course, that doesn’t stop Apple relishing a further knock to Adobe.) [...]

Instead of a confident Apple heralding the next stage in the iPhone’s development as the best mobile OS on the planet, Thursday’s announcement ensures that Apple now looks scared of Android, and is prepared to act rashly to defend itself. Rather than take on Android with superior features, better build quality, better usability and aggressive pricing, Apple shows its anxiety by hamfistedly trampling all over the people who helped them become the number on mobile app platform in the first place: the developers."

Update 2: it's the nature of business, Tensions Rise for Twitter and App Developers.

HTML5Video.org + Videoonwikipedia.org

Excerpts from NewTeeVee, Kaltura Launches HTML5Video.org, Publishes HTML5 Media Library:

Open source video platform provider Kaltura launched a new site called HTML5Video.org today that is meant to be an industry resource for HTML5 video-related issues. The site is supported by Mozilla, the Open Video Alliance and the Wikimedia Foundation. The launch coincides with the release of Kaltura’s HTML5 Media Library, which enables web site owners to embed videos in their sites through HTML5 without locking out users of older browsers that don’t support Flash-free web video just yet.
[...]
The unveiling of HTML5Video.org comes only one day after the launch of another site promoting HTML5 video to end users. Videoonwikipedia.org, which was launched yesterday by the Participatory Culture Foundation with support from Kaltura and others also involved with HTML5Video.org, wants to get users to contribute more video to Wikipedia. HTML5Video.org, on the other hand, seems much more geared toward professionals, offering business headlines as well as a link to a forum hosted by Kaltura’s open source video developer community at Kaltura.org.

Read more on NewTeeVee.

Sneak peek of Flash CS5 + physics demo

Lee Brimelow posted a Sneak peek of Flash CS5:

"I just uploaded a new video that shows all of the exciting new features coming in Flash CS5. In a previous video I focused on the new iPhone development features but this video shows the rest of the cool stuff we have in store for you. This includes the XFL format, the new text engine, and the one and only Deco tool. Again, this is a prerelease version so everything is subject to change."

Update: iPhone and physics demos of CS5 (via CS5.org),

Adobe Max 2009 sessions + Flash Physics

Adobe.TV has an Adobe Max 2009 Design channel for all sessions related to designers and a MAX 2009 Develop channel for sessions for developers. There's some AE-related sessions of course, like presos by Troy Church on Flash and by Michael Coleman on expressions.

Sessions may take a day to show up -- look out for the sneak peaks of Physics in Flash Pro (compatible with kinematics) and copy/paste animation and keyframes from Flash to an HTML canvas.

Flash CS5 to build native iPhone apps

John Nack summarizes the announcement and links to more in Use Flash to build native iPhone apps.

There a video showing off some of this on Adobe Labs -- and some Techmeme clusters for the wrinkles.

HTTP video: reports on Firefox and Apple

Platform adjustments are slowly coming to web video with HTTP streaming. Ars Technica had some background last month in HTML 5 and Web video: freeing rich media from plugin prison.
Adobe views can be seen through the prism of John Dowdell (who seems to have relocated to Twitter; more Adobe views below).

Update: see also Ars July 5 article Decoding the HTML 5 video codec debate, and later Smashing Magazine's HTML5 and The Future of the Web.

Nevermind Safari 4, Beet.TV wonders: Firefox 3.5 is Released -- A Historic Day for Web Video? Beet.TV provides the interview with a Mozilla rep below. For more complete overviews of Firefox 3.5, see Ars Technica and CNET. Note that HTML5 is not without its faults, so Mozilla has already collected fallback hacks so video will still play for those brave enough to jump in.



Last August AEP reported on Broadcasting live video from phone, while many awaited Apple moves (even gamers). With the latest iPhone release, NewTeeVee starts to discuss the video streaming features in The Lowdown on Apple’s HTTP Adaptive Bitrate Streaming and See Apple’s HTTP Adaptive Video Streaming in Action (video below):



* Update: see also Beet.tv, Adobe Readies Open Framework for Universal Video Player, and below, Adobe Lines up with Open Video Initiative and HTML 5.0.

Flash, FLV, and alpha channels: straight or premultiplied?

Todd Kopriva's After Effects region of interest features this guest post from Tim Kurkoski, an After Effects quality engineer, Flash, FLV, and alpha channels: straight or premultiplied?

The punchline is that Flash only supports alpha channels that are pre-multiplied with black.

Intro to Pixel Bender + Aviary Peacock

There's a recording of yesterday's presentation by Kevin Goldsmith of an Introduction to Pixel Bender for Photoshop and AfterEffects at the Creative Suite Developer Summit.

Also interesting is Mario Klingemann in Adobe TV's Here Be Pixels on node-based image processing in the Flash/AIR-based Aviary Peacock (intro below).

Searchable Video in Flash

Peachpit is offering a free chapter excerpt, "Searchable Video in Flash," from After Effects for Flash | Flash for After Effects: Dynamic Animation and Video with Adobe After Effects CS4 and Adobe Flash CS4 Professional by Richard Harrington & Marcus Geduld. The link under Download might be broken depending on your timing.

And of course see this AEP post: Adobe: 'The future of video is searchable', and others filed under

Flash Catalyst demo

Adobe's Flash Catalyst, soon to be in public beta, makes more sense to me than Flash, but because it was designed for Flex, hopes are not too high. Anyway here's Kevin Lynch’s Flash Catalyst Demo from a few weeks ago. via Eismann

Adobe NAB tidbits: TV, Story, Strobe

FreshDV has video demos of both Adobe Story and Adobe’s step to integrate Flash into TVs and set-top boxes and bring web video into living rooms. Zatz Not Funny! says "Flash on a set-top runs surprisingly well - so smooth you can’t tell the difference between it and traditional QAM video delivery." You can see for yourself at FreshDV.

Beet.TV notes other big news from Adobe -- Strobe -- the new video framework for building online video players. Of course back-end tools and the ability to play on TV could be an attractive-enough basis to create a standard. Probably not unrelated is news from NewTeeVee of the end of content syndication for downloadable media in Adobe Media Player. Hopefully Adobe will redo AMPs crippled UI to match or beat QuickTime Player, in addition developing of metadata and the backend. Here are video interviews from Beet.TV on Flash TV, Strobe, & partners:

Adobe: 'The future of video is searchable'

Todd Kopriva noted a new demonstration (pictured above with less retinal burn) and a white paper (PDF) that shows how to create searchable video using CS4 Production Premium:

"This new paper and demonstration show how to use Soundbooth to create an XML file that contains the metadata, rather than using After Effects scripting to convert cue points [discussed by Dan Ebberts without a demo app in February at the Adobe Developer Connection]."

The Delve player demo seems more attractive and interactive, but this is just the beginning; Google (video) and Microsoft (video) haven't made a splash quite yet.

Background on this use of metadata can be found in previous AEP posts like Metadata, search, analytics & monetization and Speech-to-Text metadata in web video. (which mentioned XMP Library for ActionScript on Adobe Labs which showed "the karaoke app").

To see current search & discover approaches, you might have to dig through Reel SEO's handy list of video Search engines or a Wikipedia page to start. Interesting ideas on video search were discussed in More-Accurate Video Search, Video Search Challenge Isn’t Speech Recognition, It’s Content Owner Management, and in the NYT in Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them (on Blinkx) and Zeroing In on Your Favorite Video Clips (on VideoSurf and DigitalSmiths use of computer vision algorithms).

By the way, Adobe uses something called Piximilar as the visual search engine in Photoshop Elements 6. Out on ahead is some more cool stuff; see Is Visual Search The Future Of Mobile Advertising? and this via the same site :





It almost seems like Skynet is real with these tiny smart cameras and Cylons and Terminators everywhere.

Update: It looks there's competitor -- see Merlin Video (via News Videographer).

Update 2: (06/15) Richard Harrington follows up with Searchable Video with Creative Suite 4: Combine the power of Flash and Soundbooth to create searchable video.

Metadata, search, analytics & monetization

A recent Beet.TV interview with Delve Networks bumps them up in awareness, but it's an older interview that really lets Delve explain how they see the semantic web, metadata, and video will work:



That interview is good background to understand the early March Adobe & Time-Warner announcement of "a strategic alliance to foster collaboration on the development of next generation video and rich media experiences." In the Beet.TV interview below, Adobe's Jennifer Taylor explains the alliance, mentioning planned collaboration on implementing Adobe's video ecosystem ('from planning to playback') and on digital rights management, metadata & search, and audience measurement & monetization. And on his blog John Dowdell fleshed out some aspects of the announcement that seemed a bit vague. It seems that DRM is wanted before HBO rolls out The Sopranos, The Wire, and Entourage, etc.



There's not much for regular users from Google or Adobe on this front quite yet, though you can find a Delve example of speech metadata exposed in Speech-to-Text metadata in web video. If you want to understand Adobe's video metadata pipeline, Dan Ebberts' recently posted an article at Adobe that nicely steps you through current metadata and speech features, XMP metadata in Creative Suite 4 Production Premium (see that article's comments for alternative method for After Effects).

There's more background on metadata in previous posts here.

Update: Contentinople notes that Gotuit Enables Video Mashups With Metadata:

"Video metadata management firm Gotuit is signing up media customers by enabling them to chop up, mix and match, and create interactive video mashups...

QuickKicks allows users to view video feeds from each game -- broken down into categories such as game highlights, goals, and saves -- and will include specific player highlights from each team. The site also includes the ability for users to create their custom playlists and share those playlists with friends.

While the ability to create video mashups isn't particularly new, Gotuit has taken a novel approach to the feature, by enabling content companies to use metadata to define where video clips start and stop.

In other words, rather than editing the full-length video of a soccer match into multiple smaller video files, Gotuit works by allowing content owners to create "clips" by marking start and end points within the larger video file. The publisher can then identify what's happening in those clips with certain pre-defined metadata tags, for easy search and discoverability"

Coleman and Ebberts videos on expressions & Flash

The Motion Graphics Dream Team videos -- geared for Flash designers -- from the Adobe MAX conference a few months ago are on Adobe.TV and on Videospider.tv.

After Effects & Flash CS4: Michael Coleman (fullscreen) shows techniques (Mocha, etc.) and shortcuts that can be used with After Effects CS4 and Flash CS4 Professional. 

 


Programmatic Animations in AE with Expressions & Scripting: Michael Coleman and Dan Ebberts (fullscreen) show tips and tricks with Scripting and Expressions in CS4. The parts on the video metadata pipeline were covered more full by Dan Ebberts in an article posted this week at Adobe, XMP metadata in Creative Suite 4 Production Premium.

Gmail to get HD video & it's not Flash

Google Operating System notes a CNET report in Upcoming Gmail Features: Contact Deduplicator, Better Video Chat. CNET spoke with Google which said to expect:

"video chat [that] is capable of HD... Gmail got video chat last year. However, instead of using Adobe's Flash to serve up the video, Google went with a small 2MB plug-in that had to be installed on your machine.

Jackson says the team had gone back and forth between doing the add-on and Flash, but in the end, what mattered was quality, which the plug-in delivered. Going forward, Jackson says the plug-in route will be able to provide even higher-quality video as people's connections improve, going to Video Graphics Array (640x480 pixels) all the way up to high definition."

Update: Mozilla is looking for more open alternatives (to h.264 licensing and proprietary developer tools), and willing to throw a very modest amount of cash at the problem to beef up the Theora codec; see Chris Blizzard's why open video?

Fabio Sonnati on H.264 Transcoding

Streaming Media is carrying a summary of Fabio Sonnati's Adobe MAX/Milan session in Back to Basics: H.264 Transcoding for Flash. According to author Tim Siglin:

"his session used examples from Main Concept’s Reference encoding tool since this is the encoder used in Adobe Media Encoder CS4 as well as the Flash Media Encoding Server (which is a branded version of Rhozet Carbon Coder that itself uses the Main Concept H.264 encoder)."

"Use VP6 as a fall-back strategy," said Sonnati, "to cover 99% of the audience, since H.264 can be viewed by 90% of the audience (that have Flash Player 9 v3 or Flash Player 10)."

Check out the specifics in Back to Basics: H.264 Transcoding for Flash. Maybe Adobe will post the video of Max sessions as promised when the dust settles. Some of the details of Fabio's work were discussed here earlier, including compression examples by Fabio:
- Heima (720p) @ 500Kbit/s
- Heroes (720p) @ 500Kbit/s
- Heima (1080p) @ 1500Kbit/s

Flocking with 3D Perlin noise

Robert Hodgin of The Barbarian Group (makers of iTunes visualizer Magnetosphere), presented a movie (pictured left) at "Flash in the Can" in Toronto earlier this year.

He talks about the Processing environment and his use of 3D Perlin noise for flocking. Flash people were quick to experiment after an earlier presentation on Perlin noise; here's one, Animated Perlin Clouds in Papervision3D.

There's a bunch more generative processing stuff around beside the recent video by Radiohead. Toolbox is a node-based generative editor app that was featured recently on Create Digital Motion, which also features regular write ups on Processing projects. You can find demo movies of Toolbox on Vimeo, where the programmer links to Vector Field animations that do not use Perlin noise (implemented in After Effects in the Fractal Noise filter).

Flash H.264 fast start, fees

As mentioned earlier, Adobe notes: "One important thing about playing an H.264 video file as progressive download is that the moov atom needs to be located at the beginning of the file, or else the entire file will have to be downloaded before it begins playing." You can fix this with QTIndexSwapper (an Adobe AIR app by Renaun Erickson) or with qt-faststart.c (a command-line app by Mike Melanson).

Also, with H.264 licensing fees a concern for some it's interesting to look at why Macromedia didn't choose it initially; terms settled on later by MPEGLA were .02$ per VOD user, with the first 12 minutes for free, and no licensing fees for internet broadcasters as long as users don't pay for viewing. Tinic Uro's post and comments on H.264 has many interesting details on Flash and MP4.

Update: While MSU compared H.264 codec quality (MainConcept beat other participants) you have to dig to find practicals, so if you're interested in quality Fabio Sonnati has pushed Flash to the limit (reported earlier) with low data rates,

"I use a mix of Ffmpeg, x264, Mencoder and Nero AAC. Here some parameters used: 5 reference frames, 5 B-frames, authomatic B-Frames, B-pyramid enabled, adaptive macroblock type, advanced Trellis on, Subq=7, advanced exagon search, deblocking filter with custom alpha e beta parameter, three pass encoding..."