PATRICK JOSEPH BESONG: January 2009 Archives
This week I did a presentation to the PSU Multimedia Group on QuickTime Pro and showed them a lot of little tricks I knew, and some I learned while researching for the presentation. It seems I used to use QT Pro more, but these days not as much, as I seem to be pretty involved with Flash mostly. It was good to get back into the s/w a bit and realize what it can do. The $30 upgrade to the QT Player is well worth it IMHO, since it can do quite a bit.
One of the neat things it can do is that it can record live video and compress it on the fly. This is great for recording presentations and such, since you don't have to do too much post-production work and it can be made available almost as soon as you're done recording. I recorded Spanier's last presentation to ITS using QT Pro and had it uploaded to the streaming server before I even left Heritage Hall in the HUB. All I had to do was to trim a little from the beginning and end, then export the movie with a hinted track for streaming. I wish this option was available for recording in the first place, but I have an Applescript that I can drop the movie on that will add the track easily.
Not only can you trim bits from the movie, but you can also add things to movies as well. As I demonstrated in my presentation today, you can save a series of slides from PowerPoint as JPEGs (to the same size as your movie), and paste them into a presentation where you may have a talking head. Using the selection brackets, you just select the time span where you want the slides to appear (over the video) and use Add to Selection and Scale to fill that timeslot with the slide. Although there are no transitions, it makes a nice seamless presentation containing both the presenter and the slides. Another option would be to have the slides in a larger format and do a picture-in-picture effect with the talking head small in the corner. I can also add a title slide easily, add a watermark throughout the movie, and even put scrolling credits on the end of the movie with very little effort. QuickTime Pro is a nice lightweight video editor for quick n' dirty video production.
"I just flew in from Chicago, and boy are my arms tired." Kim Winck needed help setting up for a green screen shoot, so just for funzies I had her shoot me lying on a table that was also covered with a green cloth. Although I couldn't get a good key digitally (partially due to what I was wearing), I imported a couple seconds of screen grabs of the video into Flash and painstakingly cut around each image. I also imported a pic of Chicago, and to make a seamless run of the background, had to cut the sky from the image because it was a slightly different color from left to right. I added a shaded blue image behind to make my own sky. This is just meant to be quick and dirty, but it shows some of the fun things you can do with Flash. Maybe I could make a game out of it. Anyway, take a look:
I knocked off a couple of jobs this week (well for the most part anyway). One was an interface for a CD of photos that will be included in a French book. It is a Flash interface that dynamically loads data and photos. I only need to add the content when I get it from the author. I tried to make the style kind of like a parchment, old manuscript kind of thing. As I've been doing the past year, it's written in Actionscript 3.0. I ran into a goofy problem with AS 3.0 in the project when I simply wanted to feed a variable to a function for a button so that it would update a counter and load all the right data (photo, title, description, page counter). The workaround was to give each button a name that included the info I wanted to pass to the function. Then I would strip the info from the name of the button that was clicked and feed it to the function. This would have been a lot easier to do in AS 2.0 and looking back I probably should have just done this project in AS 2, but I'm trying to stick with 3 so I learn it better.
The second project I worked on was an animation of the electrophoresis process. That's how they compare DNA samples. After watching quite a few YouTube videos of the process, I just drew the instruments freehand in Flash. I had thought about doing 3D, but thought it would take too long for what it would be displaying. I used a particle system code to make little bubbles in the liquid chemical. Not exactly accurate, but it does show that something is going on when electricity is applied the chemical. Here's what I came up with:
Next week I need to try and finish edits for the CHANCE project. I need to get that project done so I can move on to some other things I've been trying to accomplish. Hopefully February will allow me to try some new things.
