obj imorting from affter effects to flash

yesterday in class we were given the assignment breif which is to make a film website. today i learned a tad more about flash, like how to import a project created in adobe after effects into flash to make ttranistion 3D animations. the website that is to be created has to be for a spesific film which is Shaun of the Dead. in the first lesson i learnt a little bit about adobe after effects and made a small animation which was used later for a smooth rollover effect in flash (which didnt go so well as i havet finished it yet )

guide to digital communication

ezine article (blog version

Ezine article

In this article i will be using secondary research to inform you on the principles of video technology and how they are used within the interactive media industry. This article will cover three main sections. These sections are; Applications (user generated content, viral marketing), Platforms (World Wide Web , mobile devices) and technology (video  file formats/compression, media players)

Applications

User generated content

User generated content is a phrase that is used to describe information, blogs, videos and other content that a user would be able to upload or put onto a website on the internet. Some of the best examples of websites that rely on user generated content are YouTube, Wikipedia, blogger etc.

There are an increasing number of user generated content websites over recent years. One of the most used of these websites is YouTube .when people are surfing videos on YouTube and they come across a series of videos that they like can subscribe to that users channel. YouTube has a ‘subscribe’ button for this service, where a YouTube user will e notified of when the person they subscribed to uploads more videos. Sometimes if the content that somebody puts onto the web is particularly interesting, said person can become “internet famous”  Being internet famous can mean that somebody can actually earn money from the amount of views on a video or website. Being able to earn money from the amount of views/subscribers gained is mainly done on YouTube. If a YouTube user gains a specific amount of views, say for example for every 500,000 views, then said user can earn money from YouTube. The exact amount depends on a combination of the amount of views and subscribers.

Other that social networking sites and of course YouTube there e is one website that about from all of them. That website is of course Wikipedia. Wikipedia is another website that relies heavily on user generated content. Wikipedia is a website that uses its own specialised software that allows people to create articles and then edit them at any time. Unlike YouTube it is unlikely that anybody would get paid for uploading articles onto Wikipedia as it is a free service, so no matter how many views that the article gets, whoever uploads the content is always going to end up doing it for free.

Viral marketing

Viral marketing is different from traditional marketing as it relies on individuals, like me and you. It is a marketing strategy that does not need a company to try to get its product to our eyes and ears.

Viral marketing is used everywhere you look online, especially if you use your email often. Sometimes when you are looking through your emails you will notice advertisements that get sent into your emails folder. This is a form of viral marketing where it is relying on you to send the email to other email addresses so that word of the advertisement gets round. This is a strategy that is used to spread an advertisement across loads of people in hopes that they will buy that product. Viral marketing is also assisted by the use of user generated content. This is because when a user uploads content on to the internet, there is normally an advertisement that goes along with that content. An example of this is that YouTube has started adding advertisements to the start of videos. This is especially common if a long series of videos has been watched simultaneously. Although advertisements aren’t put onto the less popular videos, however they are put onto the popular videos so when this happens a single advertisement spread around to a number of different people really quickly, with very little input from the organisation that’s advertising their product.

Platforms

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW or the Web) is a system of interlinked hyper text documents that can be accessed via the internet. Using a web/internet browser (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer) you can view content on WebPages that may contain images, text and videos and you can navigate between these WebPages at any time using Hyperlinks. (Wikipedia. (12, november, 2011)

HyperText Markup Language (HTML is a type of computer language that is used ti create pages that can be posted on the internet or sent via email. Although it may seem complex to most people, it is considered to be a rather simple language that can also be easy to learn. All text, images, videos, graphics and design elements are ‘tagged’ in code which tells the web browser or email program how to display those elements. HTML tags can also provides layout and formatting information so the webpage can look how the designer intended it to look like.( wisegeek. (2011)

A web browser is a software program that interprets the coding of the world wide web in graphic form, displaying the translation rather than coding. This allows anyone to “browse the web” by using simple ‘point and click navigation which also bypasses the need to know commands that are used i software languages but nowadays you don’t even need to know that. When the web is viewed with software other than an internet Brower, the result looks nothing like its graphic form. To view it, right click (if using Windows) on any empty space on a webpage.  This will cause a small popup menu to appear. Choose either; view page source or inspect element in Google chrome, view page source in Mozilla Firefox or simply view source in Microsoft’s internet explorer or in Apples Safari. Doing this will open up either notepad or other os equivalent basic word processing program where the HTML coding will be displayed. Using Google chromes ‘inspect element feature opens a more advance HTML or CSS code viewer which is opened within the actual browser. This program is able to highlight different points of code and do allot more than you can in notepad. For example you can look at different scripts, text images an all sorts of other files used. In order to exit simply point to wars the x in the corner of the window to return to the browser window. (Wise Geek. (2011)

Technology

Digital video compression

Nowadays most digital video is some way or another put onto the internet. Most contractors and other people do this, whether it be professional, for example a documentary, like the one that was shown about the internet and how digital video is used in it or other people, for example vlogs that are uploaded to YouTube.  Image compression is at the core of digital video and can cause some severe confusion. There are several techniques for compressing images.  compressing video relies on file formats, for example MPEG, JPEG intra/interface, DV etc, which uses different  software techniques to  compress the file sizes on digital videos so they can be uploaded to or sent across the internet however video compression can result in loss of quality which the usere will have to accept before carrying on.  (Jeff Sauer. (June 1, 2006)

Digital video file formats

There are multiple file formats that are used in digital video. In this section i will list 3 of the most common file formats and give a definition of the following; .wmv. mp4 and flv.

.WMV

WMV is a Microsoft video format. It stands foe Windows Media video. .mv files are tiny because they are highly compressed. This is one of the smallest sharing formats and is used at the end after editing. It is the most common video file on YouTube.( Lorraine Grula. (2011)

Mp4

Motion Picture Expert Group  4 (mpeg4 or mp4) is an audio and video compression standard that allows for the storage of audio and video files to be streamed over the internet or stored on media such as CDs or DVDs. It is also the standard that is used for broadcast tv.( R.Conan-Davies. (©2006).

Flv

Flash video (flv) is the name of a file format used to deliver video over the the internerusing adobe flash player.  FLV format has quickly established itself as the format of choice for embedded video on the we  and FLV formats are used widely on mainstream video websites, For example websites such as YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo! Video. Flash video can be played freely on web without installing additional codec requirements on most operating systems. You can enjoy Flash video using the widely available adobe Flash Player and web browser plug-in. (SourceTec Software Co., LTD . (2011)

Media players

There are many media players that are used either over the internet and offline that are used to, as their name suggests play media. In this section i will give a definition of the most common media players that are used. The following media players are; windows media player and adobe flash player

Adobe flash player

Adobe flash player delivers multimedia over the internet by using online video streaming technology. Flash player has become the most popular video streaming formats in use today. Much of its popularity is from its relatively high video quality for given bandwidth as well as a user’s ability to receive flash video streaming in a number of ways. This is done by using either third party video players or a number of web browser plug-ins. wisegeek. (2011)

Windows media player

Windows Media Player is a media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices. Editions of Windows Media Player were also released for Mac OS, Mac OS X and Solaris but development of these has since been discontinued. Windows Media Player replaced an earlier application called Media Player, adding features beyond simple video or audio playback. In addition to being a media player, Windows Media Player includes the ability to rip music from and copy music to CDs and also burn music to them. It also includes a feature that allows you to synchronize content with a digital audio player (MP3 player) or other mobile devices, and enable users to purchase or rent music from a number of online music stores. (Wikipedia. (2011).

link to ease in flash mx tutorial

http://www.republicofcode.com/tutorials/flash/tweenclasseasing/

this is a liknk to mae a ease in pages using tween classes in flash

tpday in class i learnt how to make a preloader in flash. a preloader is used in all flash projects whether it be a website or a game. especialy if the project has a huge filesize. the loader is given a variable from 1 to 100% and when its loaded it loads up an image, game or website

wgeb the preloader is done it will bring up this picture:

the actual code for the pre loader was:



flash website creation: Multiswifting

Today in class I made another website using flash only this time, it was done using what is known as multiswift. Multiswift is a method in flash that is used to load up webpages quickly while not actual leaving the current page you are on. Rather than the other method of making websites in flash, multiswiting only uses on layer meaning that pages, background and navigation are saved as SWF (Small Web Format) files which are saved separately from normal flash documents. In order to make the website you start with a file called “background” and to load the next file which would be called, for example navigation, which is the file where the nav buttons will go. The file is loaded using the code: loadMovieNum('navigation.swf',5). This will entire that the navigation bar always stays on top. The pages are loaded in the same way. In order to make the nav buttons work you have to load each page separately. For example to lad pages the code is: button1.onPress = function (){

                loadMovieNum('page1.swf',2)

}.

Using this method is not only easy to do but also greatly reduces the file size of the website so that it will load quickly, even on a slow connection

Review

In this review I will be commenting on how our group was able to work together to come up with our first initial ideas for the website. I will also be writing about what went wrong during the project and then explain why the problem occurred in the first place. I will also be writing about the steps we took to overcome them.

At the start of the project I met Dan burden and Dan Taylor for the first time. We were assigned to make a media rich website for the Business department of the college. For the project, Dan Taylor was in charge of  general organisation, timekeeping and project scope, Dan Burden was put in charge of the coding of the actual website itself, in other words bring interactivity into it and I was in charge of designing the backgrounds, buttons and other icons. The layout of the website was decided by the three of us.

Dan Taylor created a timescale for the project which we then followed. We emailed the client who took while to reply but we were eventually able to meet with them. However when the time came to actually meet with the client, she left before 12:00. Because she had a headache so we were delayed for a little while. Afterward were emailed the client we were able to arrange another appointment and re met a week later. However by that time Dan Taylor was Away and he had a presentation of the alpha version of the website but we couldn’t show her our initial ideas so I and Dan Burden had to improvise on what we had and had to roughly describe what the website was meant to look like. Next we were tasked to actually make the website or a Beta build at least of which was actually completed successfully. Next we were going to create and upload videos for the website but these didn’t come without their problems. The first thing that hindered our progress for recording video was that our client refused point-blank to allow us to film in the actual business department because  apparently it looked rubbish. Then we set out to actually film something as we decided as a group that the best way to go about doing this was to film other parts of the college, for the example the LG. later on we then booked out a camera for the next day but when the next day came, Dan failed to turn up. When this happened I had no idea of what was going on and what we were actually going to film and how long for so I decided to help Dan out by designing icons and buttons for the website as to no waste the time. We eventually were able to film; however it was not for very long and was only some parts around the college. All the footage that was captured was edited by Dan Burden, which was done beyond college hours. Despite not being there for somewhat only can be said as essentisal events, he still did a good job of keeping the group together and the project probably would not be complete without the organisation.