Incompatible files systems between Windows and Mac has been causing a lot of headaches since long ago. The growing number of people migrating from PC to Mac, or giving up on Vista, made the issue appearing even more evident. It’s emblematic the case of Windows running through Boot Camp: if you boot with Windows you can’t see the Mac partition, if you boot with OSX you can read but not write in the Windows partition.
Finally I tried Seam carving (friendly called “Liquid resize”, “content aware scaling” or “intelligent image resizing”), the currently most buzzed technique for image post-production. It allows you to resize a picture “non uniformly while preserving their features, i.e. avoiding distortion of the important parts“. It fascinates you immediately, it seems magic, but it’s true and it works!
Acer organized a convention in Madrid in order to present its latest products to international press. I collaborated with the team in charge of creating several videos for the event and for subsequent marketing usage. A goal of the project was to transform the client existent communication in a coordinated image in motion. These are a couple of the videos in which I was involved:
I just joined another social network that cached my attention thanks to my guru-colleague Marco Casario. SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web, and basically it’s like YouTube but with slides instead of video. Recently they added also a feature called Slidecast, which allows you to sync slides with an mp3, for example your comment.
I remember a day in late 2004 when I almost cried for the happiness when I discovered a standalone utility for playing Flash Video files (FLV). It saved me a lot of time because it allowed me to playback immediately videos in FLV format, without even opening the Flash editor: it was just a double click on the file name or a drag-and-drop over the utility. That could have been somehow handy for a common user, but for a developer involved in Flash projects with video was super useful: it became immediately one of my most used Flash companions.
Adobe Max Europe is over and some numbers were published by the official blog: 1200 attendees in Barcelona experienced over 200 sessions. They are now invited to leave their feedback and to log in the Max site for finding the presentations uploaded by the speakers. Since some sessions held in Europe link to the files used in Chicago, here you are my presentation + demo files (for the session Advanced Video Encoding).
I quickly post the link to the demo files that I’m going to use tomorrow for my session “Advanced Video Encoding” at Adobe Max Europe:
labs.gantico.com/archive/2007/adobemax/
Here you can download the presentation:
www.gantico.com/en/media/2007/10/max-video-encoding.pdf - (2,26 Mb)
The recent support of H.264 codec by the Adobe Flash Player 9 update 3 made me wonder about licensing costs involved in publishing H.264 video on Internet. I’m not a legal expert, but from what I’ve understood you don’t have to pay anything if your viewers are not paying a subscription or a title-by-title fee. In other words, if your content is for free, the royalties are for free till 2010. After this term the license will expire and you might have to pay as for free television, starting from $2,500 per year.
Not long ago I was tempted to abandon MT (Mediatemple) in favour of Site5 and actually I did it. Even if I had been happy with MediaTemple for about 4 years, I was concerned by the negative experience that a friend of mine had with them. Forums and blogs made me discover that some serious problems were appearing in their (GS) Grid Service Hosting.
Shameless self promotion for my upcoming session on Advanced Video Encoding at Adobe Max 2007 Europe! I’m going to talk about the best practices for optimizing video and calibrating the settings in video encoding, tips & tricks for the whole work flow and comparisons between codecs. In other words, I’ll try to give good advices for producing good FLVs. I’m updating my presentation with tests and infos on the H.264 codec, since it has just been announced that the Adobe Flash Player 9 update 3 will support it. It’s already possible to download a public beta of the player and experimenting an example of HD video.
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