Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

July 5, 2012 Off

Slit Scan fun

By in Photography, Research, Tutorials

Back in November 2011, I attended the monthly meeting of the Digital Creatives Oxford. One of the guest speakers was a guy called Peter Jones – not the millionaire investor from Dragons Den, but an enthusiast of a photographic and cinematographic technique called Slit Scan. I had never heard of the technique before, but had sub consciously seen it in use in Dr Who and Star Trek.

As a Flash guy, I thought that recreating the slit scan process should be fairly straight forward in Flash, utilising a webcam. I say fairly straight forward, but I am commenting as a Flash Designer, not a coder, so I gave a call to a good friend and awesome coder, Mark Horsell.  He was immediately intrigued by the idea, and rattled off a prototype in a matter of minutes!

here are a couple of images created using slit scan.

You can have a go yourself here
You will need Flash Player installed and a webcam. When the swf loads, click Start and grant Flash access to your webcam in the pop up. Click Start again to start your scan.

I can’t take any credit for this at all, it is all Mark’s work, but I just wanted to share the bizarre technique of slit scan with you all.

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June 11, 2012 Off

Swiffy plugin for Flash Pro

By in Animation, Research

Previously I wrote a post about the current options available to export Flash to HTML5 canvas.
I thought it was about time I uploaded a Flash to HTML5 export test I did a while ago to show the result of Google’s Swiffy conversion tool.

To view the comparison below you will need Flash player installed to see the original swf, and also have a compatible browser to see the exported HTML5 version.


Get Adobe Flash player

Original Flash version [34kb]

HTML5/Swiffy export version [62kb]

I have to say Swiffy is a pretty good tool and I have had a fairly high success rate when exporting my animations with it. One slight negative point is file size of converted files compared to the size of the original swf’s. As a rule of thumb, the Swiffy exported file is around double the size of the original swf file!

Swiffy certainly isn’t the silver bullet solution if you are trying to find something that can convert all your Flash content into HTML5 at the click of a button, but for simple animations, it is pretty quick and easy to do. I do advise taking a look at the supported features and browsers before you embark on converting your animations, and perhaps keep these in mind if you are creating any new animations you know will need putting through Swiffy.

What is great is that in the latest version of Flash Pro CS6, support for HTML5 is now an inbuilt feature. To assist with optimization of your HTML5 animations, they have also included an integrated sprite sheet tool which will hopefully alleviate the file size issue I experienced with Swiffy.

As of yet I have not upgraded from Flash Pro CS5, but I think with the plethora of updated features that will help me take my Flash animations into the uncertain realms of HTML5 and mobile, it will be worth the £190 upgrade cost.

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April 24, 2012 1

Adobe Creative Cloud CS6

By in Knowledge Base, Miscellaneous, Research

Adobe Creative Cloud CS6
 
The buzz word this year is “The Cloud” and Adobe have done their bit adding another couple of oktas, by releasing Adobe Creative Cloud CS6.

In Adobe’s own words…”Adobe Creative Cloud is the digital hub that lets you download and install every Adobe Creative Suite 6 application; access online services for file sharing, collaboration, and publishing; and benefit from new apps and features as soon as they’re released — giving you the freedom to create anything you can imagine.”

How does it work?
Adobe Cloud works on a subscription model. If you sign up for a year, you get it at the monthly cost of £46.88 or if you just pay on a rolling 1 month basis it works out at £70.32 a month (inc VAT)
During your subscription you can download and install any of the applications from Creative Cloud CS6, but as soon as you stop your subscription, they cease to work!

So what do you get for you money?
The list of software available to you through the subscription is amazing – it includes:
Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, InDesign, Muse, Acrobat X Pro, Flash Pro, Flash Builder, Dreamweaver, Edge Preview, Fireworks, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, SpeedGrade, Prelude, Encore, Bridge, Media Encoder, Business Catalyst, Typekit and Story Plus and 20GB of cloud storage. Unfortunately it doesn’t include any of the Touch Apps which have to be purchased separately at a cost of £6.99 each.

So is it worth subscribing?
The major plus to this subscription model is that you get access to the latest feature updates as soon as they are released, and you don’t have to scrape together the funds to purchase another copy of said piece of software.
If you compare the yearly cost of subscribing to the service with the one off cost of an OEM copy of the Adobe Master Collection (which is what you are in effect getting access to) which retails at £2,667.60, it equates to paying for it over a 4.7 years period with the added benefit of feature updates.

Will I be subscribing?
I am the lucky owner of a copy of the Adobe Master Collection CS5. The work that I do means that I predominantly use Flash Pro, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop and Dreamweaver…and haven’t even installed any of the other applications in the suite so the subscription seems less appealing to me due to the reduced number of applications I want or need access to.
The other, more important issue is that many of the clients I do freelance work for are not up to date with the newest version of the Adobe Suite either – this causes problems when working with InDesign and Flash and having to provide them with source files that they can open and work with! I would gladly pay the subscription if Adobe produced a little app which enabled you to save back to any older version of Flash rather than limiting you to just saving back 1 version.
Unfortunately, for now I will be sticking with my OEM copy of Adobe CS5 as it is more than adequate for my needs, but I am sure at some point in the future we will all be heading down this subscription route!

 

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April 18, 2012 Off

Google Drive launching soon

By in Research

I really hope the rumors that Google will be releasing their eagerly awaited Google Drive next week are correct!

I have been investigating cloud storage solutions as another option to backup my work files after having a scare the other month when my PC went kaput!
I am trialing Dropbox and a rather nifty little app called Insync (for Google Docs) as an interim solution, but when I started to read about the possibility of Google entering the cloud storage arena, I thought I would hold out buying extra storage from any providers until I had an opportunity to see what Google would be offering.

But is all this too late? Many of my friends and work colleagues are using Dropbox, and have been for a long time now -they have established a reliable workflow through shared folders and to disrupt and set this up again with Google might be too much time and effort for many people. Even if I (and others) don’t go with Google for cloud storage, I imagine that their aggressive pricing on additional storage will force other providers such as Dropbox to reconsider their pricing, or come up with some other way to provide customers with added value.

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January 12, 2012 Off

Tech shopping list – pt 1

By in Research

My father is going to be sailing across the Atlantic with his friend in January 2013 and he has tasked me to research, and get him kitted out, with a number of key pieces of tech kit!

Items to find are:

  1. Something to read books on (I think we all know what might be the winner already!)
  2. Something for emailing / blog writing / surfing the internet.
  3. Something to listen to music / audio books with.

Important features to consider:

  1. Compact size – space is a premium on board.
  2. Long battery life – charging is available, but the fewer times they need to do this the better.
  3. No Wi-Fi on-board – data connection to the satellite terminal is through an RJ45 socket.

I have a few ideas already, but the main issue I have already foreseen is the lack of Wi-Fi!
Many of the new pieces of tech on the market, or due for release this year, do not allow wired networking as an RJ45 socket would limit how thin they could make the device.

2012 is going to be a good year for fulfilling this shopping list, especially with the expected flood of high end, competitively priced tablets hitting the market, so I am looking forward to getting stuck into my research.

If anyone has any suggestions on any of the items then please let me know.

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