Monthly Archives: March 2007

Adobe CS3 Upgrade Paths?

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Various Amazon worlwide stores have posted pricing info and box art for the upcoming Adobe CS3 product suites that will be officially announced tomorrow. Depending on where you look, both upgrade and ‘upsell’ pricing is present alongside the full retail licenses. I hope that the Adobe store will offer a variety of upgrade paths as many of us own both a collection of Adobe software and also Macromedia Studio 8.

Fractured Vision Media is licensed with both Studio 8 and the CS2 Production Studio Bundle- so we pretty well have the CS2 version of the new “CS3 Master Collection” being offered. So will we be able to upgrade from both collections collectively? Or will we be gouged completely even in consideration of my prior investment?

On a related note: it’s upsetting to see the fabulous Audition replaced by SoundBooth. I haven’t given the SoundBooth beta a full testing- but it is lacking many of the features we use to master audio tracks. Really seems like a step backward for audio professionals. :(

Oh, and in regard to my prior rant about splitting product versions: nice to see that there is no mention of “Flash CS3 Standard” anywhere.

EDIT: Nice. With Macromedia Studio and Adobe Production Studio the price is $1,399.00. Since Master Collection will not ship till July, you also have the option to snag a smaller collection now and upgrade from that later for the difference. I think we may just go with Web Premium for now- The audio/video tools in Master Collection can wait 18 months…

Apollo Security Sandbox

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The documentation released along with the Apollo downloads is tremendous. Brushing through on a basic level, I’ve found the following item of interest:

SWF files installed with Apollo applications do not need to look for cross-domain policy files. Capabilities that normally require another SWF file to grant access by calling the Security.allowDomain() method are not restricted to SWF files installed in Apollo applications.

This sounds very good. I’ve always found Flash Player security a bit restrictive. No other platform that I’m aware of has such tight rules about reading crossdomain data.

It is also stated that:

All other resources—those that are not installed with the Apollo application—are put in the same security sandboxes as they would be placed in if they were running in Flash Player in a web browser. Remote resources are put in sandboxes according to their source domains, and local resources are put in the local-with-networking, local-with-filesystem, or local-trusted sandbox.

So I guess I am pretty confused at this point… these statements seem to be in conflict with one another. I’ll have to build some sample apps to sort this out for myself.

EDIT: After toying around with Apollo and reading further into the documentation, my perception is that Flash content built with Apollo has a certain set of security features, while SWF files loaded into an Apollo application have a similar but different set of features.

CamStudio: Premiere/After Effects Solution

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CamStudio 2.0 is a free screen capture tool that can be used in the creation of tutorials, demos, and such. You can configure it to either output a SWF or AVI file. I prefer AVI because it enables me to edit, add title screens, and do general production tasks before outputting to FLV for delivery. CamStudio gives the user quite a bit of flexibility in choosing the codec used to compress the video. One such codec is the “CamStudio Lossless Codec v1.0″ which does a fine job of maintaining high frame rates, while preserving small details and even rendering gradient washes correctly.

The trouble with the AVI files produced in this way is that when brought into Premiere Pro 2.0, the quality takes a nosedive. It seems that Premiere does not interpret the codec correctly and so renders a lot of black space (seemingly due to the encoded alpha channel) and really chunks up a huge portion of the video- the framerate is thrown off considerably as well. When attempting to “Interpret Footage”, turning off the alpha channel helps somewhat, but the framerate is still shot. However, performing the same action in After Effects Pro 7.0 actually does interpret the footage correctly! I am able to ignore the alpha channel when interpreting footage and everything renders great.

So if you are only doing light screencasting work and don’t want to spend the extra $$$ on something like Camtasia or Captivate, and assuming you already have Production Studio- this is a really fine solution.

EDIT: I have had good results using the LZOCodec v0.4 codec with CamStudio and then editing in Premier. You still need to interpret the footage by ignoring any alpha channel data, but the video will function properly on output.

ActionScript 3.0 Drawing API Example

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This is a small module I wrote as a migration exercise from AS2 to AS3. Written using FlashDevelop and the Flex SDK, there are probably a few small things I could work at to optimize the code, but as an introductory exercise, I am fairly pleased. The actual drawing process is very smooth- I’m really impressed with the performance of the new VM. Oh, and making images available through code is very cool:

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[Embed(source="bg0.jpg")]

Also of note are new drawing API methods which greatly simplify the creation of basic circles, rectangles, and such:

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private var bgRect:Sprite;
bgRect = new Sprite();
bgRect.graphics.beginFill(0xCCCCCC);
bgRect.graphics.drawRoundRect(0,0,20,20,6);
bgRect.graphics.endFill();
addChild(bgRect);

The colored blocks change the drawing color, the three blocks with differently sized circle change the drawing nib, the grey box will cycle the background image, and the white box will clear the drawing:

[MEDIA MISSING]

Some Thoughts on Flex Builder 2

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I was able to devote an entire day to working with Flex Builder yesterday and am very pleased with the experience. Having previously done work in Flex and ActionScript 3 in FlashDevelop using the Flex SDK, using a dedicated tool was very liberating. I have nothing whatsoever bad to say about FlashDevelop, but Flex Builder is a full Flex editing environment and who wouldn’t want that?

Some of the features I particularly enjoyed include; full featured DEBUGGER!, layout/design mode, full class integration and context menus, package explorer panel, and the integrated language reference. One thing that is driving me nuts though- my line numbering keeps getting turned off… anyone have any ideas?