Ghetto Greenscreen

I built a greenscreen for chroma keying video/photos in my studio for about 5 dollars. Grabbed about six sheets of neon-green poster board from a local store and used some other bits I had lying around; easel, cardboard, non-reflective tape, staple gun, duct tape…

You can see the result below! Admittedly ghetto… but for my current purposes, it will work just fine. You can see the seams in the photo but this isn’t a big deal as depth of field and After Effects can both be used to get around something like that. It’s large enough that I can place it a few feet behind the subject without issue, so blurring it with depth of field in the camera is probably a good option. You can see here that it’s pretty evenly lit without any special lighting- though I do have some lights to be used in case they are needed.

As a test, I grabbed this rabbit and snapped a quick photo.

After a few seconds of keying in After Effects – Parisian Rabbit.

Creative Moments / ‘Pistachio’

It’s really interesting to me how creative impulses can arrive in little, concentrated spurts. This is how ideas usually manifest themselves to me, and when they do, I like to grab ahold and just go with it.

The past few days I was feeling kinda dry, creatively. Happens every once in awhile and to be honest- provides me with some dark moments. The good thing is that when I experience a period like this, it often means that my inspiration will pick up in a day or so. If I time things right, I can get some really good stuff out of this cycle of mine.

This is exactly the case with ‘Pistachio’, a 30 second piece inspired by a contest held at http://www.getcrackin.com/. I just read about this in passing via Twitter, and immediately some ideas shot through my head like lightening. I absolutely love moments like this. Luckily, I had a few hours to devote to it and below is the result:

Edited down in Premiere Pro CS4 from about a minute of footage in two takes captured ‘live’ from a Canon SD video camera. Compositing done in After Effects CS4 with sound recorded through Soundbooth. Was a great experience messing around with After Effects after a very long time.

Now, I knew from the get go that this would never be accepted by the judges. No way. But that isn’t the point with this sort of thing, is it?

VidLoop Updates and a Word of Caution

I took some time today to update the VidLoop AIR application. The current version is 1.2.2.  New features include a randomize function and the integration of the AIR Update Framework.  I’ve also fixed a few small bugs.

A note of importance here… I really should have integrated the update framework before my initial public build.  I just didn’t initially expect a ton of users.  Now I cannot push the update to anyone who currently has the app installed- they’ll have to update manually.  It’s probably best to include the updater on any project- no matter how small… just in case. Lessons learned!

Nifty AIR App: VidLoop

Last week, I was approached by someone asking if we could build a small application that would run a series of videos in a continual loop. I told him it would be pretty simple to do this and that it would only be an afternoon’s work in AIR. So, that evening, I was able to point him to the URL hosting the AIR app. It performed exactly as he requested- user points to a local directory and then all the videos within are run in a loop until the user intervenes. Very simple.

My client had no problem installing the app or running it but asked if it might be possible to inject still images between videos as well. This got me thinking of other useful features and I ended up spending a good deal of time over the Thanksgiving break enhancing and tweaking until I had what you can see below.

The VidLoop application allows a user to specify a directory of media files in order to present them within a semi-infinite loop.

File types that are supported are as follows…

VIDEO: flv, f4v, mp4, m4v

IMAGE: jpg, jpeg, gif, png

The user is able to adjust certain settings based on the controls presented. This includes the amount of time images are to persist on the screen, whether or not to scale these images up to fill the screen, the local directory to pull media from, and whether or not to parse subdirectories. All settings are saved upon each occurrence of a successful run.

Hit ESCAPE to stop a presentation. CLICKING will step through each item and can be used to skip ahead regardless of video length or image duration settings.

I can see a lot of applications for this tool and have begun thinking of some future enhancements; Screensaver Mode, Media Sort Functionality, Randomize Option…

Before AIR, it would be have been a lot of trouble for me to put something like this together.  Now, it’s a piece of cake – and this work is very addicting as well!

Grab it, if you wish…

Flash is King

There is really no denying it at this point for anyone who was seriously contending. Flash has the crown and is in no way giving it up.

After seeing what Alchemy can do at the keynote today, P2P multicast video, Durango, and Server-Side ActionScript (!) during Sneaks this evening…

Good God… what an awesome time to be a Flash Platform developer. I’ve seen more than enough in the past two days to validate all that I am doing, professionally. I neglect to even mention Flash Catalyst or Gumbo in all this- that’s just ‘normal’ stuff compared to what is coming down the pipeline.

I asked the JavaFX guy today why I should use his technology over Flash. His only remark was that Java was 13 years old… okay.

An amazing show of Flash over the entire conference and the competition is defenseless. Go Flash!