For some background, when I originally began writing “music” back in 1999, I did so in a very matter of fact and destructive manner in that I simply recorded whatever came to mind and performed a lot of additive overlay edits to the sound bed until it was what I wanted. The entire first album “August” was composed in this way. Since then, I’ve been using multi-track sequencers and a full production software suite to compose, record, and produce my music. It’s a more intellectual approach- generally a smarter approach- and certainly a less destructive method of working. However, you do lose quite a  lot of spontaneity and flow in regard to the creative process. Almost as though your mind gets in the way of the emergent expressive flow coming out of you.

The video embedded below is a short film called “Furnace”. Both the video and audio portions of the work were conceived, recorded, and produced with this free-flow method in mind. What has emerged is something rather dreamlike in its structure – but not lacking in essential elements, for all that it is.

A statement in free-flow expression: Furnace.

Equipment used:

• Adobe After Effects CS5
• Adobe Premier Pro CS5
• Adobe Soundbooth CS5
• Cakewalk Sonar Producer 8.5
• Native Instruments Kontakt 4
• Alesis QS7
• M-Audio Audiophile 2496
• Behringer EURORACK MX 602A Mixer
• Behringer XM2000S Cardoid Microphone
• Flip UltraHD
• Windows 7
• Dell XPS420

Time to promote the amazing new features of Flash Builder 4 to experiment the best coding experience for your Flex 3 and Flex 4 projects. To highlight these new features, I could list them (as I did in a previous post), I could record them… or I could make you work a little bit! This time, I want you to showcase the Flash Builder 4 features.

They are all short little “quick tip” style videos and do not take much time to look over (about 2 minutes a pop). With so many new little features in Flash Builder 4, you are bound to learn something new! Get over to RIAgora to view all the submissions. Congratulations to all the winners!!!

Here is my submission which was recorded last week – converting Flex projects from Flash to AIR:

Honestly- I love stuff like this. Please tip me off if you hear of anything else!

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.

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?

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!

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…

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!

I’ve read the documentation on FMS3 security features and have used quite a few myself.  Knowing these features, I could not understand how the Flash Player security model could be at fault- it seemed much more likely that the developers simply didn’t cover all their bases.

Whenever I read something like this, I am naturally concerned as I’ve thrown quite a bit of support behind FMS over the years.

Well, it seems that my hunch was correct and Adobe is not to blame.  People are far too quick to pass judgement on things like this, whether it’s Adobe, Microsoft, Apple or some other giant corporation, everyone jumps on the bandwagon when a story like this breaks.  Give it a rest…

Now, I also use Sony Vegas Pro on occasion. It is also a nice piece of software. The one thing Vegas really has over Premiere is the ability to handle just about any file type without the potential to choke and die. Lots of material that I’ve needed to edit has had to pass through Vegas for simple conversion before bringing it into Premiere for cutting. I know that formats such as WMV are not meant to be edited, but sometimes you have no choice- you have to work with what you’ve been given.

Over the weekend, I struggled for a few hours trying to import some NTSC format WMV files into Premiere. The import maxed out my CPU and my RAM for quite some time. Premiere did crash on a number of occasions. I had the idea, finally, to process the files through Vegas (AVI conversion) as I would normally do, but then thought perhaps AME would be able to handle this task for me. Sure enough AME was able to convert the WMV files into AVI with no problems whatsoever. Taking these into Premiere, editing them down, and moving them into an Encore project was quick, simple, and really such a day and night difference from my original work flow.

Having done a little research after the fact, it seems there is actually a knowledge base article about this very issue.  I can vouch that leaving the task to complete will work- but it takes forever, and editing WMV files even when the import is successful is not a pleasent experience.  Most of the time, I work with native video, but when confronted with a distribution format like WMV- I can safely recommend Using Adobe Media Encoder to transcode to a workable format.  I may not need Vegas anymore…

With FMS3, there is Client.videoSampleAccess: a property of the Flash Media Server 3 that allows direct access to raw stream data for video use (“audioSampleAccess” for audio).  This can be used for things like producing visual audio spectrums or grabbing a still from a video stream.  It is applied within the onConnect method of the Application server class as demonstrated here:

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appClient.audioSampleAccess = "/";
appClient.videoSampleAccess = "/";

In the above example, the “/” signifies that any streams within the application directory are allowed to be sampled in this way.  You can also specify a semicolon-delimited list of folder names instead if you need to be picky.

Something I came across today and the whole point of this post: even when you have Client.videoSampleAccess set up properly on Flash Media Server, you will still receive a security sandbox violation error #2123 if the stream data is not available.  This can easily happen if you have a timer invoking BitmapData.draw every few milliseconds on loading content.

One way to get around this is using NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS making sure it reports “NetStream.Buffer.Full” before attempting to access the stream data.  Depending on what you are doing, you can oftentimes check the object recieving the stream data to be sure it is accessible first.  this all seems really obvious now, but threw me for a bit of a loop, initially.