iPhone annoyances

I’m annoyed by my iPhone’s headphones, I presume because I bought a phone, that the headphones included are designed to give the user a hands free device while driving, the problem is I’m in England and I have a right hand drive car. The headphones are clearly marked L and R to ensure I have the right in the right ear and the left in the left ear but the control device hangs beneath the right ear. I suspect that the control is designed to be used by the gear lever hand in the US not the mainstay steering wheel hand? If it’s designed to favour the right handed, then shame on Apple, why not have the control in the middle to cover both left and right and both sides of the Atlantic? It’s picky I know, but these things bug me.

A blagger’s guide to multimedia goes public!

After a while of adding the odd article here and there whenever I could I’ve finally got this site to a level that I think is worth visiting more than once.

So I’ve check the box that allows search engines to index it, and look forward to my first visitor. Is it you?

The page design is a bit rubbish, I really do intend to spend a little more time making it look special but that’s not the point. It’s the content that matters.

I’m not a trained graphic designer or developer. I never went to University or studied life drawing in Florence. I’m a regular bloke from Manchester, England with a background in Marketing who after not some considerable time and effort managed to blag his way into a career as a full-time employed multimedia web graphic designer, developer jack-of-all trades and master of everything. Well not quite.
The aim of this blog is to encourage people following a similar path to me, to keep going and to share a few observations and crumbs of wisdom picked up along the way.

Enjoy!

My own private Sennheiser office

There is a debate raging in my office at the moment about headphones!
I use them as a tool to get into my own personal space for concentration and focus, especially when developing.
There are others who argue that they stilt conversation and make for an isolated and non-communicative team.

Discussions about web portfolios

At work we’re currently putting together a new website. As we search for ideas we’ve naturally been turning to other similar websites for inspiration. One of the things we noticed was the tendency for design agencies – even really big and successful ones to chuck everything they’ve ever worked on, on-line.

I argued that any old shit will not do. Too much visual information dilutes the impact – everything gets homogenized and blurred. Much better to include a small cross section of really great work that whets the potential client’s appetite than to beat them over the head with a too much visual stimulus?

Not everyone agreed – thoughts appreciated.

Default Publish Settings – SwfObject

It’s been bugging me for a while that I can export HTML with the AC_RunActiveContent.js embedding method directly from Flash CS3. I can replace the RunActiveContent HTML with a SwfObject Template but I can’t get the Flash IDE to export a copy of the swfObject.js file.

Here’s the solution.

Navigate to:

Library>Application Support>Abode>CS3>en>configuration>HTML>Active Content Files
Backup AC_RunActiveContent.js by renaming it or moving it somewhere else. Paste in a copy of the latest swfobject.js and rename it AC_RunActiveContent.js.

Annoying that it has to be called something else, so I add the following comment after the tag:

//re-named swfObject default export

I’d love to find out how I can use swfObject without having to rename it first.

Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR)

I had an unpleasant experience recently with a director who told me too late that the fine composition I’d done was too small.

I’d worked to 1024×576 (SD) but he’d filmed in 1920×1080 (HD)

Here’s some info about how to manage this kind of problem – thanks to Artbeats for two very useful PDFs

Because video often uses rectangular pixels and computer monitors use square ones circles and peoples faces look fatter on your monitor in NTSC and skinny in PAL.

In After Effects there are two places where you need to set the pixel aspect ratio: for the source, and for the composition where you are combining layers. To set the pixel aspect ratio (PAR) for a source, select it in the After Effects Project panel, and type Command+F on Mac (Control+F on Windows) to open the Interpret Footage panel. In the Other Options section is a popup for Pixel Aspect Ratio: Set it to match the format of your source. After Effects does a reasonably good job at auto-sensing the correct PAR for a footage item when you import it, but it is always good to double-check this popup – especially when using widescreen footage.

To set PAR for a composition in After Effects, select the comp and type Command+K (Control+K) to open the Composition Settings dialog. It too has a Pixel Aspect Ratio popup; set it to match your intended output format. This happens automatically when you pick a Preset in the Composition Settings, but is easy to miss when you manually set up a comp. As long as you set the PAR popups for every footage item and composition correctly, programs like After Effects will then know which images to stretch and which to squash to correct everything as needed for your final video.

A NOTE ON PHOTOSHOP

You may know that there is an option in Photoshop to change PAR to rectangular. This is not advised because changing the PAR tag on a file does not re-scale an image; it just changes the tag! To give an example: If your photo started out with square pixels, changing the PAR tag to DV will not give your photo non-square pixels – it will just give your photo an incorrect tag.
Therefore, many advise creating all of your non-video elements using square pixels. Rather than try to match any particular size, the safest approach is create the element 25–100% larger than you need it to be; that way, you can also scale it down or reposition it as needed in your video program.

pixel-aspect-ratios

If you create still images at these sizes, and tag them as having square pixels in a program like After Effects, After Effects will automatically adjust them to be the same size as their corresponding video frame.

Hope that helps!

TextMate for ActionScript

Wow! I’ve been exploring the various features of TextMate and how it’s use relates to Flash / ActionScript development. There are some great built in features and lively communities offering excellent bundles for extending TextMate.

Here’s how I set it all up.

Essentially you install the ActionScript bundle and use the Bundle Editor to point everything in the proper direction.

class test {
function test() {
// Empty constructor
}
// Hook for MTASC. This method will be called to start the application
static function main() {
var myVar:String;
myVar=” Patrick”
_root.createTextField(“hello_txt”,1,0,0,800,30);
_root.hello_txt.text = “Hello, World!”+myVar;
_root.Button1._alpha=50;
_root.Button1.onRelease = function(){
_root.Button1._alpha=100;
trace(“Hello World!”);
}
}
};

I copied the above .as file from the one that’s automatically generated by selecting file>New from template>ActionScript>MTASC sample and fiddled with it.

If you stick a .yaml file in the same directory as your .as and .swf file you can pass parameters to your preview like, trace, in my case through console, and the SWF header.

——————

# Name of your output file:
swf: test.swf

# Name of your main class:
app: test.as

# Folder/URL/file to open when compilation succeeds. Use ‘textmate’ to preview in TextMate:
preview: textmate

# SWF Header:
player: 8
width: 800
height: 600
fps: 31
bgcolor: 000000

# Optional, use it to send additional MTASC parameters (i.e: -strict)
params: -main -mx

# If you want to use Console.app (see )
trace: console

——————

Blogging from TextMate

This is my first Blog, posted directly from within TextMate.

Wow! What a cool feature. It’s easy to set up, simply, do the following:

Bundles>Blogging>Setup Blogs

Enter your blogs URL, username and password and that’s it. Then all you need to do is write your post and publish.

Bundles>Blogging>Post to Blog

TextMate will prompt you to enter a post title and your username, then publish whatever you’ve written.

How cool is that?

Apparently you can even add images.

Exporting Flash Movies to other formats

Just a quick one for those of you pulling your hair out. Movie clip animations don’t work when exporting Flash to other formats or importing .swfs into external applications, like Quick Time, After Effects or image sequences.

Movie clips themselves are fine, but they only display the first frame. The secret is to convert all your movie clips to graphic symbols! They work just fine. If you scrub the play head through your timeline, whatever you see will probably render okay elsewhere.

If you are creating a Flash Banner and want to export frames to animated gifs it is a good idea to build your animation entirely on the root timeline, or use graphic symbols. It will save you a lot of hassle later.