Speaker: Craign Swan from CRASH!MEDIA

In recent years Flash has broadened as an Interactive tool offering more than just a platform for animations, websites, games and RIA’s, but a whole new world of Interactive possibilities. Engaging Installations. Alternative Interfaces. Calm Computing. Physical Prototyping. Interactive Environments. Making things and Exploring the User as the Interface.

Craig has been a regular speaker at FITC over the years. He never fails to impress – this year was the best by far. Craig’s presentation covers a lot of ground, and this post doesn’t do it justice, however, here are some notes I scribbled down:

• Flash has an ambient awareness – microphone and camera capabilities provide flash with an awareness of what is happening in its environment. Although, this control has been around for a little while by now, a new suite of tools has increased possibilities. Sophistication is limitless. Many new ideas and possibilities with new tools such as bitmap toolkit and new video tools.
• Interaction with camera enables new interfaces including gesture capturing and more interactive user-interfacing. Use color tracking and mapping objects to colour. Technically, poll the screen for the presence of a colour and perform various procedures depending on location and intensity (or any variable) of colour.
• Input devices. [unfortunately, my notes get more sparse as his presentation goes on] IPAC device, a simple input controller, allows developers to piece together their own interfaces. You can use any type of sensor to generate the simulation of a keypress and in turn capture that event within Flash. PhidgetRFID is an easy to use and easy to integrate RFID reader. Make board, tilio board, controller board allow the designer/developer to create alternate output. Monome 8″x8″ controller is a input/output device that is a 10×10 grid of LEDs that double as an input device. Craig was using this as a video mixing board. MIDI controller with a number of knobs provides a wide range of real time control. Craig was using this to interact with a live video feed in realtime controlling various aspects of colour and timing. Connect to WII controller through bluetooth (max msp).

For examples of Craig’s work, go to the CRASH!MEDIA site and click on “Labs”.   A lot of it is in there. Enjoy.

Recently came across this nifty little video on YouTube that was put together by an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. In the span of 5 minutes, it “chronicles” the history of the web with a focus on the social media revolution – or to some, the over-hyped hoopla – that’s being referred to as Web2.0. Regardless of whether you work on the web or not, this piece will have an impact on just about anybody whose life has been touched by the web in some way (… i.e. pretty much everybody on the planet).

It’s an old and tired tale by now – the employee who gets fired/harassed/suspended etc. for blogging.

But this case, involving an NCAA basketball coach being reprimanded for comments he made on his blog about the way his league is run, is of interest to me because it brings up the issue of blogs and sports, which is an intriguing topic.

Of course the most famous sports blogger, possibly the most famous blogger period, and certainly the richest, is Mark Cuban, (http://www.blogmaverick.com/) the billionaire owner of the NBA’s powerhouse Dallas Mavericks. Cuban made his billions (5 of them, if I recall correctly) by selling his audio/video streaming operation (the world’s first) called Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999. Cuban has always ‘gotten’ the web and he has been a tireless advocate for free speech, blogging and other progressive web initiatives ever since. He also posts regularly and answers many comments himself, something few billionaires and no other sports team owners do. (His post on the corporatization of YouTube was a killer: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/12/27/ripping-on-gootube-again2/) So, good for Mark Cuban. His team might even win the title this year, if they can get past the amazing Captain Canada and his Suns. (My money’s on the Suns.)

Another NBA blogpost that really knocked me out was this one, by former Raptor and current Milwaukee Buck, Charlie Villanueva: http://www.cv31.com/myjournal.html. This post was written last year by a 21 year-old NBA rookie who had just scored an amazing 48 points in a game, the most by a rookie since Michael Jordan, I believe. This post on his blog is not some typical ghost-written prefab pap nor is it sports journalism. It’s one young NBA player’s honest outpouring of feelings about an incredible experience he had just had. I loved it. I also found it indicative of the generation gap around blogging because I tried to imagine veteran sports stars sitting down and putting their feelings out there this way and it was inconceivable. (Barry Bonds: “So then I got another shot of ‘the clear’ and stepped to the plate…”)

It also made me think back to Ball Four (1970), the hilarious book by Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton that was the first ‘exposé’ of the life of a professional athlete, with its booze and hookers and juvenile hijinx. Bouton was excoriated by many (tho his book was a bestseller) for breaking a taboo that kept players’ realities shielded from their adoring fans. Of course the journalists were complicit in this, too. These days, things have changed, and the Internet has a lot to do with that. Just take a look at this behind-the-scenes video on YouTube from NBA draft day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QibGO_QKzQE. The average Joe wasn’t privy to this kind of thing in the days of Harold Ballard. (Just imagine what that behind-the-scenes footage would have revealed…Yikes!)

Then there’s the Raptorblog, (http://www.raptorblog.com/) which has been a furious hotbed of Raptor fandom for many years. (If you notice a certain theme, here…yes, I am a huge Raptors fan). Apart from the high level of critical discussion on this board, which sees itself as able to deliver much more informed and knowledgeable writing than do the basketball writers for Toronto’s daily newspapers, it’s interesting to note that the moderator of this blog just took a job at MSN.ca as a senior sports editor. Another example of how blogging is a good career move.

When I think about it, as much as I like the new dynamics that have made sports more transparent, on some level I do long for the good old days too, when sports heroes were heroes to their fans even if they were pricks in real life. I remember when I was a young boy, my dad wrote a fine book called Babe Ruth and the American Dream (Random House, out of print). I went out with him on some of his research trips and got to meet several hall-of-famers who had played with Ruth, including the likes of Frankie Frisch, (The Fordham Flash) and kindly old Harry Hooper (who had been on the 1927 Yankees, widely considered the greatest baseball team ever). It was awe-inspiring. And although my father’s book made no bones about Ruth’s coarseness in person (imagine MeatLoaf with a bat) it also highlighted the incredible respect and love that he engendered among Americans of every race and class. It’s hard to imagine anything like that today – in the era of OJ Simpson and Kobe Bryant, of Terrell Owens and Mark McGwire, of season-long player’s strikes and endless testing of the free agent market. Maybe Gretzky was the closest thing to Ruth we’ve known in a long time. Now if we can just get The Great One to blog…

“TV is dying” is a tired cliche at this point but i think it’s also true. Just look at the numbers in this report published by the BBC yesterday. It suggests that 43% of people in the UK who use online video are watching less TV than they used to as a direct result. And of those, nearly half say they are watching ‘a lot less’ TV than they used to. How many people are using online video? We can assume that everyone who has broadband does so, and while I don’t have the UK numbers handy, penetration rates are running at 45% of all households in the USA and 55% in Canada. And that doesn’t even take into account people who check out videos at work. So we’re talking about a substantial minority of the population switching from video-via-tv to video-via-web.

That really is big news. Will it be a surprise to anyone if in a year or two those numbers are twice as high as they are today? I know that when I moved to Ottawa a few months ago I left my two TVs behind and I haven’t missed them. I keep up to date on news events via the web and RSS feeds, I watch sports highlights on NFL.com and NBA.com, and I get plenty of comedy (including some of my favourite old shows like Absolutely Fabulous) on YouTube and elsewhere. When I need a video fix I get all I need online, or I rent a movie, and obviously I’m not alone.

What I’m really waiting for, though, is for marketing budgets to start to reflect this increasingly important trend. Currently media buys of many millions of dollars are normal for businesses that invest only marginally in online marketing. One day, and hopefully soon, Directors of Marketing will start to understand that they can get a far greater bang for their buck online, and that for the price of a small TV campaign (producing an ad and buying eyeballs via TV), they can run earth-shaking online campaigns that will reach far more people and accomplish far more from a customer-development and retention perspective than been-there-done-that TV ads.

Flash has long been the standard for creating rich and engaging multimedia content on the web. But as more and more creative folks are discovering, Flash can make the sometimes daunting jump from web to video a relatively simple and inexpensive task. And the results are pretty darn good…

In addition to the cost benefits, being able to take your web-ready Flash pieces and quickly create professional looking video from them allows you to cross-purpose work you’ve done once for two pretty distinct mediums. Now that’s value.

Sure, you’re probably saying “I can export to Quicktime right from inside Flash!”. Yes, Flash lets you export your movies to Quicktime natively but the problem is that when you watch the video you can just tell it’s Flash. It’s got that flat and synthetic look. If you saw it on a TV or DVD you’d think it was amateur. Plus, Flash doesn’t give you a lot of options when exporting video when you consider all the different aspect ratios, square pixels, yadda yadda yadda.

So what I’m going to do is offer up my list of “must have” tools for converting Flash to (or integrating it with) video. With this bag of tricks in your corner you’ll end up with professional looking broadcast-quality results.

1. Macromedia Flash
   This one’s pretty obvious. Can’t do much without it.
2. Flash MX Design for TV and Video
   This book covers a lot of material from both sides – Flash people looking to create for TV and traditional animators who might consider the possiblities of Flash. Topics include broadcast production basics to sound, animation techniques, video exporting, and postproduction. There are some excellent case studies and lots of good information for the traditional Flash user who’s looking to understand the differences between creating for web and TV.
3. Adobe Premiere Pro
   Premiere Pro is a pretty basic tool compared to some of Adobe’s other digital video products like Final Cut Pro and After Effects, but let’s not sell it short. It’s a great nonlinear video editing application that users familiar with Flash’s timeline and Photoshop’s GUI shouldn’t have too much difficulty jumping right into.
4. SWF2Video Plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro
   Premiere doesn’t natively import SWF movies (though this might change in the next version of Premiere with the acquisition of Macromedia) so this little plug-in developed by FlashAnts comes to the rescue. Now you can import SWF movies and Premiere treats them just like any other video format. It also retains SWF alpha channels, so you can overlay your Flash on top of video clips. This is really useful for titling and on-screen graphics. The downside is that it can only import Flash 7 SWF files and lower – sorry no Flash 8. The double downside (which I discovered after pulling most of my hair out) is that you have to have the Flash 7 plugin installed in IE. If you upgrade to Flash Player 8, this plugin will no longer work and Premiere will crash uncontrollably. Don’t worry, you can have Flash Player 8 installed on Firefox (or any other non-IE browser, I assume).
5. ReelSmart Motion Blur
   Without this one, I’d say we’re about 90% of the way to getting something that really looks professional. So far, Premiere allowed us to import our SWF files (integrate them with video and audio if we wish) and export them as video in a multitude of different formats. But we’re still facing that inherent flatness of Flash. That’s where this last tool comes in and I must say it’s my personal favourite, because it’s that last 10% that makes such a huge difference. With this After Effects compatible plugin (works in AE, Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro and a tonne of other digital video editors) you can apply motion blur to your SWF animations. Why would you want to do that? Well, when you move something from point A to point B in Flash, it moves in steps (frame by frame) until it reaches it’s destination. At each step, it looks the same as it does standing still. While this does create the illusion of motion when played back, this illusion can be enhanced greatly with a little motion blur. This plugin interprets the animation that’s happening in your video and creates composite blurred frames to replace your original ones. While my explanation might not get the point across, the results speak for themselves. See the “with and without” comparison.Notice how the one on the left looks much more fluid and life-like, like it was shot with film? The motion looks a lot more realistic.

   Now of course everything comes with drawbacks and this plug-in is no exception. Unfortunately, you can’t apply motion blur to movies with transparency. So drop that alpha channel and make sure your SWFs are 100% opaque throughout. Second, applying this plug-in greatly increases rendering time, so keep that in mind. Speaking of rendering, you’ll want to make sure that when you do export that you turn off interlacing (i.e. tell Premiere that the footage has no fields or is “progressive”). This is very important because otherwise you’ll end up with those mice teeth lines all over the place.

And that’s my personal Flash to video toolbox. It might sound like a complicated process, but once you have all the software set up it’s really quick and easy to go from SWF to video. As I mentioned above, the only thing that takes considerable time is the rendering.

For all of us who are familiar with Flash and it’s well-known web capabilities, this really opens the door to a whole new realm of creative possibilities.