I’ve been developing a few new courses – well new for me – in our Sheridan Interactive Multimedia one-year Post Grad Program in Oakville Ontario between Hamilton and Toronto.
These are Audio Video (AV) and Motion Graphics (MG). In first term AV I wanted to turn away from making movies and move to interactive video. I gave this some thought and broke Interactive Video down into the following – click for samples except the Tracking one which is fairly traditional and I had the students create samples – I’ve been doing that since the 1995 McLuhan CD:
- Affecting Video – i.e. Blurring Flash Video as Cursor Moves
- Blending Video – i.e. Putting one video on top of another
- Branching Video – i.e. Playing different video depending…
- Tracking Video – applying and letting users apply cue points
- Motion Capture – with a $10 video cam and Flash alone…
For this last category, we did a joint project with the multimedia pioneering class I teach to make Big Interactive prototypes where people just wave at a $10 Web cam to interact with the features. This is accomplished with a MotionCursor ActionScript Class – to be launched one day. We put on a show called Interactive Interactive that highlighted these:
In the second term Motion Graphics course I have created the traditional bouncing balls with stretch and squash but made them interactive. This was just a quick exercise to show the Flash Tween Class. It does not behave exactly like real life but you can pick up the ball and throw it around
I also made a tool and set of ActionScript Classes to scrub audio and apply markers or cue points and in particular to apply common mouth shapes to sounds to affect lip synching. This tool is to be used at Authoring time so the example is in a sense disabled but you can imagine how it would work by scrubbing the timeline and placing markers – the record button will not work for you.
Perhaps not as effective but more efficient is using sound frequency analysis to activate lip synching. A very quick example is shown here where data is brought from Spectrum Lab into Flash:
And then just recently I’ve been working on the old animated mask stuff to create a sample class for Focuso… Please see the next post or click the link here:
Still to come, DVD authoring. A few students and I went up to Collingwood to video the Canadian Summer Olympic Team during their spirit building and preparations for 2008 Beijing Games. We took 30 hours of video and made a DVD in Adobe Encore. It was quite an amazing experience. You can read about it here:
I’m also in the middle of building (just about done) and online Chess game using ActionScript 2 Classes – it will be launched as Zen Chess soon.
And I have started in on code name SspotT – a Flash based MySpace – so that is a fairly large project that will probably take the summer. I’m working on that with my friend Aron who is programming the back end – he wants to.
Dan
May 7, 2007 at 5:10 am |
This is an interesting site.
July 27, 2007 at 2:32 am |
Great. I am going to look into doing the Motion capture.
August 10, 2007 at 12:05 am |
I am amazed of all the good stuff here. I am doing a Interactive Multi Media Project in my third year studying Digital Media. Thanks!
August 13, 2007 at 1:42 pm |
Your examples with the fairy doesn’t work on my Mac. I tried several other motion capture examples out there as well, but none of them worked. I thought it might be my flash settings, but they worked just fine and I could preview video from my ISight camera. I have flash player 9 installed.
August 13, 2007 at 3:14 pm |
The last I tried, I could not even get the camera to come into a simple camera object in Flash on a mac. At that point I said, it is not a problem with my code…. but I would like to find a solution obviously. So I may dig one day or perhaps someone could post here if they have any information about getting the web cam to show up in flash. Thanks.
November 26, 2007 at 5:34 pm |
Hi Dan,
After some googling I found a solution to the getting your video motion classes to work with the MacBook webcam. Using the Camera.get() call doesn’t bring up the built in camera. You have to go into your Flash player settings and set it to “USB Video Class Video”.
One of the bloggers on this site suggests this workaround: using a check by listing the cameras from AS if you detect that you’re on a Macintosh and then attempt to choose “USB Video Class Video.”
http://bobspace.wordpress.com/2007/02/22/flash-isight-3-if-you-pick-the-right-settings/
Sunil
December 30, 2007 at 3:10 pm |
Thanks for the mac tip. That will be most helpful.
March 18, 2008 at 11:30 pm |
Hi
The Camera.get() call works fine on the Macs.
The problem is the VideoMotion Class, which is such an easier method for calling and using web cams in flash motion detection.
Does anyone know why this does not work?
Cheers
March 19, 2008 at 5:24 am |
Sorry – got half way through trying to solve this – thought I had it but when I tested it still did not work. I think I can get it and will try again this week. I have not posted my attempts. Will post the working version hopefully.
March 29, 2008 at 10:15 pm |
Any ideas yet?
I am trying to create a motion sensing movie that picks random mc’s on motion detection. This works fine with the VideoMotion class ie:
mL.onMotionStart = function(obj) {
if (obj.cursor == mc3) {
light.gotoAndStop(Math.ceil(Math.random()*5+1));
}
}
myMotion.addEventListener(”onMotionStart”, mL);
mL.onMotionStop = function(obj) {
if (obj.cursor == mc3) {
light.gotoAndStop(1);
}
}
myMotion.addEventListener(”onMotionStop”, mL);
but trying the same with the Camera.get():
c = Camera.get();
function motion(mode)
{
pinkBox.gotoAndStop(Math.ceil(Math.random()*5)+1);
}
c.onActivity = function(mode){motion(mode);}
c.setMotionLevel(30, 3000);
myVideoObject.attachVideo(c);
if I could get something like this to work it would be great!
function motion(mode)
{
trace(x + “: ” + mode);
x++;
}
c.onActivity = function(mode) {motion(mode);};
if ((mode) = (true)){
pinkBox.gotoAndStop(Math.ceil(Math.random()*5)+1)
}
Cheers for having a look.
February 10, 2009 at 10:20 am |
Hi.
I want that when i acept the cam to turn on, that the motion only works when i move my hand. i want to stop the light from work in the beggining. how can i do that. thanks
February 11, 2009 at 2:28 am |
Hi Rodolfo.
Right… perhaps create the VideoMotionCursor and then add a Timer with a delay of 300ms before you add the cursor to the stage and or set the events. If you need help there, let me know.
March 11, 2009 at 4:11 am |
http://www.squidder.com/2009/03/09/trick-auto-select-mac-isight-in-flash/ has the answer to the Camera on the Mac – thanks Sunil! Tracked it down after 2 years – have not put the trick into the code but will at some point soon.