Large Screen Stream example

[whiterabbit]

Our first of this size. Incredibly file size is only 4mb but you still need broadband to view it or you will be waiting around for awhile. You wont need a video codec its done in Flash.

filmed with the xl1, let me know how it played for you
http://www.mantaproductions.com/fullscreen

cheers

[Dan Holly]

Even on my crappy video card at work <:)

[whiterabbit]

That's great to hear!

I was disappointed that nobody had any comments on it, you saved the day :)

Cheers,

JP

[Clayton Farr]

Very cool.

Seemed to come across fine on my setup: T1 connection behind firewall, Apple G4 400Mhz, Internet Explorer 5. It did seem to drop frames periodically - I'm assuming to keep the pix in sync with the audio. It also seemed to eat up a decent amount of time in determining my 'bandwidth' before reflecting that anything was downloading. (Maybe this is just a display issue and it is downloading from the get go?)

Interesting approach. I would imagine though that it would require *quite* a bit of work on the front end, if for nothing else than generating masks for all of your objects/video. (Are you shooting all of the video elements against green screen? If so, do you find that this "SV" approach is limited to content that can be shot that way? You did seem to have some frames with quite a bit of motion blur - added in post?) And then of course compositing everything together.

But still a very interesting look. I also like the sequence of the mouse on the guy's arm (on your front page)...kind of simple yet surreal.

Clayton

[whiterabbit]

Lots of great observations! and here is a long answer,

Playback is delayed, you could have begun watching from the get go with your connection. You probably had the whole thing downloaded by the time the guy started speaking.

We tested on a 450 G4 and the Flash player is not as fast on the Mac so even though it worked fine on ours I think we were at the limit.

As for the work, we lost our location at the last moment and ended up shooting against a white wall. I had to cut the frames out by hand, something I will never do again. A good green screen would make life great but -->

What we usually do is shoot with whatever background we intend to have in place. We first shoot a clean background and then the talent gets in place and we shoot the scene. When we render out to jpgs, we crop as tight to the talent as possible and then compost over the clean background in Flash, doesnt take much time to do this and really lowers the bandwidth and processor power required. In some cases action might move across the background like a car say, and then we just crop each jpg as tight as possible to the car and compost it over the clean background same as before. This takes a little time but its not that bad.

We applied motion blur mostly (I think) to the girl spinning out. I kind of liked the effect. Because she was moving so fast it looked a bit choppy. The alternative would have been to slow it down before cutting frames and that usually works well.

We see SV as being good for short large screen TV style adverts though we have encoded a few movie trailers http://www.mantaproductions.com/demo.html we did those last year. And we like it for other stuff like below

This is a work in progress we shot on the xl1. This is just plain SV no composting. Remember- under construction so expect broken links, copy not complete, etc.

click on CLASSES then click on either- BOXING, AEROBIC KICKBOX or SPARRING. I know those videos are up at this moment.

Whats cool about the approach we took here is that all the variables for the SV video are contained in the database and so the video.swf just loads into a template player. Maintenance is a breeze.

These are fast moving choppy videos, the idea was to make it all seem like a killer workout. In truth most of the people were sluggish as hell :) but Im not criticizing them, I probably would have had a heart attack.

http://www.southfloridaboxinggym.com/NEW

cheers,

JP

[Clayton Farr]

Thanks for the info. That makes perfect sense. I've actually had to do this with some clips in video projects, but never considered doing it in Flash.

With the boxing video, how did your SV technique play a role there? It looked like every frame either had motion filling it or the camera was moving/zooming itself, seeming to preclude the option of cropping the action over a 'still' background.

Clayton

[whiterabbit]

Yeah, we use SV that way also, no composting just straight sequences. When there is that much action going on the DV codecs dont offer any advantages quality or file size wise and that makes the flash 4 compatability factor really attractive.

I am putting up the next 3 tonight.

take care,

JP