Krisco43's Weblog

New Multimedia Assignment

krisco43 — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:10:00 +0000

This is my new multimedia assignment, where I investigate the possibility of importing 3DS Max renders or meshes/models into Flash. On initial research I found that I might need a plugin called Swift 3D Max, to export directly from 3DS Max as Flash files. This would be easy to open in Flash and do additional work, as 3DS Max files are large and cannot be easily reduced in size without losing resolution. I shall update this blog with more detail in a while.

Update 1: 26-06-08: 19.50 PM

I have installed a 30 Day trial copy of Swift 3D, which happens to be a standalone application, not a plugin. The advantages in using Swift 3D are that it can do most of what 3DS Max does, and can export the renders as SWF, FLV, AVI, and a host of other useful formats. I am planning to make a model in Swift 3D and animate it, after which I shall export the file in AVI format. The AVI movie will then be imported into Flash, where I will embed it in a player. The player will have a play button, progress bar, and other movie controls. I think SWF is the best format to save the movie and player. I shall experiment with this, and post the results.

Update 2: 27-06-08: 06.59 AM

I am going to model something in Swift 3D, thought I would make something that used the mesh modelling, lighting, texture, animation, and other features. I shall write another entry when I have decided.

Update 3: 01-07-08: 09.55 PM

I have created an animation of a bouncing ball, a bouncing 8 ball to be precise. The occult/mystical implications of the 8 ball intrigued me, as well as the idea of imparting lifelike reality to an animation, using key frame effects in Swift 3D. I wrapped a bitmap material I created using Photoshop (see link) around a sphere primitive to make the 8 ball, and created a horizontal plane or floor, for the ball to bounce on. The bounce animation was created using an animation path, and rotation around the x, y and z axes to produce the illusion of the ball rotating as it bounced. (Click this link to see a screenshot of the movie being animated) This was the really hard part, getting the ball to bounce realistically. 17 tries later, success!! The animation is 60 frames long. At 15 FPS, that is 4 seconds of video.

Update 4: 04-07-08: 09.17 PM

The animation has been done in 3D Swift, and exported as an SWF file. (Click here to see the render window in Swift 3D) I was going to try and place the SWF in a Flash file, and embed the file in a player. However, I found, there are more options available when the file is imported as an AVI video, so I converted the SWF to AVI in Flash, and compressed the video to get a reasonable file size for web streaming. I used the Cinepac Codec to do the conversion. When importing the AVI into a new Flash file, I used the Flash High Quality 700 Kbps encoding profile. (Click here to see the encoding window). I found that I could use an SWF skin for the media player, the one I used was SkinUnderAll.swf. This way, I could get all the movie controls without having to resort to coding in Actionscript. I then exported from Flash back to SWF, in the Flash Player 9 version. I compressed the movie for lower filesize, while setting the JPEG quality to maximum (100). I felt this to be a good balance between filesize (download times) and resolution. The AVI file and player skin didn’t work too well, so I exported from flash as FLV (Flash Movie) (view a screenshot of the export window) and loaded that into my Index.htm page in Dreamweaver. The media player that Dreamweaver provides works rather well, but the animation is a bit jerky, so I will have to tweak some settings to make it more smooth, possibly when I export the FLV. I will try to remove all compression and see how that works. I will write another update when the movie is working to spec.

Update 5: 05-07-08:11.15 PM

Well I have tweaked the compression settings and got the FLV movie to be a bit better, but I think there are limitations imposed by the file format that might be quite difficult to overcome. Meanwhile the results are reasonable for the filesize, and the download times are almost instantaneous, atleast over my 2MB Internet connection. Here is the link to the movie (click here). This link opens the FLV Flash movie embedded in the Flash player. This link opens a 3.3 Mb AVI file embedded in Windows media player. The link usually works right away, but you sometimes have to be patient and wait for the file to load.

You can see the subtle differences between the two formats. The outlines of the 8 Ball in FLV can be slightly pixellated at the start, but the antialiasing starts to work in the later frames, and the display quality improves. The AVI file features a bit smother rendering and better antialiasing. The animation also flows freely without any jerkiness. The tradeoff is the filesize, so the FLV provides almost identical results for a drastically lower filesize, 122Kb. For a website that has more that a certain amount of movies, FLV offers a low-overhead solution that does the job. AVI, although a compressed format, has a much larger filesize for a slight increase in picture quality and motion. I loaded the AVI file into my webpage in a DIV layer, using the following script:

I have tried to make the windows media player cross-browser compatible, but find that the results in Opera and Firefox are less than desirable, while in IE the results are OK. This is possibly something I can examine in the future, how Windows media player can be customized for different browsers by changing the associated code.

One might ask, if it is possible to export the renders directly from Swift 3D as a Flash movie (FLV), and then embed the movie into the HTML page in Dreamweaver, why not do so, and take Flash out of the loop? This is quite a reasonable question to ask. The reason I took the roundabout route is that I was working on an experimental trial and error basis, feeling my way around. Also, if I exported the FLV movie from Swift 3D, all the frames would have been front to back, as I had created the animation from front to back, and reversed the keyframes in Flash. I hope the reader finds this a useful and thought provoking piece of writing.

This project was used as a test case or proof of concept, to show that animations rendered in 3DS Max can be successfully transformed into small files that are web deployable or deliverable using other software such as Abobe Acrobat. The key issue is almost always the file size, since all the documents that I am working on contain many graphic sequences that would be more expressive when animated. The success of this experiment shows that the communication problem regarding the conversion of 3DS Max animations into an easily transportable format has been overcome. This is definitely good news, since I have a lot of animations that are to be produced in 3DS Max, such as assembly and disassembly instructions etc. The SWF or FLV movies of these animations can be easily placed into Adobe Acrobat 3D, and this becomes a fully zoomable animation in the document. The size of the distilled Acrobat file containing these animations is smaller than the source files in 3DS Max format. This way, complex animations with high resolution graphics and high polygon-count 3D meshes can be faithfully rendered into lower file sizes, and become highly useful, with minimal loss of resolution. I am currently using this technique at work to create assembly instructions.

Multimedia Exercise

krisco43 — Thu, 08 May 2008 04:30:37 +0000

This is the link to my multimedia exercise , click on the link to go to the shockwave flash file. I used Flash CS3 to create a mask over a background image. This effect can be used with any backgroud and any size mask. The mask shape can also be changed along with the motion. So you can have a dynamically changing mask that reveals only that part of the background directly under it. This is useful to create game and banner effects. I have included the instructions for making a mask if anyone is interested.

Create a new layer under the default layer. You can do this by clicking the add layer icon.
Import your picture into the library.
Drag the picture symbol into the bottom layer and align it with the edges of the stage. It helps if your image size and the document size are the same.
Select the Oval tool from your tool box and draw a circle in the top layer.
Select the circle border and delete it.
Drag the circle to one end of your picture.
In frame 40 of the topmost layer, press F6 to insert a new keyframe.
In frame 40 of the bottom layer, press F5 to insert frames.
Select frame 40 of the top layer.
Keep the playhead on frame 40 of the top layer and drag the circle to other end of the background picture.
In frame 1 of the top layer, keep the playhead on frame 1 of the top layer.
In the Tween drop down list in the properties window, select Shape Tween.
Right click on the top layer in the layers window and select Mask.
If you want to preview the movie, you can press Ctrl+Enter to see the movie.

You can embed an swf file in your website, but to get it right can be a bit iffy. I had to spend half the night troubleshooting, turned out to be a JS file not in the right folder.

I hope you all enjoy this.

Reflections of a rebel blogger

krisco43 — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:44:29 +0000

At the end of a very hectic blogging session, where I blogged no less than six readings in as many days, I can sit back and analyse the experience in light of what I did, how I did it, and what I learnt from it. The aim of this exercise was to create a blog in WordPress, and populate it with blog entries. Creating the account was a straightforward task, and as soon as the account was created, I could start blogging right away, and all this for free. Thanks Ken! Now I could unleash some of my pent up frustrated writer angst onto the unsuspecting world, in the form of blog entries. I have since created several blog entries, and embedded graphics and thumbnails into the blog. I have also created a link to link to a graphic. Although the basic tools are easy to use, time constraints have conspired against me discovering the full potential of the WordPress blog. However, the controls and user face are quite intuitive, so I am confident that I can find a way to do whatever it is I have to do within WordPress.
It took a while for me to understand the mindset underlying the user interface design, but once I captured the mindset, I could make the leaps of imagination to laterally deconstruct the interface.
Once the reviews were written, publishing them was easy, all I had to do was to log on to my WordPress account and click Write. I could then copy and paste from MS Word directly into the post fields. I included a title for each review, and I kept fiddling with the look of the blog presentation interface till I got more or less the look I wanted, in this case the Hemingway blog template. It is easy to change the presentation interface, and thus change the look and feel of the blog. I have already learnt how to add a link to a post, and how to connect that link to a specific file. In summary, it has been a fun experience that also taught me about the power of blogging.

Review – Acumen: An Interactive Multimedia Simulation Based on Situated Learning Theory Peter Standen & Jan Herrington

krisco43 — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:57:00 +0000

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a multimedia simulation for teaching research skills to business students. The article quotes from other sources, stating that traditional school and university learning is in danger of becoming isolated from mainstream real-world activity and performance. The challenge, state the authors, is for educators to align formal learning more substantially with the way learning is achieved in real-life settings, and to base instructional materials design on more recent theories of learning which reflect this shift. They postulate that one method which has the potential to achieve this is the theory of situated cognition or situated learning.
This involves creating microworlds that recreate the realism of the macroworld. I quote “Multimedia designers need to provide only enough clues to enable imagination, not technology, to create ‘realism’.” I understand this to be that the creation of partial clues can be seen as sampling reality and creating a microworld out of these samples. The Acumen application is provided as an example of how a micro world application can be or should be created. This software is modelled on the experience of a student employed as an apprentice in a summer job. There are no instructions for using the program, and the users navigate around the program by clicking on images of people or objects. One can see the benefits of this program, in that a task can accurately model real life objects and behaviour, without the abstraction and secondary or representative reality found in standard user interfaces. This rethink and redesign of the traditional user interface is required to enable multimedia simulation that has a larger transfer capacity. Though the concept is an excellent one, the question arises as to what level of fidelity should the microworld mirror the macroworld. The issue is budgetary, where very close resemblance between the micro and macroworlds have a cost factor attached. In summary, this is a well written, well researched article that transfers complex ideas with easily understood text and graphics, and presents a sound argument for modelling simulations that bring the practice of textbook principles into the classroom.

Source: http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth97/papers/Standen/Standen.html

Review of A Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning: Implications for Design Principles by Richard E. Mayer and Roxana Moreno

krisco43 — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:49:23 +0000

In this work, Mayer and Moreno ask the question, how can we avoid a trail of broken promises concerning the educational benefits of new educational technologies such as multimedia learning environments? In answer to this question, they suggest that a solution is to use instructional technology in ways that are grounded in research-based theory. They provide a research-based review of five principles of multimedia design. The argument has its strengths since empirical theory can give reliable conclusions if the experiments have been performed correctly. On this basis, one can accept the veracity of Mayer and Moreno’s arguments. By studying the cognitive aspect of multimedia, they identify three main cognitive processes, selecting, organizing and integrating. This model based on the work of Mayer (1999), and five major principles have been derived by experimentation, based on this model.
1. The Multiple Representation Principle. It is better to present an explanation using two modes of representation rather than one.
2. Contiguity Principle. When giving a multimedia explanation, present corresponding words and pictures contiguously rather than separately.
3. Split-Attention Principle: When giving a multimedia explanation, present words as auditory narration rather than as visual on-screen text.
4. Individual Differences Principle: The foregoing principles are more important for low knowledge than high-knowledge learners, and for high-spatial rather than low-spatial learners.
5. Coherence Principle: When giving a multimedia explanation, use few rather than many extraneous words and pictures.
The work presents a very strong argument in favor of applying these principles when using multimedia for teaching, especially scientific subjects. It is based on the findings of major researchers in multimedia cognition, and so attains credibility by association. The style is succinct, and the content is well organized, which enables it to deliver the message with authority and smooth cadence.
Source: http://www.unm.edu/~moreno/PDFS/chi.pdf

My thoughts on “Garage Cinema and the Future of Media Technology”, by Marc Davis

krisco43 — Sun, 04 May 2008 14:12:24 +0000

Marc Davis is a media futurologist who paints a convincing picture of the convergence of motion pictures and computation in the future. Davis believes that in the next 50 years, computational motion pictures will bring a fundamental change in the possibilities of written language and communication, and that the full potential of computation has not yet affected our thinking about media. He is of the opinion that profound technological, linguistic, and social effects are imminent over the next half century.
The linguistic area where the most changes will occur, according to Davis, is in semasiography, or visual writing, where computers can aid in the transmission of ideas through pictures. He foresees the ascendance of semasiographical writing over the glottographic form of expression, or written language as it is prevalent today. This idea is already being realised in the proliferation of visual images and iconography in visual media. The immense popularity of video sharing sites such as Youtube might signify that the visual language is gaining strength as a form of expression. How far this will go remains to be seen, and if Davis’s predictions of humans using technology to communicate using pictures and mental imagery are realised, then the very basic foundation of human communication will change in the future, as we evolve away from the traditional glottographic language systems. Admittedly, the central challenge for computational media technology is to develop a language that both humans and computers can read and write. This can be quite a difficult problem, but not insurmountable.

Garage cinema can be likened to those videos to be found on video sharing sites. These home made videos are sometimes of surprisingly amazing quality and content. The rise of Garage cinema, according to the author, is the forerunner to this change, although many technological, social and legal changes have to occur before garage cinema becomes common practice. Sweeping statements and predictions such as these, especially in connection with computer technology, often have a way of being proven untrue or only partly true. This might be because the experts cannot fully predict the exponential patterns of technological evolution, or foresee the many twists and turns of changing reality in the distant future. Given the span of his predictions, whether Davis is spot on the mark, or bowling a wide ball, can only be analysed in half a century from now.

Source: http://fusion.sims.berkeley.edu/GarageCinema/pubs/pdf/pdf_599AB179-D346-4374-8F0AE11D9D76EBEF.pdf

Principles of educational multimedia user interface design, by Lawrence J. Najjar- A Review

krisco43 — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:46:38 +0000

In this work, Najjar attempts to describe empirically based principles that multimedia user interface designers can use to better the learning outcomes from educational multimedia applications. He sets out to redress shortcomings in multimedia user interface design guidelines by basing them on empirical research rather than on the opinions of experts. He researches a number of factors that influence learning outcomes in multimedia applications, and lists the findings.
This is quite a novel approach, especially in multimedia, where very little research as been conducted into how the message encapsulated in the media is received, perceived, and acted upon by the audience.
Najjar concludes, “Designers should use closely related verbal and pictorial information together, and build in tasks that encourage users to elaborateively process the information”. Illustrations and other media should support the accompanying text, and illustrations should not be used just for the sake of including a graphic. The choice of medium to suit the message is also important, as the effectiveness of media is quite application-specific. Najjar also advocates that the user interface be made intuitive, as the user interface has a significant positive effect when learning from multimedia. His conclusions not only ring true when viewed from a logical point of view, but are also backed up by the findings of well-known researchers in the field. These findings can be applied by multimedia designers to improve the quality and effectiveness of their products.
Although he adds the caveat that these principles should be used with caution as they are largely untested, the principles set out in his work appear to be able to withstand the rigors of being tested in actual use.

Source: http://www.informatikdidaktik.de/HyFISCH/Multimedia/Learning/MMDesignNajjar.htm

A review and critique of Anna Brown’s paper on Instructional Design

krisco43 — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:59:29 +0000

In her analysis, Brown asserts that regardless of how much he or she (the instructional designer, or ID) actually participates in the production process, the instructional designer must have some working knowledge of media production to work effectively. Any course of study in ID must at some point address issues of media production.
From personal experience, I would say that knowledge of the media production process would make instructional designers more aware of the process involved in creating the learning systems. Comparing those IDs that understand the production process to those who don’t, the ones who understand media production are more able to factor the production process into their design, and are more able to leverage the capabilities offered by the media. Say for example, an ID producing a set of instructions for classroom delivery, might be more effective if he or she understood slide show (PowerPoint) and movie media production. Having an understanding of these media production processes, they could design the instruction to fit more closely to the method of delivery. The instructional package for a movie presentation for example, would be much more effective if it were designed specifically for the movie, instead of being an instructional package with no particular planned mode of delivery. The ideal scenario is for all IDs to have good media production skills, and to take part in the production process, at least in the capacity of knowledgeable partners, being able to offer input and be actively involved.
The study
A study was conducted by Brown, in which data was collected from the students and instructors from interview transcripts, participant-observer journal entries, and case studies of selected students. The study aimed to discover the changes, if any, in the attitude of IDs who took up media studies.
This study comes to the conclusion that “Without exception, every student interviewed or observed in action during the course of the semester did indeed change his or her attitude toward the production process to some extent; and that change was one that would be considered positive in terms of the instructors’ originally articulated goals. Every student observed or interviewed demonstrated a change through word or deed.”
This is very positive and desirable outcome for the course, and shows that instruction designers who are given insider knowledge into the media production will become more attuned to the requirements and challenges inherent in media production. This sort of rounded education can only go to improve the work of IDs.

Comments on Joel Spolsky’s work

krisco43 — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:46:41 +0000

I’ve just read Joel Spolsky’s work, Building Communities with Software. Although Spolsky’s piece is a commentary on social evolutions in the states, it is also highly applicable to British society. I for one, never go to pubs, unless with friends. I hate drinking alone. The Work-TV-Sleep-Work-TV-Sleep cycle must be familiar to many of us, regardless of where we live in the world. Spolsky posits that we flock to online communities and chatrooms, discussion forums and open source projects out of desperation for some human contact. He asserts that societal influences are largely responsible for the lack of a place to socialize in. “Make a coffee shop without very many chairs, as Starbucks does, and people will carry their coffee back to their lonely rooms, instead of staying around and socializing like they do in the fantasy TV coffeehouse of “Friends…”. This is something that many of us, if not all of us have already experienced in one way or another. The fragmentation of family bonds, the increasing encapsulation of the individual in swathes of psychic insulation that cannot be easily penetrated, and the devaluation of values that were once held dear in society. We seem to be embracing change recklessly without due regard to the potentially disastrous consequences. Global warming, climate change, large scale deforestation and other man made calamities have all of us walking the brink, a hairsbreadth away from the abyss. Most of Spolsky’s statements strike a chord within me, and I can see myself nodding in agreement as he sets forth one damning argument after another. One might have chance to doubt ones observations, but when they are backed by the keen observations of someone such as Spolsky, it does tend to reinforce those beliefs.

After making these rather telling observations, Spolsky abruptly veers off into analysing the influence of design in the popularity of the software. He states that the variations in the popularity of an online community are mainly due to the software design decisions. This might be so, but why are terribly designed sites such as Ebay and Amazon so popular that they are icons more than services? These assertions are probably not so well supported by fact. The IRC, aussie gay bashers, bots, bot wars and many other digressions later, the reader is cast ashore on Slashdot, fuckedcompany.com, and branching, which is supposedly very logical to a programmer, but lacking in real-world fidelity. In summary, Spolsky got off to a promising start, but then squandered his lead, went off the tracks, and got himself stuck in quicksand.

Flash

krisco43 — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:55:48 +0000

Can i import 3D meshes and models into Flash, and output as fla and swf? Will the models remain 3D models, or just animation cels, as in a sequence of flat 2D images?

Need to ask Ken.

How do I import a series of bitmaps and put them in the same order in a flash file?