June 7th, 2010 mosesoak
Perhaps it's atypical to send empty POSTs (is it?), but on a recent project we were simply leaving the contents for later until we'd proven that Flash could properly send headers. There are a number of header types that the player blocks, clearly listed in the URLRequestHeader docs, however we couldn't figure out why non-blocked and custom headers were failing to send at all. It was not a security issue, our crossdomain.xml was temporarily changed to include allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="*" secure="false". (For testing only, that's certainly not recommended for deployment!)
After lots of hair-pulling, hand-wringing and tooth-gnashing we realized: you have to include data in your POST or Flash Player simply discards all of your headers! Flash Player bug? Or just one more annoying, undocumented idiosyncrasy? Anyway I hope this post saves someone else some of the time our team lost today.
(By the way, I highly recommend the Charles Debugging Proxy which provides a really nice detailed look at network requests and responses.)
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December 21st, 2009 mosesoak
I'm no expert in professional-grade motion blur, but the FilmStrip library for Flash has let me toy around with it a little. I noticed that when both a scene's subjects and its camera are animated, the motion of the camera can impact blurs in sometimes unwanted ways. For example, an object might be moving very fast in one direction, but then if the camera swivels in the opposite direction it can actually reverse the blur of the subject.
As I've described in earlier posts, FilmStrip generates motion blur by generating a series of subframe captures within the real animation flow. If the camera is also animating, this will affect the perspective of the subframes as well as the primary frame. Since allowing the camera to animate normally turned up some unnatural-looking results (like the swivel example I mentioned), the next thing I tried was to entirely cut out camera animation. This had the effect of completely restoring the blurs of the animation subjects, but it also didn't really look natural to the eye. I suppose we've all grown up watching the particular way TV and film cameras capture things that it's pretty ingrained, things either read as fake or natural even if we don't know the exact reasons.
So next I tried an in-between: allowing the camera to animate during subframe captures, but just not as much as it normally would, which looked a lot better. I achieved this by applying a multiplier to the camera animation. By dampening camera motion during subframe animation, but not cutting it entirely, camera motion can still have some interplay without fully overpowering the blur of the subjects.
I've added a property to the MotionBlurSettings class called cameraBlurPercent, which now defaults to CAMERA_BLUR_NATURAL (0.5), cutting the influence of camera motion in half. Two other constants added to the class, CAMERA_BLUR_NONE (0), CAMERA_BLUR_ABSOLUTE (1) allow you to toggle camera influence based on your particular animation. You can also fine-tune it to another percentage such as 0.25, or do crazy experiments by setting it above 1 to magnify camera motion.
Once again here's my little x-wing clip which I think shows a really natural interplay of camera motion and subject motion. (This MP4 doesn't seem to work in Chrome for Mac, try it in Safari instead.)
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May 8th, 2009 mosesoak
Animoto nabbed a real-life 2009 Webby folks, under Services and Applications -- and we won the People's Voice award as well so thanks for your votes!
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May 8th, 2009 mosesoak
My session at the Flash on Tap conference will now head into the uncharted waters of Flash multi-touch tables and rendering simulated video out of Papervision3D. We've just recently spruced up our Animoto Labs blog where you can get more information on my session.
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October 23rd, 2008 mosesoak
Fans will recognize the cover of Figure 8, a street mural in L.A.
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August 21st, 2008 mosesoak
If you've ever read up on the history of Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash [2] [3:video], you're probably familiar with the names Jonathan Gay and Robert Tatsumi.
Their latest startup venture is called greenbox, an "interactive energy management platform that enables households to save money and reduce their carbon footprint." The venture is backed in part by former Macromedia CFO Betsey Nelson and CEO Rob Burgess.
Earth2Tech blog: Greenbox: Flash Creators Tackle Energy in the Home
Wired.com: Flash Creators Reveal App for Saving Money on Energy
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