On Thu, 29 Dec 2005 14:02:54 +0000, SpaceGirl
wrote:
You never did explain. However on my own I found you can right click on objects in Macromedia and convert them to symbols…quite deficient compared to SwishMax’s interface.
Still haven’t touched on that one…are you avoiding it on purpose or what?
Because I’ve not used Swish yet, so I cant really comment on it to be honest.
I was actually wondering about Macromedia Flash. I mean, is there something I’m missing? Do they just add extra steps in order to get objects on the outline/timeline? Is there some menu I’m missing? I’m trying to determine if it’s just a piss poor UI or if it’s just deficient as far as object layout/control.
…what would you need any real code for? No offense but if you’re writing a butt load of code to create interactive video you’re REALLY doing something wrong. Check out the downloads section on the main Backwater site…that didn’t require any sort of serious code at all.
Because you are living in client-side land. If you want to do anything with services, or use XML, process user input etc, you cannot do ANY of this without coding. But really, your statement demonstrates a real lack of knowledge about how Flash works beyond animation and perhaps stop(); ?? All the really creative sides are as much about good use of AS as design-smarts.
I thought we were talking about interactive video, now suddenly you’re talking about XML…what the fuck time zone are you in exactly?
Because it’s all part of it. at least, we tend to build sites that aren’t static, and rather than building every single video into Flash by hand we spit out XML from a database that contains info (such as location) for the video. This is then parsed by Flash and it loads the correct FLV. It’s pretty much the best way I think as if we choose a different way of distributing video in the future (perhaps Metro?) XML is universal.
1. Nothing is universal, if you think otherwise you’re just deluding yourself.
2. Last I checked you can access PHP files and pass variables back and forth from within Flash…which is a LOT more "universal" than relying on "XML"…by the by, just what do you mean EXACTLY by "XML"…just curious.
Actually no and it’s less intuitive. Less keyboard shortcuts is generally a better thing in most cases and why do you need to click on the image preview portion of the layers box in order to do it? What does that have to do with SELECTION…you see, less intuitive. In Paint Shop the function is tied into the SELECTION TOOL, which, you know MAKES SENSE.
You can ALSO do it from the select tool honey.
Yeah…with a keyboard command. You’re like…slow…or something.
There’s no reason to start name calling really is there?
….um, yeah actually there is. The insults make it all much more interesting to read (clever word art and all like that)…plus it weeds out deficients since those who don’t have thick skin will quite quickly become frothy mouthed little snits with nothing meaningful to contribute.
Here, let me try explaining to you the S..L..O..W way:
Photoshop – select a box area, hold down CTRL, then move your mouse slightly and hope to I love you don’t accidentally move the selection out of place in the process.
Pretty much sums it up. What professional uses Photoshop with a mouse!?
….you’re joking, right?
Really ends the discussion right there ๐ Buy yourself a graphics tablet for gods sake ๐
Um, I have one, actually…and coincidentally it came with a mouse too.
Paint Shop – select a box area, click once inside of it.
You can do all of that from the select menu – or how about vector masks? Or perhaps use the alpha channels, or then again a quickmask. The reason sometimes the functionality is not quite so obvious is because there is SO much of it.
Paint Shop – select a box area, click once inside of it.
Is reading just like REALLY hard for you or something? I mean, you’re sittin there back spinning for excuses and you just look like an idiot. This isn’t a debate over the imaginary functionality that you think exists in Photoshop, Kiddo, this is about a very SIMPLE and OFTEN USED tool that Adobe has implemented in a most horrid and backwards fashion.
Right there I’ve listed 4 masking tools, each of which
can be used in combination and each of which have their own specific functionality, and there’s reason for it – each do different tasks that could not be combined into a single tool Either that or you’d have 8 different masking buttons on the toolbar – which I think would be VERY confusing.
Not that, that has fuck all to do with…well, ANYTHING that this debate is about, but um, actually you could, quite easily…in fact they kind of already do. Click and hold over the pretty lil icons in the tool bar, Kiddo.
o_O
Where the fuck is your head, Kiddo?
On top of my pretty neck?
Which apparently is firmly entrenched between your butt cheeks.
It’s a choice.
Giving options where you don’t need any only causes confusion and makes the interface less user friendly and less intuitive. You don’t need 8 different ways of doing something, you only need ONE WAY, the best way. If you’re so deficient that you can’t figure out what the best way is…yeah, you probably shouldn’t be designing an interface.
No, you need the best way for that PROJECT. When it comes to ma<SLAP>
Okay look, Fallacy Girl, get it through that stupid head of yours, WE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT MASKING. Jesus fuck all, quit molesting straw men to try and protect your Adobe demigod.
you run full screen with NO TOOLS visible at all. That’s how everyone in our studio works. It’s so much faster.
Kiddiekins, I bet I’m faster than every person in your studio COMBINED and, huh, I have the tools visible.
If you say so.
I produced a working example of alpha transparent video in less than a day while you’re…well, even with the backing of your ENTIRE studio you haven’t even been able to produce a single working prototype.
Wanna name a few clients?
….what do clients have to do with it, Kiddo? Just because you slurp yerself up a corporate asshole doesn’t mean you have fuck all for skills…well maybe in marketing.
Scrollwheel zooms the image in PhotoShop. Duh ๐
Uh, no it doesn’t. Maybe on the Mac is does, but it sure as fuck doesn’t on the PC…but then what would you be using a Mac for…*snicker*…
Fix your mouse driver. Photoshop 6, 7, 8 & 9 all support scrollwheel on the PC, and 8 & 9 do on the Mac.
There’s nothing wrong with my mouse driver, Kiddo. The mouse wheel does not zoom in or out in Photoshop on the PC, it only scrolls up and down.
I’m not done yet. Paint Shop Pro also comes bundled with Animation Shop…Photoshop, not even CS2 has anything like that.
Photoshop comes shipped with ImageReady (since version 6, and we’re now on version 9). It’s a fully fledged animation/web tool.
Oh, Photoshop FINALLY got an anima-er…wait…wait…no, no it really doesn’t. I mean, if you want to make an uber simple 3rd rate animated GIF okay…but I don’t see any frame transitions…no frame effects…no text transitions…no text effects…you can only export video in Quicktime…um…I think maybe you missed the point, Powerluser.
I didn’t say it was any good. You just said there wasn’t one and that was somewhat inaccurate as there has been one for about 6 years. It does some very basic animation things, and it’s really designed for chopping up images for web pages – which it’s not actually very good at either. We tend to stick to PhotoShop. Cant remember the last time I used ImageReady for anything serious.
Now ya see, that wasn’t so hard, now was it? Maybe next we can cover Paint Shop Pro’s point to point line creation tool (which is like a perfected form of Illustrator built right into your graphics app)…only downside is that you can’t reedit node points after you’ve closed the line like you can in Illustrator…wait, no, I take that back, you can in Paint Shop Pro 9+.
That’s because unlike many other editing programs PhotoShop has non-linear undo.
*whispers* no it doesn’t *whispers*
o_O
…not by default anyway…and boy there’s a REAL good reason why.
I think it would confuse the hell out of new Photoshop users if it was turned on by default.
It would do a lot more than confuse them.
It’s incredibly useful though.
….yeah incredibly useful if you want to fuck everything all up. Seriously, it’s people like you that make me pray to God that we never invent time travel technology, because you’d be fucking retarded enough to actually think it’d be a good idea to go screwing around with it.
I dont actually know if PaintShop does that, maybe it does.
I don’t know either actually, I wouldn’t look for it if it did though.
There are far easier ways of achieving such results with far less effort and far less…mess. You’re relying far too much on the program to think for you and not enough on your own ability to organize what you’re doing directly. To me, most of what you’re doing and most of what you proposed says one thing…uncreative. *shrugs*
That IS the danger, but then clients are hard to predict. Especially the sorts we have – often we can get RIGHT to the end of a project and they decide to use a different colour on an album cover. So how do you fix all the art quickly?
With money and time, their money, your time. Bottom line…you’re getting screwed by your clients.
You know what REALLY kills Photoshop though?
This:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_images/_Scraps/PNG_Opt ions.png
Paint Shop has the most powerful PNG optimization controls I’ve ever seen…Photoshop has nothing even remotely like it…I wouldn’t expect Powerlusers to know anything about image encoding methodology though.
Yeah I wish it had better PNG support. But…
PNG isn’t really viable just now on the Internet – end of 2006-2007 when enough people have either IE7 or Fx.
….well, that’s the going delusion. Coincidentally I ripped it apart a long time ago:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/transmov e/ Not to mention that Flash fully supports PNG files outright, so uh…yeah, I dunno what yer talkin about.
Oh hey, Spacey, for fun why don’t you post the link to one of your studios sites, for fun I’ll reap the fucker and then rebuild it at half the size…LOL…
Hmm www.garbage.com
Apparently it’s not just a clever name. I especially like how the nav bar gets partially covered by the ink splotches making navigation just that much more annoying! ^_^
www.redhotchilipeppers.com
What a horrid interface…and an extremely poor use of fonts. Might wanna try breaking out of that monochromatic color scheme while you’re at it.
www.yell.com
….why did you even list that one? It looks like a generic Dreamweaver template littered up with some generic pictures you ripped off some stock photo CD you bought off eBay.
www.bowie.net etc…
Gawd, they just get worse as you go down the line. Apparently you were listing by quality of design. Free cl00, that last one…has no design.
PhotoShop has smart objects that can be embedded
PhotoShop or Illustrator files.
…those aren’t selections, Honey.
But they can contain selections.
Uh…no, they can’t actually. o_O
Yes they can. They’re just PSD files really. You can save as many alpha channels was you want inside them.
You’re confused again, child. We’re not talking about alpha channels, we’re talking about SELECTIONS. *rolls eyes* This whole READING thing sure is a bitch for you, innt?
What part of the definition of "selection" are you not grasping exactly?
Selection is just an alpha channel.
Uh, no it’s not. You can make a selection out of an alpha channel, but a selection most certainly IS NOT an alpha channel.
The closest you can come to saving selections in Photoshop is to save the selection as a new image and then to save that image as a PSD file…which coincidentally is HUGE in size and much harder to manage.
Because it’s a photo-editing program it has to save channels against something, so yes, alpha channels do have to be saved inside a PSD and cannot be saved externally. But that’s not really a problem. If you are working with production media size is hardly an issue is it? Some of our PhotoShop production files can be 200mb+ (raw images inside them).
If your production files are that large…yeah, you don’t know fuck all about image encoding methodology. And the size matters, Kiddo, even during the development phase. You remind me of the last client I had and I had to work with their graphic designer who sent me 300 MB PSD files. Transmitting 300 MB files back and forth is a Jesus killing waste of time and bandwidth even on a high speed connection. Multiply that by a factor of a 100 for a large
studio…OH…MY…GAWD…seriously, you could be saving quite literarily HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars in equipment and networking costs. You remind me of the kind of deficients who go out and buy a bunch of new shit for their fuckin Dell, complaining that it’s "running slow", when really, it’s not that it’s slow, it’s just it’s littered up with so much adware and spyware shit that it can no longer operate with any degree of practical efficiency.
Its useful. Imagine this; you are working on designs for a company web site. You integrate their pretty logo into letter heads, web sites, brochures etc. The company then changes their mind about their logo. Do you really want to have to edit ALL those documents by hand?
Yes…and if the client changes their mind about the logo…guess whose gonna pay for it…not only the logo change but updating all the letter heads, web sites, brochures, etc…yeah, THE CLIENT.
Of course – but if you have lots of clients you have be be efficient and it’s a huge pain in the arse if you have to go change all those files. Talk about mind-bendingly dull.
Like I said before, your clients are taking advantage of you. You can stop getting fucked up the ass any time you like, it’s your choice to get used like that. *shrugs*
Like I said, post the link to one of your sites…I’ll reap the fucker and rebuild it at half the size…LOL…yer Powerluser program doesn’t even have proper image encoding options for PNG files fer fuck sake.
With all the xml, php, asp, database, restricted access, logging,
As much of it as I can get, for the rest I can create simulation pieces.
search engine optomisation etc…?
….search engine optimization, eh? LOL *rolls eyes*
Well, that’s one way to look at it, but you’re aiming pretty low. My freelance clients range from record labels and popular bands for Universal to interactive sites for Yell. Home-bru sites have their market, but not if you’re after the kind of clients that are willing to let you play with more cutting edge stuff (and pay for the time it takes to do it).
…it’s sad that you need clients to "play with more cutting edge stuff"…tsch, tsch, tsch…sounds to me like you have no love of the art…just another "professional" with mediocre skills.
I do love the art – I only do this because I love it, but I have one I on what the Internet COULD be. Music clients tend to want something that stands out. This often means playing with things that no many people have done. That’s why we’re pushing all the time. Sadly we’re not always as cutting edge as we’d like to be :/
Especially if you’re only just now discovering the cleverness of alpha transparencies/chroma keying. Free cl00, you should have been working with alpha transparent images LONG before they ever started including support for alpha transparent video.
No, no, I think you misunderstood…again. My point was that you were trying to make it sound like chroma keying didn’t even exist before Flash…my point is that it’s been around for a LOOOONG time…WAAAAAY before Flash was even conceived of. The fact that you’re only finding a use for it NOW and just with Flash kinda says a lot about yer skillz, Kiddo.
It didn’t exist in Flash. I know keying has been around forever – but this is the first time it can be done real-time in something so small to distribute.
….not really:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/transmov e/ Woah, alpha transparencies sure are hard!
*rolls eyes*
Sounds fun ๐ I’ll try post when we’re done filming. Not that we’ve even started yet! ๐ฎ
You’re too slow:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/_test_platform/cbmain2/
I’ve run into a couple problems, but I should have em sorted out within the next 24/7:
I dont see any video on there?
Try upgrading to Flash 8…or suddenly feel humbled by the fact that you can’t even recognize video when you see it.
None of the links do anything.
….why would the links do anything? It’s an interface prototype, why the fuck do you think it’s in a directory called "test platform"…woah, yeah, not just a clever name.
If you want access to the content you need to use the old version of the site:
http://www.backwater-productions.net/carebears/ Film something with a video camera and then show me.
….what difference would that make? I mean whether you’ve video taped a subject on a green screen or created it from scratch graphically it’s the same thing. Actually though, what I did was about a million times harder since I created my video from scratch…literarily, I created it FRAME BY FRAME from scratch. Any idiot to can hit record on a video camera, Bumbles. That requires no experience what-so-ever…just a good $4,000 or so for a Canon XL2…well unless you REALLY wanna do it up cheap.
As good as I am though…I don’t even need the subject to be on a green screen, I can manually edit out the background and create my own alpha transparency straight from scratch if it was absolutely necessary.
We just encoded about 40 MPEGs for a band site as Flash8 FLV, but none of them contain alpha grrrr. Gimme time ๐ This is supposed to be a holiday!
Put up one of yer source videos, I’ll do it up proper for ya.
Doing it with SwishMax requires a bit more creativity than using Macromedia Flash, but I would never give up the SwishMax UI for it.
Yeah, point and click ๐
No, Kiddo, point and click has nothing to do with it. It’s all about the relationships between content. It’s like comparing Agent to XNews. Agent’s UI is superior to XNews because it treats Usenet messages like individual files and let’s you manipulate them as if they were such. Where as with XNews it treats messages as if they’re apart of a list and gives you very little control over individual message manipulation and control. SwishMax is superior to Macromedia Flash because its interface treats every object like a piece of video on a timeline and allows you to essentially create sub clips or sprites within the timeline. SwishMax basically operates like Adobe Premiere where as Macromedia Flash operates too much like Photoshop, which doesn’t lend itself well for creating moving content.
—
Onideus Mad Hatter
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