Archive of August 2008
Papervision Tree
For the next version of my site, I'm going to have a sweet environment that grows for your pleasure!
Here is sneak peak 1 at the development tests. This test is using Line3D to draw a recursive branch. Pretty simple.. you instanciate one branch, and it adds branches as it draws it's self.
Cheers!UPDATE:
Added some leafs... nothing fancy just some planes as placeholders.
Flash Video Encoding
FLV encoding.. and the fun it brings to us all!
Today I've been encoding videos all day to put in a microsite. My choice product for the encoding process is On2 Technologies Flix Pro because it kicks ass, basically. The features out weight the other FLV encoders I've used. This is usually a wonderful process, but today it was painfully slow for some reason. The first reason is that I keep getting new versions of the videos to use, and second is, for some strange reason if I encode the video with the "One Pass" parameter set, the metadata duration get's f'd up. That's bad for what I needed it for. In 2 pass mode it would be great and compress down a little further, but the last frame of the video would look pretty junky.
This site uses the video to transition from page to page and on the end of the video it uses BitmapData to capture the last frame and thats what you get while you view the content. It took me a while to track this down, but I finally got it. The complete event was never being fired in Actionscript, meaning progress/duration never got to 1.
After some trial and error, I figured out that if I encode the video at 2 pass, it works fine. Here's the funny part, if I encode the video in 2 pass and then follow it up with another encode (exact same settings) in 1 pass mode, it kept the meta data duration parameter and the last frame was pristine.
Seems slightly strange, but maybe this will save someone a bit of time when they find the same problem. Either that, or maybe I'm just slightly off my rocker and I am staring at these videos too much :)