ERA404

/ Don

Flash Video Smoothing

While working on a new project for ERA404, I received a great tip from Zeh, my Flash Obi Wan whom you’ve no doubt read me gushing about in the past. The site (which will be launched at the top of 2010) is centered around a video loop. The loop began as a 208MB raw Quicktime video clip shot by one of ERA404’s video directors/editors, Greg Stadnik (you may remember his work from our Beautiful Children viral video that was featured in Gawker and AdRants last year). The clip was then scaled in 1/2, compressed using the On2 VP6 codec, imported into flash and then manipulated manually.  The final SWF was 3.12MB, but the quality suffered terribly.

This is when Zeh clued me in to video smoothing. It’s the same principle as bitmap smoothing, since embedded video clips are technically just an image sequence. The result was night and day. The left half of the below screenshot shows video smoothing set to true, where the right shows smoothing set to false.

smoothingFigure 1. Video Smoothing – Click image for larger/detailed version

Note that this is just the beginning of this site with the radial gradient and scanlines stripped away to accentuate the smoothing detail. Overall, it’s an easy way to preserve quality without increasing loadtime, memory or processor demand. Give it a try. I’m sure you’ll be as pleasantly surprised as I was by the result.

/ Don

Make any image into Google Maps, with UMapper

I’ve been following the success of UMapper (formerly GMap, provided by the good folks at AFComponents.com) since a client of mine asked ERA404 to build a dating search with results based on proximity around a geographic area. And while the site has taken a slightly different direction since then, UMapper piqued my interest. In their latest newsletter, they cited creating Google Maps-style widgets from any image. And sure enough, it works!

I started to think of all the useful applications this could have for my companies and clients. For instance, Lyrek CEMS, which manages our clients’ contacts, events and venues, could plot their contacts on a world map. Clients seeking geographic searches (such as the dating site, previously mentioned) could now brand and custom design their national or global maps. Game developers and Facebook Application developers could use this functionality for GeoDart Games and MapWikis. And who is to say that the map has to be a geographical representation of land? Any application where a user would want to plot points of interest/note on a 2D plane would work: It could be a hi-rez scan of an organ or anatomical figure for physician studies, or a zoomed micro electron slide of pond water for biological research. The possibilities are endless.

And with AFComponents/UMapper’s analytics tools, you can also create surveys, questionnaires, tests/quizzes, census studies and a whole host of other information-gathering applications.

Watch their video, here:

/ Don

The 404 Goat is on the Rampage

screenshot021This is, for some reason, the funniest thing I’ve seen online in a long, long time. The 404 page for The North Face‘s web site is this fullscreen image of a bucking goat with an inset about how the goat has eaten the page that you’re attempting to visit. No, despite my company name, I do not spend my off-hours researching funny 404 pages (not anymore, anyway). I came across this by doing a hashtag search for 404.

screenshot03

/ Don

NBC Universal Milestones Timeline

Broadway Video Senior Designer, Katherine Burke, approached my company (ERA404) to develop the ActionScript 3 interface for NBC Universal‘s 5-Year Anniversary project, entitled “Milestones.” The site, designed by Ms. Burke, is hosted on NBCUni.com and linked from NBC.com, NBCUni.com and UniversalStudios.com. The interface provides a timeline for users to chart NBC Universal’s major achievements over the past five years.

screenshot081

Post Links
Broadway Video
/ Don

tweet//404

twitI know how excited you have been to read my sparse @citarella twitter tweets. AND how you’ve reveled in finding ERA404’s quarterly newsletter in your inbox, too. So have I got a surprise for all the [d]online readers. Now you can get ERA404 news, product and project information served directly to your browser and mobile devices more than four times a year. That’s right! ERA404 is now on twitter (as if you couldn’t tell by the post title.

Add us here: http://www.twitter.com/era404