Audio recording trouble work-around

After having spent a while with IT support trying to sort out this audio skipping problem when playing back recorded audio in Audition, I tried recording with Windows Sound Recorder instead and it was fine. Therefore it appears that we will have to use Sound Recorder instead for our narration.

Tristan.

Remaining school shoots problems solved

After enquiring again about why we were no longer able to film the girls' football club at Chaucer Technology School, we were pleased to have been granted permission without requiring a CRB check. A shoot will be arranged for when the club next train.
However Barton Court will not let us film their girls' football club, and so our project supervisor recommended that we use or trace general pictures of girls' football from the Internet.
Finally the school football clubs asset gathering has been sorted out and we will now be able to display something in both of the picture frames on every club office screen!

Tristan.

Workaround for jolty zooms

I have found a way of smoothing out our child screen zooms. It involves converting the stadium movie clip into an image when it is fully zoomed in, replacing the contents of the movie clip with this image, and quadrupling the length of the tweens. However, as the stadium movie clip is so big, it requires doing many print screens and piecing them together in Photoshop. Also, extending the tweens means the Actionscript requires updating.
This method however is not feasible for those child screens involving extremely deep zooms (such as the perception and football events screens); Photoshop cannot handle such a huge canvas size, therefore an alternative method needs to be sought for these screens.

Tristan.

mp3 trouble

I have had to convert some of the sound files to wav because for some strange reason Cool Edit introduces a short silence at the start and end of mp3 files. This is not good for those sound effects that are repeated many times or the sound loops used for the soundtrack. It doesn't do this with wav files so we have a mixture of both mp3 and wav files in the application. The soundtrack though will not be converted to wav because you cannot link wav files externally in Flash, but you can with mp3. To eliminate the delays I simply looped the sounds within the files themselves for several minutes.

Tristan.

Videos to be controlled externally

I have decided that all our videos will no longer be embedded into the fla files. This is because I had trouble with exporting a swf containing two fairly lengthy video clips; the export process froze.
Here is how we will be linking to our video clips externally:

1. Convert the mov file into a flv file and create an FLVPlayback player component (you can do this by importing the video and selecting the "progressive download from a web server" deployment option. Please see my blog post "Video clip render and Flash import settings" for the Flash import settings). I have created a seperate directory for our videos whose path is "Implementation/Videos." You will have to move the flv file into this directory as Flash automatically creates it in the directory containing the fla file. This means you will have to update the contentPath attribute for the FLVPlayback player instance in the "Component Inspector" window (on the "Parameters" tab). Ensure you give the FLVPlayback player instance an instance name.

2. Insert play, pause, stop, seek, and volume components from the "FLV Playback Custom UI list" in the "Components" window on the stage. Give these instance names.

3. Link these buttons to the FLVPlayback player instance using the following actionscript code in the "actions" layer:

FLVPlaybackInstanceName.playButton = PlaybuttonInstanceName;
FLVPlaybackInstanceName.pauseButton = PausebuttonInstanceName;
FLVPlaybackInstanceName.stopButton = StopbuttonInstanceName;
FLVPlaybackInstanceName.seekBar = SeekbarInstanceName;
FLVPlaybackInstanceName.volumeBar = volumebarInstanceName;

I have customised these controls, will import them into all fla files that will include video.

Tristan

Re-recording of the Jean Williams interview

Yesterday we recorded another student reading out the Jean Williams interview in the AV labs. After over an hour of working out how to set up Adobe Audition to record from the microphone, we recorded all ten questions that are to feature in the application. Audio from the microphone was only recorded into the left channel, so I had to duplicate the contents into the right channel for each file. Surprisingly we found that some of the recordings had a few jumps introduced in them when we played them back and so these will need re-doing tomorrow. We aren't sure what's causing this!

Tristan

Video dimensions

Perception quotes: 350x280

Football training methods: 380x304

Football events: 400x320

Football rules:

School football clubs: 203x162

Mark Patterson interview: 270x216

University of Kent women's football club credits video: 222x178

Unable to film Barton Court or Chaucer girls' clubs

As planned, I got in touch with Chaucer Technology School at the start of February when the girls' football club was to start up training to arrange a video shoot date. However, they have now decided that we are no longer able to film the club due to child protection reasons. I have asked them if a CRB check will grant us permission.
I also received refusal from Barton Court to film their club at a distance so that the members would not be identifiable.

As it stands, we only have video footage of Simon Langton and Montgomery School girls' clubs! I have therefore decided to get in touch with St. Anselm's and see if we can get permission to film thier girls' football club.

Tristan.

Project Critique

We successfully presented our mid-year critique today, and with positive feedback we are happy that we are on track to complete a fully functional completed project on time.

We aim to have all implementation finished by 1st March 07, leaving us with the rest of the month to test and if necessary make adjustments/developments to the project.

At the moment we are working on video editing in Premier Pro and adding video clips to the appropriate sections. We will also work on adding sound clips and effects where needed.