Category — Talks and Courses

As part of their promotion surrounding their new site and new courses, the Rich Media Institute is giving away FREE enrollment in 'Comprehensive ActionScript 3', which is a compilation of five of the online training courses I have published for the RMI.

Enrollment lasts for 90 days, and this course is free to enroll only through February 15th, and only through this link.

'Comprehensive ActionScript 3' includes over 9 hours of training, from the following courses:

- Practical ActionScript 3
- Understanding and Working with Events in ActionScript 3
- Understanding and Working with Event Broadcasters in ActionScript 3
- ActionScript 3 for Flash Video
- The Webcam, CuePoints and Captions in Flash Video with ActionScript 3

So, go ahead and do yourself a favor, and enroll.

Share and enjoy!

-r

I know it's been really light (basically non-existent) blogging this year. And I promise there's a good reason for it.

Aside from my standard work load, I've been consumed with two projects. One is the Ludi Machine, which I'm getting into shape for FITC Amsterdam at the end of February (there are still seats available for my workshop on Events in AS3 on February 21st in Amsterdam).

The other item that's been consuming my time has been the revamp of the Rich Media Institute website -- the first real overhaul to the public website since 2006. Among the new features we've recently launched:

• Totally overhauled catalog
  Making it much easier for you to browse the courses
• New shopping cart
  You can buy as many courses as you like at once, and you don't need to use paypal
• New European video server
  So our customers in Europe and Asia can view our training as well as our American ones
• Public forums
  So you can ask questions and follow news of the RMI without having to enroll in a course
• Brand new products
  We're constantly adding new courses to the site, including the FDT training and new combo courses, including Comprehensive ActionScript 3, which has over 9 hours of training content

So, the changes to the RMI are pretty exciting. And, following the launch of the new site, I'm teaching some new workshops that I wanted to let you all know about:

New Compilation Online Training
Comprehensive ActionScript 3 (over 9 hours of training)
Comprehensive Flash Video (5 and a half hours)

New Live Workshops
Practical ActionScript 3 on May 1st
Mastering ActionScript 3 Events on May 8th
Purchase both together and save $75

And, because of the new system, we are offering the option to enroll in the online training and live workshops at the same time -- so you can start accessing the online training immediately, and then get your face-to-face training when the workshop day comes.

Combo Live and Online Workshops
Practical ActionScript 3 online and live on May 1st
Mastering ActionScript 3 Events online and live on May 8th
Comprehensive AS3 9 hours of online training and both live workshops on May 1st and 8th

We're using these to gauge customer interest in these sorts of new and unique training opportunities. So please spread the word.

The Comprehensive AS3 - Live and Online is particularly great value. For $425 you get 9 hours of online training and 12 classroom hours, with me teaching you AS3 -- I've worked on these courses for years now, and it really is the best AS3 training available.

All of our online training, and all of my live workshops, are on sale through all of February, and you can save an additional 10% with the code 'rblank9'.

Share and enjoy!

-r

My new online video course on Dynamic Multi-bitrate Streaming with Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) has just gone live on Adobe Developer Connection.

It's 35 minutes across five lessons and takes you through the process of converting the progressive OSMF video player (which we create in the first installment of this course on Building Progressive Video Players with Adobe OSMF, into a dynamic multi-bitrate streaming player. Multi-bitrate streaming occurs when you program your Flash to deliver the highest quality video a viewer can see (dependent on their bandwidth). *Dynamic* multi-bitrate streaming is similar, with the additional feature of having your player constantly meters the bandwidth throughout viewing, to adjust the playback between multiple videos seamlessly, as the viewer's bandwidth may fluctuate.

Please note: that the first course on progressive video players was built with OSMF Sprint 5. The second course on streaming with OSMF was built with OSMF Sprint 7. I spend the first lesson of the new course updating the progressive player to work with Sprint 7, and I wrote a few notes about the major differences between OSMF 0.5 and 0.7 in a post on this blog last month. Also note that, by the time the course was published by Adobe, OSMF had already moved forward to Spring 8.

When I wrote the first course on building a progressive video player with OSMF, I was struck by two things:
1) OSMF is clean -- really clean -- and it just works well in ways that the AS3 video API does not -- for instance, with OSMF setting volume is a matter of talking to the volume property of the MediaPlayer
2) OSMF felt like a bit of overkill -- you need a lot of imports and classes (a MediaPlayer, a MediaElement, a NetLoader and a URLResource) just to build the simplest of progressive video players -- that would be simple enough, requiring seven lines of code with raw AS3 if you knew it

But, I had a hunch that #2 above was due to the fact that I was using approximately 0.05% of this powerful framework -- like trying to use a nuclear bomb when a shovel would do just fine.

Well, when I started learning how to write the code to build dynamic multi-bitrate streaming player, I quickly learned that my hunch was right. The benefits of OSMF really kick in once you do anything beyond the most basic video player.

In the case of streaming, to convert your progressive OSMF video player to a streaming OSMF video player, all you do is change the URL! Seriously, that's it. OSMF is smart enough to know that when you try to load a video from an RTMP server, you're trying to stream -- and it takes care of the rest.

That was pretty neat. But the benefits really kicked in when I beefed my regular streaming OSMF video player to one that supports dynamic multi-bitrate streaming. All it took was just a few extra lines of code to turn my regular video player into one that supports dynamic multi-bitrate streaming. If you want to learn those lines of code, I'd recommend checking out the course.

As I say, I'm still just barely cracking the surface of OSMF, and I'm really looking forward to digging deeper into its support for layouts, playlists and monetization. But, even with this second course, the massive time, workflow and standardization features of OSMF are already revealing themselves.

Share and enjoy!

-r

As I've mentioned or alluded to in a few of my posts in the past couple of months, I've recently been working on a new talk for 2010. The talk is entitled 'Hearing Pictures' and is based around my work on a side hobby called 'Project Ludi'.

It's a little difficult to explain the long-term mission of Project Ludi in a short blog post, but in the first series of experiments on which I've honed in, I am seeking to create a system that can translate pictures into music. This is what I call the Synesthesizer -- a musical synthesizer that relies on synesthesia-inspired translation metaphors.

I'm only a few short months into what is a very long-term endeavor, and I've had precious few hours to spend on the project in that time, but I always set the benchmark definition of version 1.0 of the synesthesizer as 'a system that produces something approximating music', and even though I haven't invested nearly the amount of time as I'd like, I believe that the current Synesthesizer meets this definition. And thus, I feel I have Synesthesizer 1.0.

The Synesthesizer is a Flash 10 application that translates pictures into music in real-time. What I've included with this post is a rendering of the output of the application -- not the Synesthesizer itself. I'll let you judge the quality for yourself -- and please feel free to let me know what you think.

Now, of course, there is far more to do here, but what I found most amazing about this process was how easy it was to get to a point of generating 'music' instead of 'sound'. In effect, I apply something along the order of six rules to get to this point. The addition of each rule to the Synesthesizer brings us closer to the generation of music, instead of raw sound.

To get a bit more insight into the Synesthesizer, you should check out my talk, Hearing Pictures, which I'll be presenting at FITC Amsterdam in February and at FITC Toronto in April.

In this talk, I describe the process I followed to get the Synesthesizer to this point. Using the 1943 Hermann Hesse novel, The Glass Bead Game (also published under the title Magister Ludi, the protagonist of the novel, from whom Project Ludi derives its name), as a starting point, and proceeding through a discussion of synesthesia, the aural illusions of Professor Diana Deutsch, the Experiments in Musical Intelligence by Professor David Cope, the music of Tamarin Monkeys, and many other stepping points, I walk through the thought process required to assume an odd endeavor such as the cross-modal translation of pictures into music.

Share and enjoy!

-r

Two new ActionScript 3 workshop dates have been announced. I'll be teaching 'ActionScript 3 Events' in Amsterdam on February 21st, 2010 (the day before FITC Amsterdam) and 'Practical ActionScript 3' in Toronto on April 24, 2010 (the day before FITC Toronto).

I've written about both workshops before (and the descriptions are on the linked urls), but briefly... Practical ActionScript 3 is a pretty jam-packed day of a lot of individual lessons covering what you need to do most in Flash (make a button work, load an XML file, play a video, etc), and students leave with a nice code-library for use in development.

ActionScript 3 Events is a course that's really unique -- it's really hard to find this information assembled in one place. The premise of this course is that, once you know your way around ActionScript 3 and can make things work, the next step is to make things work as part of a whole. Coding each individual thing in your project isn't a challenge -- it's making them all work together. Which means that different parts of your code need to talk to each other. This is what events are for. This course is about demystifying events, showing you everything you need to work with them (from addEventListener() all the way through default behaviors and cancelability) -- and, more importantly, their limitations. Through the examination of these limitations, and the techniques we can employ to circumvent them, we end up building an Event Broadcaster singleton -- one of the most powerful tools available to liberate your coding in Flash.

Both workshops are only a day, and are a really great price for this information -- so it's quick, painless and affordable. So, if you're in either city for these workshops, you should really consider attending.

Share and enjoy!

-r

The Rich Media Institute has just released a series of three courses in FDT (a.k.a, the Flash Development Tool), which is the most powerful IDE for Actionscript 2, 3 and MXML -- the only editor built from the ground-up to support the needs of ActionScript developers.

I'm posting here because this is the first and only official training for FDT available online, and so especially at this price ($9.99 each) this is a great resource for people looking to get up to speed with FDT, and I'm proud to have worked directly with FDT, Carlo Blatz, Bruno Fonzi, and expert Alan Klement to help bring this training to the public.

But, it's also another exciting first for the RMI. We were the first company in the world to offer training in Papervision3D; we held the second workshop in the world on Adobe Flex; we have the first and only online training in PureMVC; we have the only online training available providing business advice on freelancer contracts; and many more.

This new set of courses in FDT is another step in our effort at the Rich Media Institute to bring you outstanding and affordable training, directly from experts, in the specialized topics that you need and that are simply unavailable elsewhere.

I have recently completed a course on working with the Adobe Open Source Media Framework. Introduction to the Adobe Open Source Media Framework for Flash, which is 90 minutes of video-based online training, has been posted to the Adobe Developer Connection, and to the Rich Media Institute.

OSMF is relatively new, and if you haven't yet heard about it, you should check it out. I have been building video players in Flash for over eight years, and almost no two players are ever built the same way. OSMF is an attempt at standardizing the way that such players are built into Flash. Incorporating basic functionality (which we cover in this course), as well as more advanced behaviors like playlists, overlays and integrated advertising, OSMF is a set of classes available for Flash Platform development.

In this course, we cover the basics of working with OSMF in Adobe Flash CS4 -- coding on the timeline to build a fully-functional video player, step-by-step.

And, of course, it's FREE, so you really don't have an excuse. Check it out!

Title: Introduction to the Adobe Open Source Media Framework for Flash
Duration: 90 minutes
Price: FREE
View Course at Adobe Developer Connection
View Course at the Rich Media Institute (eligible for certificate of completion)
Description: This course covers all the basic functionality and concepts required to build progressive video players in Flash CS4 with the Adobe Open Source Media Framework. We start from the basics, and work our way to a fully-functioning video player, authored from scratch, using OSMF and Flash CS4.

OSMF is Adobe's community-centered approach to standardizing the way that media players (and, in particular, video players) are built on the Adobe Flash Platform. Although still in prelease, OSMF encompasses media playback functionality, playlists, branding, advertising, and other monetization aspects, and represents a powerful and comprehensive attempt to standardize a huge portion of the work currently executed in Flash.

Who this Course is For: This course is useful for two sets of students looking to get up to speed with OSMF:

• Low-to-intermediate level Flash ActionScripters, comfortable coding on the timeline, who want to learn the raw ActionScript, as well as the underlying concepts, required to work with OSMF
• Higher level coders, using Adobe Flash or Flex, who want a quick run-down of the core classes utilized when building an OSMF video player

Outline:

• Introduction: Brief Overview of OSMF and Installing the SWC ( 5:44 )
• Lesson 1 : Basics of Video Playback with OSMF ( 6:46 )
• Lesson 2 : Handling Changes in View State ( 7:04 )
• Lesson 3: Adding a Pause Toggle Button ( 8:55 )
• Lesson 4: Sizing the Video ( 9:56 )
• Lesson 5: Adding Volume Control ( 5:56 )
• Lesson 6: Adding a Progress Bar ( 13:58 )
• Lesson 7: Adding Seek Functionality ( 10:43 )
• Lesson 8: Cleaning Up After a Video ( 8:26 )
• Lesson 9 : Playing Multiple Videos ( 11:05 )

Yesterday afternoon I had the privilege of addressing a crowd of over 100 at MAX. Apparently, the slides and source code that accompany the talk were not placed on the attendee extranet at MAX. So, per request of some of the attendees, I am posting the files here. (If you were one of the people who attended, thank you very much for turning out.)

Download the Presentation Files

Included are:

• All code files (62 flas, and associated AS files)
• Slides used during presentation
• Extended slides for home reference

As you can see, the subject was 'Practical ActionScript 3', which is a one-hour version of a day-long (8-hour) curriculum I have created, and teach through the Rich Media Institute.

I will be teaching the full-day version of this workshop on October 24th in Toronto and November 7th in Los Angeles. A 3-hour online version is also available through the RMI (that hasn't yet been updated for Flash Player 10, as the live workshop has).

I'd also like to take this opportunity to note that I will be teaching a full-day version of my new AS3 workshop, 'Working With and Extending Events in ActionScript 3 (on October 25th in Toronto and November 8th in Los Angeles). I know 'Events' isn't often treated as it's own subject, worthy of an entire day-long course, but in my experience this is an incredibly useful subject -- events are really the key to functional fluency in AS3 and once you understand them (which really isn't *that* difficult) you can basically do anything you want in Flash. It's designed to accompany Practical AS3 (which is why I'm teaching it the immediately following day in both Toronto and LA), and I would really strongly suggest you consider enrolling.

UPDATE
So turns out Adobe captured the whole talk and posted it on Adobe TV. Share and enjoy!

I'm sure FITC will be posting some pix of the event soon, but I took a few myself and posted the album on Photobucket (what's this with monthly limits on Flickr?!?! I've posted two albums there in my life, but made the mistake of trying to post a third right after the 2nd -- lord knows that's the last time I'll be trying that one).

Oh, and my talk, Hearing Pictures with The Ludi Machine went really well. Because of IP-ownership issues, I can't post the work I showed (I don't own the sound files I used), but the code wasn't the important part anyway. The 25 minutes of talking before getting to the code was the really fun part. I started out with 2 people in the audience but ended up with a full house, including at least a dozen standing by the entrance. I don't want to post the slides yet. This was a first shot at something -- using a funky platform like the Unconference to try out something new -- and it worked out well, so I want to invest more time in making this a meaningful lecture, at which point I'll start making parts of it available online as well. I've included a totally-unfulfilling snapshot of a Ludi-powered sound-board in action, translating a snapshot from the Hubble telescope into 'music':

Kudos to Shawn Pucknell, Erin Kelly and FITC for running such a great event and Kudos to Adobe for giving him the platform to do it right in the belly of the beast.