Information Filled Under ‘Multimedia’ Category
It’s been a challenging year on the multimedia front. Many newspapers retrenched by refocusing their limited resources back on traditional print products and away from online innovation. This is in sharp contrast to the rush to develop online products so prevalent in 2008
Read the rest here:
Looking back at the state of newspaper multimedia in 2009
One of the most exciting things about working for Symbian is that its model enables a wider variety of contributions than source code. Contributions of all forms are valuable, including words (in the form of discussions in the various forums and Ideas site etc) but also test effort. There are many areas of platform testing that are resource-intensive and common between companies, for example interoperability testing and multimedia playability testing. Therefore one of the specific ideas we have been working towards is a web database to enable community memebers to coordinate testing efforts and collaborate. This will help reduce R&D time and costs for everyone.
Read more here:
Collaborative Test Database
Improving browser / player integration Following on from my earlier post about the role of mobile in the lean forward / lean back worlds, there are a number of ways in which browser / video player integration can be improved and streamlined. Plenty of you I’m sure will have ideas here. A few of us in the community have been discussing this already, and a forthcoming blog post will outline these ideas. If you have any of your own, please feel free to feed them back as a comment
Continue reading here:
Calling all Developers!
JAM3MEDIA have done it again winning Best in Show for the National Film Board’s Waterlife site, Golds and a couple Bronzes at the Digital Marketing Awards and an ADCC award for Happy Planet Shots . Have a look at their blog for what they’ve been up to – http://blog.jam3media.com JAM3MEDIA was created by Adrian, Mark and Pablo, grads of the Sheridan Interactive Multimedia . Dennis, Salpy, and Nick are also IMM grads at Jam 3 – excellent talent! JAM3MEDIA http://www.jam3media.com/ Our focus is delivering incredible interactive work by combining the interactive directors, motionographers and sound designers with Jam3media’s elite team of developers and designers.
Pictured above is the 2010 Sheridan Interactive Multimedia class (in part) at the Fall Tour of Toronto Interactive Studios arranged by Oddly Studios. Our first stop was Grip where we entered via slide… The paparazzi took shots from the bubble reception area… We walked the streets of Toronto on this beautiful day each of the six groups of about 30 saw a half dozen studios of the 20 or so fantastic studios on the tour who spoke about their philosophy and the state of the industry… Thank you Tim, the volunteers, the studios and all the students we met on this wonderful Fall Tour – cupcakes for all!
Original post:
Sheridan Interactive Multimedia on Oddly Toronto Digital Studio Tour
Following this forum posting in the multimedia forum , in which a developer was interested in a particular API. The documentation available for this was quite thin. Thanks to the efforts of various people at Symbian and Nokia, the first set of documentation for this API is now available . I think the key takeaway from this story is to highlight that the multimedia community can help resolve issues and improve problem areas, so if you are in a similar position to this developer and haven’t yet dipped your toes into our forums, then we look forward to hearing from you!
Link:
MPX Documentation
My last blog post generated many useful and interesting comments – so many thanks to all those who made the time to write back, both on this blog, and to its identical twin on the main Symbian blog page. A number of comments focused on codec availability, and of course this is an important and difficult topic. In responding to the blog comments, I hinted at a more complete response on our codec strategy, and this is something I will do once the details are clear. However, while codecs are of course an important topic, they are by no means the complete view of this domain. So to scope future discussions, I thought I would frame the domain: Codecs: the debate between proprietary vs.
See more here:
Multimedia: Seen, Heard… But What Is It?
Of course, I mean this figuratively – multimedia should be both seen and heard, preferably on high resolution displays with rich audio! But the problem I’m highlighting (“I” being Martin Webb , Symbian’s Technology Manager for Multimedia) is that multimedia is a means to an end, rather than the end itself. Applications and users aren’t bothered about containers and codec profiles – they just want media to play, immediately will be fine thank you, but certainly not with any delays. Multimedia should “just work”. Given Symbian’s transition into an open source project, I thought a good starting point for my multimedia blog would be to take stock of where we are. What are the key challenges facing the multimedia domain? I open with three: Playability Is King: Multimedia is a tool, and tools should work reliably. This isn’t yet the case – applications call “Play This”, and sometimes find the media isn’t playable. We need to ensure containers, codecs, stream sources etc work together reliably, failing only though a lack of device resources. This isn’t differentiating, it’s a hygiene factor – users assume that if a use-case is possible, it will always work, and so not working “negatively differentiates”. Sharing the burden through collaborative development is going to be an enormous help. Service Integration: More and more emphasis going forward will be placed on branded services – see the BBC’s iPlayer app on Nokia’s N97 for example. Such applications may want to manage video themselves, for example switching bit rates depending on network conditions. The platform needs to provide flexibility to these applications to allow them to differentiate. Picture Quality is Coming: devices are starting to appear that use tricks from TV land, such as dimming backlights, to improve picture quality. As displays get larger, this will increasingly become a differentiating issue. Ensuring the platform can work with these differentiating features will be key.
Originally posted here:
Multimedia: Seen, But Not Heard
Salpy Kelian has been featured as the Design Student of the month on the Microsoft Canada User Experience Connection blog . Salpy is a graduate of the 2009 Sheridan Interactive Multimedia program with an excellent blend of coding and usability skills. Yay Salpy! And thank you to Qixing over at Microsoft for the feature
Click for Interactive Invite We are having our Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Open House at Function 13 this year in Kensington Market in Toronto. This is the home of FITO – the largest Flash User Group in the world and also FITC – one of the top digital media conferences. As such… we are thankful for Shawn and the crew for providing a FREE FITC Ticket as a door prize! So come on out! The invite this year is exciting as usual. It was created by the students and in particular Rob, Salpy and Matt with theme and organizational help from all of us. It includes an interactive augmented reality 3D portion. You print a page and look at the page with a Webcam and it shows a surprise 3D figure. This is something that we will be continuing at the open house in a very amusing way and also is involved in how we give away the FITC ticket. Here is a link to the Invite: http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca/go/openhouse2009wp Anyone can see the invite but for the second stage with the FLAR and 3D portion you will need to have a Webcam – if you don’t or just want to take a quick look at what it is like… here is a video of professor Dan Zen trying it out: http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca/go/youtube2009wp Please drop on by the event page in facebook and RSVP! IT’S ALIVE – Modeling Life… Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Open House 2009 addEventListener… April 22, 2009 2PM – 7PM Function 13 Gallery (Home of FITO and FITC) 156 Augusta Ave – Kensington Market (at Dundas) Toronto var tech:Array = ["AS3", "3D", "Inverse Kinematics", "Tilt", "Motion Graphics", "AIR", "PHP", "MySQL", "JQuery", "AJAX", "Project Management", "Web Design"]; var apps:Array = ["Adobe CS4", "Flash", "DreamWeaver", "Photoshop", "Illustrator", "Premiere", "AfterEffects"]; All the best… Dan Zen -09-
Here is the original post:
IT’S ALIVE! Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Open House
Adrian Belina from Jam 3 Visits IMM Adrian Belina from the award winning Jam 3 Media at http://jam3media.com came in to give a talk on Motion Graphics to the students of the Sheridan Interactive Multimedia one year post grad program. Adrian is a co-founder of Jam 3 along with Mark McQuillan and Pablo Vio. All three graduated the same year from Sheridan Interactive Multimedia and have gone on to form their own company in Liberty Village in Toronto.
See the original post:
Adrian Belina from Jam3 Media Gives Talk to Sheridan Interactive Multimedia
Visit from Japan's Osaka University of Electro Communications – click to see larger Japan’s Osaka University of Electro Communications came for a visit to the Sheridan Interactive Multimedia class and saw some of the new advances in Adobe Flash work. The visit is part of an exchange visit between our schools. The students were primarily digital arts and animation and one of the teachers taught multimedia. We have now met the teachers a few times and are starting to get to know one another. We had the same camera -09-
Follow this link:
Japan’s Osaka University of Electro Communications Visits Sheridan Interactive Multimedia
We had another great visit to GestureTek in Toronto where Vincent Jon Vincent showed us around the gesture control systems – like Minority Report and the multitouch tables. A couple groups of students are making applications to run on the GestureTek systems for the upcoming Ontario Premier Awards as part of their combined Multimedia Pioneering / Client Project curriculum.
See more here:
Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Visits GestureTek to view Multitouch Tables and Motion Interface Systems
PHUG at http://phug.ca is an open source community group based out of Toronto and guided by Brendan Sera-Shriar. Brendan and folks are very passionate about the open source community and provide workshops, contests, organize conferences, etc. to help the cause. Please have a look at their site and subscribe to their RSS. Professor Dan Zen of Sheridan’s Interactive Multimedia Program in Oakville, Ontario, Canada presented a double presentation on Chat for Designers and Animating to Sound Frequencies or Waves in Flash. The PHUG post can be read here: http://phug.ca/index.php/flash-media-server-and-beatmaker-workshop/ Dan Zen would like to thank the 40 odd people who came out, many of whom chatted afterwards to help share knowledge of stories they are working on, VJ tools, etc. They were a very warm and welcoming crowd
Excerpt from:
Dan Zen Gives Talk at PHUG on Chat for Designers and Animating to Sound in Flash
Adobe Creative Suite 4 As is the Sheridan Interactive Multimedia tradition, we teach the latest software even if that means switching in the middle of a school year. Our Interactive Multimedia students will be learning Adobe CS4 in the second term starting January. This gives our graduates an advantage in the industry and also helps industry keep trained and fresh. We also have the students create tutorials on the new technology. These tutorials have received thousands of views and have been a helpful resource – Dan Zen Sheridan Interactive Multimedia is currently accepting applications for September 2009. Please visit our site for more information: http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca
Read the original post:
Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Teaches Adobe CS4 in 2009