Whaddya Think?

A request that comes up from time to time is for a way to make it easier to track over selected points in a picture - imagine a wedding photo where you'd want to fly the camera over each of a number of faces, zoom in and then zoom back again, effectively defining a flight path over the image.

You and we know you can do that today by stringing together several of the 3D Effects, but one school of thought says that's a bit fiddly, while the other says if we add a special way of solving that one problem we'll make the interface more complicated and hence scarier.

It's the age-old debate between power and ease-of-use - do we make it clever, or do we make it easy? Let us know where you stand - it's your choice....

What is it? We love Sony and we love XP... but....

Calling all Vixators (we really need a name as a community - not sure that's a good one) - what IS that issue with XP and video from Sony cameras? If you've seen it and can repro it, we'd be very pleased to hear and we'll pay handsomely (we lied about that bit) for a sample video that causes The Bug to stir from its slumbers.

Dear Bug... you is toast dude - the Vixators is on your case....

Sweet Sixteen

We've just posted another Vixer build onto the web site - it fixes an issue to do with the geeky post below - we weren't able to capture video on non-Aero Vista variants (e.g. Vista Basic) before, and now we can.

Just in case it's bothering you, the build is tagged "Stage16", hence "sweet sixteen"!

Detecting Aero

Bit of a geeky post this, but it took us a while to find any reference to how you'd work out (in a program) whether a Vista PC's running the Aero theme or not.

It's important to Vixer because if Aero isn't running we can't capture video against a transparent background, so some of the loveliness of our user interface gets nibbled away. The same's true on XP too.

It's worth adding that Plan A wasn't to capture video by taking a snap-shot of the desktop (which is what we do now) - in theory there's a better mechanism that uses WPF's RenderTargetBitmap, but it leaks memory even in .NET 3.5SP1. Our friends at Microsoft tell us it's fixed for .NET 4.0 and we'll find out when we look at Windows 7.

So... what's different between two PC's, one running the Windows Vista Basic "color scheme" and one runnning the Windows Aero variant?

It's all down to registry settings - if you look at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\

...the Composition and CompositionPolicy fields are set to 1 and 2 (respectively) for Aero, and both are zero otherwise.

If you want to know how to get at those from Managed Code, there's a great piece here.

Let us know if you plan to go to Windows 7 from the off - there are some features that will help us so we may do a Vixer that's specifically for Windows 7. It's only months away now and we're reading great things about it!

Editing Colour Schemes

At a bit of a tangent here... we're building a couple of websites in ASP.NET and Silverlight at the moment and one thing that was driving us nuts was trying to keep track of colour schemes.

Which colours gave rise to which gradients, or given a gradient image, what colours would reproduce it?

Which colours in which bits of CSS need to change to swing a purple theme to a green one?

Yes, we know you can store palettes in various tools (we're actually PaintShop Pro fans but don't tell those nice people at Adobe) but we wound up cobbling together a rather nifty application that amongst other things allows us to rotate colour gradients by hue (so a blue gradient becomes a pink one for example) and build colour schemes according to "proper" colour theory.

If it's just us being dumb and there are hundred tools out there already that do this stuff, let us know, but otherwise we'll publish our baby for free as soon as it's finished acquiring features....

Aw c'mon... you didn't know already...

Little known Vixer facts number sixty three... if you select text caption media on the timeline, the captions tab takes all the information off it (for example the text itself, the alignment, the colours and so on), and then if you drag from the captions tab and drop onto the selected text, it's updated.

So what, we hear you cry.

This means you can edit captions once they're in place - select them, make your changes, and drop from the captions tab onto the selected text.

So you misspelt something? Fixing it's easy!

Another Update?

Yip, the build we lovingly tagged "Stage15" has just been posted to the web site - there are a couple of very minor fixes included, along with a new text caption animation that drops letters into a word as though they're being typed.

We're looking at other animations - do you really want your letters bouncing round as though on springs? If not, let us know, or we'll do it 'cos it's fun....

Caption Text Animations

There's a library of different animations for text in Vixer (e.g. flying text bottom to top, fading in and out, and so on), and as we wander round the many video sharing sites we see all sorts of other caption animations. None of them are remotely difficult to do technically, but there could easily come a point when the list of animation types gets unwieldy. What if there were fifty? It's supposed to be easy to use, not scary!

So... which are your favourites, which should we be supporting, and which do you find overblown and tacky?

Let us know...!

Vacation Work?

We're hearing everywhere that it's nearly impossible to get holiday or vacation work this Summer, so here's an idea. Of course you could wash your neighbours' car or mow their lawn, but wouldn't it be a lot more fun to...

* Make a video of their family holiday pictures set to a favourite song; or...

* If their wedding pictures are printed you could scan them and create a video set to the song they danced to on the big day, or if their piccies are digital it's even easier; or...

* Maybe they're trying to sell their house? Maybe a video interpersing stills of the garden with video clips of a tour of the house would help them sell it on the internet and avoid estate agents' fees?

If you're comfortable with PC technology you can capitalise on those skills very easily - with your know-how and Vixer there's a much better way to earn cash than trying to get seagull droppings off an old Ford...

Mixing audio and video

So... can you mix a photos and video clips on a single poster in Vixer?

Yip, you can.

We mention here it because it falls into that large bucket of things we know we can do and therefore forgot to tell anyone about! Hence your presentations can mix photos and videos seamlessly and very easily.

If you stumble on anything else you're pleasantly (or indeed unpleasantly) surprised by, do let us know....

There's a new Vixer in Town!

Any minute now there'll be a new version of Vixer to play with out on www.Vixer.co.uk.

It's still free, and it has a number of new features, especially the new text captioning and a number of tweaks to make it play more sociably with Windows XP.

If your kids are getting bored during the school holidays, this is the very thing for them to download - it's very easy to use, very forgiving, very friendly, and they'll get great results quickly with plenty of scope for pushing the boundaries as they learn more about its more powerful features.

If you're proud of their work let us know and we'll post it in our gallery (subject to the rules of copyright of course - get them to sing the soundtrack instead of lifting it straight from an MP3!).....

Gotcha! XP Video Creation Issue

Many thanks to all of you who helped us get the video creation buglet into a corner - it's been released humanely into the wild where we sincerely hope it won't breed.

If you're a .NET geek you'll have come across the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which is our primary graphics technolog for Vixer. Suffice to say there are some aspects of WPF that behave very differently on XP, and some that behave very subtlely differently, and those are the very trying ones.

Drop us a line if you want to know more or chat about the differences - we're not seeing huge amounts of documentation on the WWW about them and there should be a lot more!

As Promised...

The picture below shows text outlining....



...while this one shows the use of a gradient image as a text outline brush and the new shadowing capability...




Rocket Science? No. Visually more appealing? You betcha...

New! Improved! Text Captioning...

One of the areas we've wanted to improve on for quite some time is the way that text captions work - we were a bit unhappy with them being a wee bit limited, so going live any day now is a new version.

Now, as well as the solid and transparent brushes text had before, you can add image brushes, either to the body of the text or its outline, or both.

This turns out to be very neat way of adding some rather impressive effects. You choose the image you want, and if you pick an image with a gradient (say a white spot blending radially out to a black background) you can very easily create very cool highlight effects.

We'll post some images to illustrate the point in a few minutes - in the meantime feel free to treat yourself to a cup of tea!

Call for XP Testers

Halloo - we're seeing some issues on XP that we're not seeing on Vista, and they're proving a little difficult to isolate. If you have access to a Windows XP machine we'd be delighted to hear how you get on with creating a video, whether you're successful or otherwise - there's some combination of circumstances that causes a bug to raise its ugly head and we could do with some help!

Please ping us a mail via the website

Thanks in advance

Vixer Team UK

The Vixer has Landed!

Last week, www.Vixer.co.uk crept quietly onto the web. The software's there to download and experiment with, and for the time being it's free, so get over there now!