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....