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Archive for the 'Multimedia' Category

Expert Techniques for Integrating Video on the Web

Now there's a single definitive source for everything Flash developers need to know to integrate cutting-edge video into a website—seamlessly. Whether your Flash skills focus on design or programming, this guide helps you with every phase from writing the project proposal to deploying finished applications. A step-by-step workflow directs you through setting up a work environment, designing applications, using ActionScript 2 and 3, Flash® Media Server 2, and every stage in between. Packed with tried-and-true solutions and detailed code examples, it's exactly what you need to deliver interactive video to your clients.

  • Understand your clients' needs and ask the right questions to determine the scope of their projects
  • Obtain source video and optimize it for Web-based playback

  • Develop a site or Web application that incorporates video

  • Create and skin a player with Flash in both ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3

  • Explore hosting requirements, server options, and streaming vs. progressive download delivery

  • Publish your site and enable the client to update it with automated tools

Learn how to create full-featured video players with custom-designed skins

Develop professional interactive video applications that utilize the power of ActionScript 2 and 3

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Voice and Video Conferencing FundamentalsDesign, develop, select, deploy, and support advanced IP-based audio and video conferencing systems

Scott Firestone, Thiya Ramalingam, Steve Fry

As audio and video conferencing move rapidly into the mainstream, customers and end users are demanding unprecedented performance, reliability, scalability, and security. In Voice and Video Conferencing Fundamentals, three leading experts systematically introduce the principles, technologies, and protocols underlying today’s state-of-the-art conferencing systems. Discover how to use these concepts and techniques to deliver unified, presence-enabled services that integrate voice, video, telephony, networks, and the Internet—and enable breakthrough business collaboration.

The authors begin with a clear, concise overview of current voice and video conferencing, including system components, operational modes, endpoints, features, and user interactivity. Next, they illuminate conferencing architectures, offering practical insights for designing today’s complex IP-based conferencing and collaboration systems.

Topics covered in this book include video codecs, media control, SIP and H.323 protocols and applications, lip synchronization in video conferencing, security, and much more. Throughout the book, the authors draw on their extensive experience as Cisco® technical leaders, showing how to avoid the most common pitfalls that arise in planning, deployment, and administration.

Voice and Video Conferencing Fundamentals is for every professional involved with audio or video conferencing: network and system administrators, engineers, technology managers, and Cisco solution partners alike. Whether you’re involved with design, development, selection, implementation, management, or support, you’ll find the in-depth knowledge you need to succeed.

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WiMAX Technologies Performance Analysis and QoS - CRCAs the demand for broadband services continues to grow worldwide, traditional solutions, such as digital cable and fiber optics, are often difficult and expensive to implement, especially in rural and remote areas. The emerging WiMAX system satisfies the growing need for high data-rate applications such as voiceover IP, video conferencing, interactive gaming, and multimedia streaming. WiMAX deployments not only serve residential and enterprise users but can also be deployed as a backhaul for Wi-Fi hotspots or 3G cellular towers. By providing affordable wireless broadband access, the technology of WiMAX will revolutionize broadband communications in the developed world and bridge the digital divide in developing countries. Part of the WiMAX Handbook, this volume focuses on the technologies behind WiMAX, its performance capabilities, and its control mechanisms. The book introduces programmable baseband processors suited for WiMAX systems, describes an innovative methodology for the design of multi-band WiMAX antennas, addresses space-time block codes, and reviews space-frequency/space-time-frequency code design criteria. It also proposes a combined call admission control and scheduling scheme, focuses on the performance analysis of the IEEE 802.16 mesh mode, and analyzes the performance of both single-input-single-output and space-time-block-coded OFDM systems in mobile environments. The final section establishes a framework of an ideal reservation period controller, examines the ecosystem in which scheduling for IEEE 802.16e systems must be performed, and presents a fuzzy logic controller for admission control. With the revolutionary technology of WiMAX, the lives of many will undoubtedly improve, thereby leading to greater economic empowerment.

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Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium All-in-One Desk Reference For DummiesThe future looks bright for Web developers! With Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium, you now have fantastic tools that enable you to create a wide array of content and graphics to deploy on a Web site that is dynamic and easy to maintain.

Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies is a hands-on, easy-to-understand guide to the main features in all the CS3 Web development products. The no-nonsense approach is designed to help you build Web sites by covering the basics of each program—Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator, Flash, Contribute, and Acrobat—as well as the new features in a clear and concise minibook.

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 Multidimensional Signal  Image  and Video Processing and Coding

Digital images have become mainstream of late notably within HDTV, cell phones, personal cameras, and many medical applications. The processing of digital images and video includes adjusting illumination, manufacturing enlargements/reductions, and creating contrast. This development has made it possible to take long forgotten, badly damaged photos and make them new again with image estimation. It can also help snapshot photographers with image restoration, a method of reducing the influence of an unsteady hand.

Dr. Woods has constructed a book for professionals and graduate students that will give them the thorough understanding of image and video processing that they need in order to contribute to this hot technology's future advances. Examples and problems at the end of each chapter help the reader digest what has just been read. Forged from a theoretical base, this exceptional book develops into an essential guide to hands-on endeavors in signal processing.

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tech-geek, October 11, 2007

After Effects Apprentice

If youre new to After Effects and want to get up to speed quickly, After Effects Apprentice was created just for you. With 11 core lessons plus a fun final project, youll quickly get into the program and learn how to tap its potential whether you want to create motion graphics for a network program, your companys video, or your own independent production.

In this book, youll get a professional perspective on the most important features a motion graphics artist needs to learn to use this program effectively. Youll learn to creatively edit and combine layers, animate eye-catching titles, replace a screen on a computer monitor, place a studio shot in anew environment, manipulate 3D space, and use effects to generate excitement or enhance the realism of a scene. Easy to follow step-by-step instructions take you through each technique, including projects that encourage you to express it in your own way. Youll learn more than just the tools; youll learn skills that you can immediately put to work in your own projects.

Topics include how to:
* Animate, layer, and composite images and text.
* Manipulate keyframes to create more refined animations.
* Use masks, mattes, stencils and modes to add depth.
* Manage layers to make them easier to coordinate.
* Add 3D to your animations.
* Use tracking and keying to create special effects.
* Includes new CS3 features; Shape layers, the Puppet tool, Brainstorm, and Per-Character 3D Text.

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 Since the dawn of film, novices and experts have used quick-and-dirty workarounds and audiovisual tricks to improve their motion pictures, from home movies to feature films. Today, the tools have certainly changed, as have the quality and scope of the results. With digital video, the hacking possibilities are now limitless, for both amateurs and professional artists. From acquiring footage, mixing, editing, and adding effects to final distribution, Digital Video Hacks provides unique tips, tools, and techniques for every stage of video production. You'll learn how to:

  • Get your projects started right using creative preparation tools and techniques,
    from making your own steadicam, boom, or dolly to effective storyboarding, timecoding, and tape labeling
  • Troubleshoot common shooting problems, including using stop-motion and time-lapse techniques, lighting effects, colored screens and gels, and household objects to establish mood or otherwise wow an audience
  • Create stunning visual effects, such as satellite zooming, surreal scenes, Matrix-like bullet-time, and green screen illusions
  • Fool your audience with audio tricks, replacing flubbed dialogue, smoothing over cuts, and covering missing audio with room tone
  • Add professional features with post-production tricks, including color correction, soundtrack cleanup, opening sequences, and DVD bookmarks
  • Distribute final content in a variety of creative ways, from exporting to basic videotape or DVD to streaming over the internet or even via cell phoneUse the web to provide interactivity and dynamic content, attend a remote conference, or vlog your life.

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mrblue, October 3, 2007

O Reilly - Photoshop Fine Arts Effects CookbookHow would you like to create your own impressionist landscape, a van Gogh still life, or a surrealist Salvador Dali dream world? Or perhaps a classic Ansel Adams photograph of Yosemite or an authentic-looking 19th century Daguerrotype? You can do all of that and more with Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook.

The book tells you all you need to know to turn your original digital photographs into images that mimic the styles of great photographers and painters. From advice on how to develop an eye for appropriate subject matter to 62 detailed recipes that demonstrate exactly how to create an "original" van Gogh, Vermeer, Edward Weston, or Andy Warhol (among others), this book is an authentic guide to understanding and simulating the work of great artists-and a whole lot of fun.

  • Analyzing the styles of great artists: format, composition, angles of view, color palettes, and image textures
  • Shooting for digital manipulation, working non-destructively, making your own brushes and patterns
  • Creating Daguerrotypes, cyanotypes, stop-motion photographs, cross-processed images, Polaroid transfers, and infrared effects
  • Mimicking photographic styles from the pre-Raphaelites and the Naturalists to Jerry Uelsmann and David Hockney
  • Exploring painting and printmaking techniques from Rembrandt to Warhol: Dutch portraits, 18th century landscape painting, Japanese woodblocks, Impressionism, Pointillism, Fauvism, Art Nouveau, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Pop Art

Packed with step-by-step instructions, an inspirational selection of full-color digital imagery, and authoritative information and advice, Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook is the ultimate guide to creating convincing digital masterpieces in the styles of many of the world's greatest artists.

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 Interactive Video- Algorithms and Technologies

This book is a groundbreaking resource that covers both algorithms and technologies of interactive videos, so that businesses in IT and data managements, scientists, teachers, and software engineers in video processing and computer vision, coaches and instructors that use video technology in teaching, and finally end-users of hyper videos will greatly benefit from it. This comprehensive four part book contains excellent scientific and up-to-date contributions made by a number of pioneering scientists, futurists and experts in the field. The first part introduces the reader to interactive and hyper video rhetoric, algorithms and technologies. It also presents effective automatic audio-video summarization methodologies. In the second part, a list of advanced computer vision and signal processing algorithms and systems for automatic and semiautomatic analysis and editing of audio-video documents are presented. The third part tackles a more challenging level of the transformation from raw to enriched video format, filtering of the video content by extracting and linking of highlights, events, and meaningful semantic units. In particular, a detailed example of the Computational Media Aesthetics approach at work towards understanding the semantics of instructional media through automated analysis for e-learning content annotation is presented. The last part is reserved for interactive video searching engines, non-linear video content browsing and quick video navigational systems.

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 Although vital to modern software development, Java and object-oriented programming can pose significant challenges to newcomers. This text addresses that learning curve by providing a careful, classroom-tested presentation of Java — from the fundamentals of variables, types, and expressions to procedural concepts like loops and sophisticated object-oriented ideas.

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