by Wes Gorgichuk

Alpha Video Article Released

Macromedia has released the second of a series of articles from us Flash developers at gskinner. This article entitled “True Alpha Video in Flash 8” gives you the knowledge and skills to create your first alpha video, and how to use that video in Flash. I learned a lot about the new Flash 8 video in researching this article, and I really hope you take away some good knowledge about creating and using alpha video from reading this. You can read my article here. While researching this article we had tons of fun filming Guirellmo the hamster for the goofy demo below. Guirellmo’s whole purpose was to eat, and run across the screen (easier said then done). Just click to drop food in his feeding area and watch him do his thing.


This sample requires the Flash 8 player.

Needless to say, filming hamsters is harder than we expected, and requires better video equipment than we had easy access to.

Wes Gorgichuk

Wes has an extensive background in JavaScript, Node, PHP, and MySQL development. He enjoys learning new technologies and has unwittingly received the, unofficial, title of DevOps at gskinner for managing the internal server infrastructure in addition to his programming duties. When he's not learning new technologies he can be found hitting the trails on his mountain bike or travelling the world and eating at some of the best restaurants there are.

If you enjoyed this, you might like these articles…

Flash 8: DevNet Article Series, Alpha video in HTML5, FAVideo Released: Flash Video for JavaScript / AJAX, Flash 8: Alpha Masks With Blendmodes

6 Comments

  1. Eric Chan October 15, 2005 at 2:01am

    Pretty sweet, I’m playing around with Flash 8 right now and all I can say is that there are so many possibilities. Its gonna be interesting to see what people will come up with now…

  2. Ben Gill October 15, 2005 at 3:34pm

    I definately love the new possibilities this brings. What I have been struggling with is the halo around the subjects fringe. Until I figure out hhow to get rid of that, it is still not useable to me.

  3. dan November 4, 2005 at 4:22am

    Really nice idea. 🙂

    Sadly, the result is pretty ugly. If that it what people can expect from video with alpha channel… good night. Sorry, but the final result is the only thing that counts, and it’s quite poor.

    Anyway, thank you for sharing.

  4. Grant Skinner November 4, 2005 at 8:58am

    As alluded to in the last sentence – yes, we know it is ugly. That’s why we never used it for the article. The idea seemed neat though, so we thought it would be fun to post it here anyway.

  5. JDO November 9, 2005 at 4:47pm

    The problem is not as much in Flash 8 as it is in the keying. If you cut out an object in Photoshop and put it in to After Effects, The alpha video looks pretty good. I’ve tested with blurs and different opacities and worked well. The one thing Macromedia needs to add is a pick matte color option to reduce color being picked up on the edge. I don’t know any software (Premier, Avid, etc.) that got this right on the first shot. Be careful how you light the blue screen and practice keying, it will go a long way.

  6. Laurence Wheway April 24, 2006 at 4:00pm

    Hey,

    I’ve just finished my first Alpha Channel Video base site

    http://son.ofabit.ch

    have a look, feed back is greatly appreciated!

Comments are closed.