07.14.08
Posted in Silverlight at 10:13 pm by Cal
Expression Encoder is an application which allows you to “encode” a video for use with a Silverlight web application.? The term encode here principally means to compress the video to the extent appropriate for delivery via the intended delivery mechanism.? In general, encoding for Internet delivery will use a much higher degree of compression than encoding for delivery via DVD.
Since most users will expect to have a standard set of controls to Play, Pause, Rewind, etc. Expression Encoder includes a collection of different styles for these controls.? These styles are called Templates and appear on the Output tab in the Expression Encoder UI.? While it is possible to preview each of these Templates directly in the Expression Encoder UI, the size of the preview in my opinion is too small to make a particularly informed decision in choosing which one is preferable.
So to help anyone who also would like to quickly review how these Templates look at a more convenient size, I have taken a series of screenshots which depict each option.? If you click on the images, an actual video will open in a separate window. Each such video offers a full size live preview of the selected style.
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Posted in Deep Zoom, Silverlight at 1:16 pm by Cal
Silverlight 2 includes a nifty new feature called Deep Zoom which lets you post a very large photo on the Internet which then exhibits remarkably responsive zooming and panning capability.? Microsoft’s demonstration project is the Hard Rock Cafe memorabilia wall.? Given my ongoing interest in travel photography, Deep Zoom immediately caught my eye.? I watched the MIX08 video featuring Scott Stanfield and then recently attended his Bay.NET presentation in San Francisco in June.
I just happened to have a few panorama photos which I have taken over the years (but never really done much with).? So I dug out these photos and using PTGui, a stiching application recommened by Scott, I combined my photos into some large panorama images.? Then after some minor touching up in Photoshop, I used the Deep Zoom Composer to prepare these panoramas for use with Silverlight.? You can see the results at www.travelswithcal.com/deepzoom/
The key to a successful DeepZoom photo is a large enough image that allows zooming in to some meaningful level.? If you just take a standard 8 - 10 megapixel photo,? a user won’t be able to zoom in for very far until the image begins to seriously degrade.? (In this respect, I strongly recommend putting an upper limit on the permissible zoom since it makes very little sense to allow a user to zoom in beyond the point where the image begins to completely deteriorate.)? ? Given that most stitching software recommends between a 33 and 50 percent overlap between the photos to be combined, I would estimate that in most cases a 3 or 4 photo composite would be the smallest possible image that would give you a satisfactory Deep Zoom result.? Obviously, the larger the original image, the more zooming that can be achieved.
A friend and I are planning to take some San Francisco photos on July 26 with a view to creating some Deep Zoom panoramas.? What we are hoping to determine is whether following the correct procedures for image preparation can lead to some stunning results.? Stay tuned.
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