Attached Link: http://www.intecinteractive.com/trailers.asp

Interactive DVD Comic Book Trailers...

I found this interesting link from an article in eMedia,
(which is an industry magazine dealing with optical media and multimedia production).

Real comic fans probably already know about this stuff, but I can see lots of other potential in this. Mainly it has been an effort to CONVERT comic book titles to DVD titles,
using pan and zoom efx to make the still imagery more interactive- plus exciting audio voiceovers and music tracks. Since the comics were already in digital format
for publication, it was not too difficult to convert them into an interactive DVD medium.

Seems that this would certainly be a way to make some bucks with STILL RENDERS and then semi-animate them with Pan-Zoom, etc. Do some audio-video post work, burn a DVD (so that it can be read on consumer DVD players) and you might have a business publishing your own artwork!

Attached Link: http://www.stagetools.com

Here's a neat little program which gives you those "Ken Burns" documentary pan and zoom effects. Plus it can convert them into flash Pan-Zoom website animatics as well...

Message edited on: 07/22/2004 15:52

Yep. I've been toying with this idea ever since I saw Spike's Renderosity gallery DVDs.

Now all I need is free time...

lol -- add in some specific animations for different things, a few power point presentations, and make it a Training CD, and you have what I've been doing for four years now.

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

I've messed around with Pinnacle some and I see the same "distortion" in the trailers at the above site that I get in Pinnacle. It's, hmmmm, distracting to have things go in and out of "blur".

That's part of the reason I prefer to do my pans manually -- and I use Vegas for most production elements that way, which gives me that capability. You want to do the above on a visual, intutive, workflow easy, highly flexible platform, go with Vegas -- Switched over entirely from Premiere, and despite trying hard, Adobe's not won me back yet (nor likely to given how I can do stuff natively in Vegas that premiere has only as plug-ins).

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)

StageTools doesn't cause the BLUR effect- that's why it has been used by Ken Burns, among other documentary makers, because it is rock-steady in its pans and zooms (plus rotations. etc.) It also works on extremely HI-REZ images, like 8000x8000, and I believe even higher...

Well, the trailers I watched had, hmmmm, "blotches" of blur in portions of it. Not in the same location but here and there as the trailer progressed. Blur synonomous with lowering the quality level enough to make it somewhat feasible to broadcast. I converted a 3-minute dance routine on video to the best (BEST!) quality I could get to AVI. Around 230 MB in a 640 x 480 window with Pinnacle. It did the same thing as I saw in the trailers. It's not a blur that appears in the same spot throughout the run but, rather, a blur that appears randomly in the window througout the conversion (as if there was too much detail to convert at "that" particular codec/quality level). You take a look again and tell me if you don't see various areas of the picutre blur in and out.

I just watched one again, "Sojourn". Watch it and when it gets to introducing the characters, take a look at how "Arwyn" goes in and out of focus. That's what I'm talking about.