Pocketcine's blog

Mobile Video Shorts for Still Image Artists (Part 2)

Submitted by Pocketcine on February 23, 2007 - 1:09am.
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In this first part of this series, we showed how Photoshop can be used to generate fixed sized frames for an animation.

In this tutorial we take things a step further, using a vector program (in this case Illustrator) to create a character face, then importing it as a Smart Object in Photoshop. The advantage of Smart Objects is that the character face remains resolution independent, and you can go back and forth between Illustrator and Photoshop. You can re-size the Photoshop file larger or smaller and retain crisp edges. You can size up the character for a poster, or size him down for a mobile video. You can distribute the character in videos made for a variety of different devices, from HD television to iPod videos. On top of that you can easily combine the character with bitmap graphics, using Photoshop's extensive manipulation and processing capabilities. We begin by reviewing how Photoshop layers are used in animation.

Mobile Video Shorts for Still Image Artists (Part 1)

Submitted by Pocketcine on February 22, 2007 - 4:48pm.
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It may come as a surprise to some people who use such tools as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to create illustrations, retouch photos, create montages or develop single images from scratch that these programs can also be used to create animations for mobile media. I have written this tutorial specifically for still image artists who want to enter the Pocketcine contest on Renderosity.com, but do not use animation programs like Macromedia Flash. I will show you how to create simple and even complex animations without leaving Photoshop and its companion animation program, Image Ready.

Compression Software for Mobile Video

Submitted by Pocketcine on February 9, 2007 - 4:40pm.
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Compressed videos are produced by codecs, which is a word that combines the two roles they perform: compressing and decompressing video or audio. The process of compressing video is often called "encoding," and the process of decompressing video "decoding." 

Compression standards like MPEG do not actually specify how a video should be encoded. That is left up to the codec. Creators of encoding software are free to implement the encoding algorithm whatever way they like. As long as the compressed video or audio complies with the standard, software developers can implement the actual codec with whatever features and user interface they want.

3GP and 3GPP Mobile Video Formats

Submitted by Pocketcine on February 9, 2007 - 4:36pm.
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3GPP is an acronym for 3rd Generation Partnership Project, a telecom industry partnership formed in 1998 to promote collaboration around communication standards. A sister project is 3GPP2, the International Telecommunication Union's (ITU) International Mobile Telecommunications "IMT-2000" initiaitive. It's a co-operation between ARIB/TTC (Japan), CCSA (China), TIA (North America) and TTA (South Korea). Both standards try to establish uniform delivery of rich media (like pocket videos) over 3rd generation broadband cellular networks. Both standards are based on MPEG-4. See our overview article on MPEG-4.

MPEG-4 Overview

Submitted by Pocketcine on February 9, 2007 - 4:31pm.
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Video is commonly compressed to an MPEG-4 format for playback on the mobile phone (3GP and MP4 are the most common formats).

MPEG-4 is an international standard to define, encode, and play back time-based media, like video. It is from the same committee, the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG), that established MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 as standards for digital video.

The MPEG-4 file format, called MP4, is based on Apple QuickTime. When you see the extension .mp4 it is referencing the file format.

Video files with the .3gp extension (3GP) support one of the MPEG-4 standards. See the related article on the 3GP video format.
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