A post-production house organized a competition where assistant editors re-cut trailers for famous movies to try and make them seem like different movies.

This is the winner: Shining

Someone ask me about creating a background pattern with video, which it is not a big deal since we can use MovieClip.beginBitmapFill method in order to fill a drawing area with a bitmap image or like in this case with a video by using the BitmapData.draw method.

SWF sample (You need a webcam):

[flash]http://www.blog.lessrain.com/wp-content/upload/tilebackground3.swf,400,200[/flash]

Macromedia has released a couple of new interesting Flash Video articles:

• Introducing True Alpha Video in Flash 8 (Wes Gorgichuk). Learn from this simple example to create and import your own alpha video.
• Best Practices for Encoding Video with the VP6 Codec (William Caulfield). Prepare your video for the web with the new Flash 8 Video Encoder.

Opening Party and Exhibition, Fri 14th, 19-22h.
Less Rain Shop, Linienstrasse 154a, 10115 Berlin

Ron Jonzo (man with pen) exibits ' Pictures from the Flowing World', a new series of paintings:

And while we're at nature (as I know it) - electronic life forms (elf) is an installation project of my friend Martina Höfflin:

'Elfs' are small mechanical systems powered by solar energy that behave as natural living systems in many aspects. The immediate compassion for these life forms is an amazing experience, even though their abilities are very limited.

I still haven't actually seen them - the video and images are already quite amazing.

Nice video of CG modified plants and what seems to be 1st Ave Machine's self-promo spot.

Via JWZ.

Fabio Sonnati has a very nice and useful article in his blog about how to de-interlace video in real-time using the Convolution Filter in Flash 8.

Worth to read: Flash real-time deinterlacing best-practice.

Related Articles:

• What is Deinterlacing? Facts, solutions, examples.
• Matrix convolution filters.

Interesting benchmark test, by Frédéric Saunier, to demonstrate how the new GC behaves when we fill an array with many new instances of an object and we destroy the array.

Flash 8 garbage collector benchmark.

Related articles:

• Garbage collection in Flash Player 8. (Tinic Uro).
• Performance Improvements in Flash Player 8. (Macromedia Flash Player Developer Center).

Apart of the sample source files that install with Flash 8 in the Samples folder on your hard disk, you can find some interesting additonal files here.

• Alpha-enabled Video.
• Alpha Masking.
• Runtime Bitmap Caching (Flash Professional).
• CellRenderer API samples
• Multiline CellRenderer class example.
• CheckBox and ComboBox cell renderer class examples.
• Custom component "quickstart" template.

If you are tired of receiving unsolicited sales and marketing voice recorded messages down your telephone line, take a look at TPS service, it is free and it really works!.

The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) helps you to make sure your telephone number is no longer available to organisations, including charities and voluntary organisations who may telephone you with offers and information you do not wish to receive.

Telephone Preference Service.

If you ever have trouble with Key events while testing movies inside the Flash IDE, you should set the Control - Disable Keyboard Shortcuts checkbox in the menu of the internal swf player. Keys like ENTER, PGUP, PDDN, HOME, END and more are ignored when the option isn't set!

Here's a fla if you want to see it yourself.

Charles v2.2 has now been released and can be download from here.

This release is mainly improvements and bug fixes:

• Improved Firefox proxy configuration
• XML viewer improvements
• Line numbers displayed in ASCII viewer
• more...