For immediate release
HDTV Quality Web Video Reaches the Masses with Industry Standard Video Codec in Flash Player
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Aug. 21, 2007 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the latest update for Adobe® Flash® Player 9 software, code-named Moviestar, which includes H.264 standard video support - the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray® and HD-DVD® high definition video players - and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support, as well as hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback. These advancements will extend Adobe’s leadership position in Web video by enabling the delivery of HD television quality and premium audio content through the ubiquitous Adobe Flash Player and pave the way to expand rich media Flash experiences on the desktop and H.264 ready consumer devices. The latest update for Adobe Flash Player 9 will be available in beta for immediate download later today on Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com .
With H.264 encoding already available in Adobe Premiere® Pro and Adobe After Effects® software, H.264 playback is now enabled in Adobe Flash Player, and will be supported by the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and applications developed with Adobe AIR™ software, including Adobe Media Player™. Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system application runtime that enables developers to use their existing skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop. The Adobe Media Player, which leverages Adobe’s Emmy® Award winning Flash architecture, delivers engaging video experiences to viewers while offering content publishers new abilities to distribute, track and build businesses around their media assets.
“Adobe is committed to providing a seamless creation-to-playback solution that allows creatives and developers to produce video and rich-media once, and then deploy that content across the widest array of distribution and playback environments,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe. “Already a broadly adopted industry standard, the inclusion of the H.264 codec in Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR, the Creative Suite® product line, and the upcoming Adobe Media Player will accelerate customer workflows, enabling the creation and repurpose of high-quality Web video content without extra development costs.”
Broader Reach for Video Consumers
Adobe Flash Player content reaches over 98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops, as well as a wide range of devices. Today, both live and on demand television shows are being delivered online with video that can be viewed using Adobe Flash Player, and the technology also powers the video capabilities of social networking sites such YouTube and MySpace. As Adobe expands Flash experiences outside the Web browser, content can be shared across different devices and people can get great video experiences on the video players of their choice, including the upcoming Adobe Media Player. Consumers can also stream user-generated content such as home movies from Adobe Premiere® Elements with Adobe Flash Player and play video movies on handheld, portable devices.
“MTV Networks has consistently led the industry in making its popular music, entertainment and comedy programming available everywhere so our audiences can stay in touch with all the great content they love from CMT, COMEDY CENTRAL, Logo, MTV, Nickelodeon, Spike and VH1,” said Nick Rockwell, senior vice president and chief technology officer for MTV Networks. “Flash is an important part of that strategy and Adobe’s support of H.264 in Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR and the upcoming Adobe Media Player will ensure that we continue to deliver high-quality video to our diverse audiences who expect it.”
Content developers can reduce the cost of encoding and preparing data for distribution with H.264 and HE-AAC support in Adobe Flash Player, since these standards are already integrated into their existing authoring workflows. In addition, Adobe is working with an ecosystem of video encoding partners to expand rich media Flash experiences that already support these standards.
Availability
The public beta version of the update to Adobe Flash Player 9 software, code-named Moviestar, which includes H.264 and HE-AAC functionality, will be available later today as a free download from Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com . The final release is expected to be available via update in the fall. Demonstrations of Adobe Flash® Media Server and Adobe Flash Media Encoder supporting the new codecs will be held during the IBC 2007 at the RAI Exhibition and Congress Center in Amsterdam, September 7- 11 (Stand 7.721) and again at the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago, which begins September 30th.
About Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information - anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com .
Monday, September 3, 2007
Adobe: Shockwave Player
Adobe Case Study
Pearson Prentice Hall
Science Explorer© Active Art Digital Curriculum
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Choosing to develop our project in Director MX was an easy decision. We needed a technology to rapidly develop real-time 3D interactive simulations that would be accessible both online and offline, and work across a wide variety of machine platforms, operating systems, and browsers. The powerful capabilities of Director plus the exceedingly wide distribution of the Shockwave Player made Macromedia Director MX the obvious choice."
Peggy Bliss
Project Manager
Pearson Prentice Hall
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Print this Case Study
Developed byForgeFX
Products used Director MX
Try | Buy
Find more items that match:Choose an Industry
All Industries Architecture, Engineering & Construction Consumer Products Entertainment Financial Services Government Higher Education K-12 Education Legal Life Sciences Manufacturing Media & Publishing Non-profit Oil & Gas Other Photography Print, Production & Print Services Professional Services Retail Services Technology Telecommunications Travel & Tourism Utility Wholesale & Resale
and/or
Choose a Project Type All Project Types Accessibility Data Management Demonstration eCommerce e-Learning Games Help & Support Intranets & Portals Multimedia & Kiosk Mobile & Devices Presentations Rich Internet Applications Rich Media Advertising Video Web Applications Web Publishing Web Sites
Browse by Product:Select a Product Acrobat Acrobat 3D Acrobat Connect Adobe Bridge After Effects Audition Authorware Adobe Captivate Contribute Central Pro Output Server ColdFusion Creative Suite Director Device Central Dreamweaver Encore DVD Adobe Enterprise Connect Server Fireworks Flash FlashCast Flash Lite Flash Media Server Flash Remoting Flash Player Flex Builder Flex FrameMaker FreeHand Illustrator InDesign JRun LiveCycle Open HD Real-time Adobe Open HD Solution PageMaker PDF JobReady Photoshop Photoshop Elements Adobe Premiere Adobe Presenter Production Studio Reader RoboHelp RoboInfo Shockwave Player Stock Photos Macromedia Studio Web Publishing System Adobe Video Bundle Visual Communicator Pearson Prentice Hall is the nation's leading educational publisher of standards-based instruction materials for today's 6–12th grade classrooms. Their mission is to create exceptional educational tools that ensure student and teacher success in language arts, mathematics, modern and classical languages, science, social studies, career and technology, and advanced placement, electives, and honors.
Prentice Hall’s Science Active Art team developed an innovative product for its middle-grades science program called Science Explorer © 2005. The product is unique in the middle school market due to its depth and breadth of content and high level of user interactivity. The processes developed and utilized by this team, and the active art product itself are truly fine examples of Prentice Hall’s reputation for quality.
ChallengeThe Active Art team set out to develop a product where students become participants in learning rather than audience members through detailed explorations of core content. The team created interactive activities, simulations, and experiments capable of running on the company's PHSchool companion website that match the quality and detail of graphics in the Science Explorer textbooks. Like mainstream media’s multi-sensory experience, active art pulls students into the content and keeps them engaged in learning. The Active Art projects captivate the interest of the student s with cutting-edge 3D graphics and interactivity while allowing students to interact and learn at their own pace.
Prentice Hall and ForgeFX decided to use Macromedia Director to develop the product since the Shockwave Player supports textured real-time interactive 3D environments, and allows the developer to work in a well established and fully objected oriented programming environment.
SolutionDirector MX
BenefitsMacromedia Director MX enabled ForgeFX to create real-time 3D environments for Prentice Hall to demonstrate a variety of scientific concepts. Since the Shockwave Player is one of the most popular media players, students are able to access the active art projects seamlessly from school and from home. Through the use of the real-time 3D capabilities in Director, online simulations included smoke, particle systems, water, artificial intelligence, reflections, mesh deformations, and a host of other 3D features standard in most cutting-edge 3D tools.
The Macromedia W3D exporter allowed ForgeFX's 3D artists and animators to do their art work in 3D Studio Max and easily export their files into a format that worked well with Director.
Benefits include:
Using Macromedia Director, ForgeFX was able to deliver true real-time 3D environments that are capable of running online or from a CD-ROM on any computer.
The projects dynamically check their frame rate while running on every end user’s machine, and scale delivery to meet acceptable performance levels regardless of the end user’s processor speed and video card.
Because 298 million web users have Macromedia Shockwave Player, developers are assured that deployment of sophisticated 3D technology will be available to all users.
While Director is a full-blown, object-oriented development environment, it is also a rapid development tool, which allows the developer to create projects in a relatively short amount of time.
The developers took advantage of multi-resolution meshes and scalable geometry to allow users on low-end or high-end machines to interact with the content at performance levels tailored for their machines.
To reduce download sizes the content of some of the 3D Active Art projects are generated randomly which also ensures that the participants have a different experience every time they access the project.
Project DetailsWith the advancements and rapid adoption rates of the Internet, Pearson Prentice Hall now has companion websites for all of their textbook programs. Adding digital media to the student's curriculum allows for compelling content to supplement the course material. Science Explorer covers a wide spectrum of science content, including environmental science, human biology, chemical interactions, and motion, forces and energy, spanning the chapters of 16 books.
The Pearson Prentice Hall website is accessed by millions of students a year on a variety of operating systems, platforms, and browsers and needs a technology solution that is capable of deploying the projects to all students consistently. At the same time ForgeFX needed a robust development tool capable of creating interactive 3D simulations of ocean waves, seismic waves, the solar system, crystal systems, topographic maps, pheromone trails, volcanoes, cells, and a host of other complex scientific subjects.
"After working with the 3D capabilities in Director since their introduction, we at ForgeFX are still sometimes a little blown away by the strength of the technology that comes right out of the box”, said Adam Kane, lead programmer, ForgeFX.
”Within an intuitive coding framework, you get: on-the-fly mesh deformation, skeletal animation, reflection mapping, specular highlighting, point-based dynamic light sources, alpha-transparent texturing, and more. For physics, you can either use the included award-winning Havok engine or hand-roll your own via Lingo. For Prentice Hall, one project required that students be able to sculpt a mountain in real-time and then be able to see the topographic map that would result. Building on top of the foundation that Director MX provides, we were able to create the custom components for this experience in a relatively short period of time."
Working closely, the Active Art team and ForgeFX collaborated to develop a collection of educational software projects that is both compelling and exciting for the user, and accurate in regards to the scientific principles being taught. With a combination of coordinated conference calls and online meetings using ForgeFX’s extranet and file server, the teams were able to conduct weekly online reviews of every active art project in production and to make changes and corrections in real time, saving time and money for both teams.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Science Explorer© Active Art Digital Curriculum
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pearson Prentice Hall has found that developing projects using real-time 3D has many benefits. Because the 3D Active Art pieces are built using computer generated models, camera angles, and lighting effects, they are easy to modify and make changes to. It is easy for the developer to create a variety of options for the client to choose from while the project is in production. This allows for far fewer changes toward the end of the project and also allows for easy reuse of models and textures in other projects.
"Choosing to develop our project in Director MX was an easy decision”, explained Peggy Bliss, project manager, Pearson Prentice Hall. “We needed a technology to rapidly develop real-time 3D interactive simulations that would be accessible both online and offline, and work across a wide variety of machine platforms, operating systems, and browsers. The powerful capabilities of Director plus the exceedingly wide distribution of the Shockwave Player made Macromedia Director MX the obvious choice."
From Pearson Prentice Hall Science Explorer © 2005 by Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Prentice Hall. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Pearson Prentice Hall™ is a trademark of Pearson Education, Inc. Pearson® is a registered trademark of Pearson plc. Prentice Hall® is a registered trademark of Pearson Education, Inc.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pearson Prentice Hall
Science Explorer© Active Art Digital Curriculum
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Choosing to develop our project in Director MX was an easy decision. We needed a technology to rapidly develop real-time 3D interactive simulations that would be accessible both online and offline, and work across a wide variety of machine platforms, operating systems, and browsers. The powerful capabilities of Director plus the exceedingly wide distribution of the Shockwave Player made Macromedia Director MX the obvious choice."
Peggy Bliss
Project Manager
Pearson Prentice Hall
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Print this Case Study
Developed byForgeFX
Products used Director MX
Try | Buy
Find more items that match:Choose an Industry
All Industries Architecture, Engineering & Construction Consumer Products Entertainment Financial Services Government Higher Education K-12 Education Legal Life Sciences Manufacturing Media & Publishing Non-profit Oil & Gas Other Photography Print, Production & Print Services Professional Services Retail Services Technology Telecommunications Travel & Tourism Utility Wholesale & Resale
and/or
Choose a Project Type All Project Types Accessibility Data Management Demonstration eCommerce e-Learning Games Help & Support Intranets & Portals Multimedia & Kiosk Mobile & Devices Presentations Rich Internet Applications Rich Media Advertising Video Web Applications Web Publishing Web Sites
Browse by Product:Select a Product Acrobat Acrobat 3D Acrobat Connect Adobe Bridge After Effects Audition Authorware Adobe Captivate Contribute Central Pro Output Server ColdFusion Creative Suite Director Device Central Dreamweaver Encore DVD Adobe Enterprise Connect Server Fireworks Flash FlashCast Flash Lite Flash Media Server Flash Remoting Flash Player Flex Builder Flex FrameMaker FreeHand Illustrator InDesign JRun LiveCycle Open HD Real-time Adobe Open HD Solution PageMaker PDF JobReady Photoshop Photoshop Elements Adobe Premiere Adobe Presenter Production Studio Reader RoboHelp RoboInfo Shockwave Player Stock Photos Macromedia Studio Web Publishing System Adobe Video Bundle Visual Communicator Pearson Prentice Hall is the nation's leading educational publisher of standards-based instruction materials for today's 6–12th grade classrooms. Their mission is to create exceptional educational tools that ensure student and teacher success in language arts, mathematics, modern and classical languages, science, social studies, career and technology, and advanced placement, electives, and honors.
Prentice Hall’s Science Active Art team developed an innovative product for its middle-grades science program called Science Explorer © 2005. The product is unique in the middle school market due to its depth and breadth of content and high level of user interactivity. The processes developed and utilized by this team, and the active art product itself are truly fine examples of Prentice Hall’s reputation for quality.
ChallengeThe Active Art team set out to develop a product where students become participants in learning rather than audience members through detailed explorations of core content. The team created interactive activities, simulations, and experiments capable of running on the company's PHSchool companion website that match the quality and detail of graphics in the Science Explorer textbooks. Like mainstream media’s multi-sensory experience, active art pulls students into the content and keeps them engaged in learning. The Active Art projects captivate the interest of the student s with cutting-edge 3D graphics and interactivity while allowing students to interact and learn at their own pace.
Prentice Hall and ForgeFX decided to use Macromedia Director to develop the product since the Shockwave Player supports textured real-time interactive 3D environments, and allows the developer to work in a well established and fully objected oriented programming environment.
SolutionDirector MX
BenefitsMacromedia Director MX enabled ForgeFX to create real-time 3D environments for Prentice Hall to demonstrate a variety of scientific concepts. Since the Shockwave Player is one of the most popular media players, students are able to access the active art projects seamlessly from school and from home. Through the use of the real-time 3D capabilities in Director, online simulations included smoke, particle systems, water, artificial intelligence, reflections, mesh deformations, and a host of other 3D features standard in most cutting-edge 3D tools.
The Macromedia W3D exporter allowed ForgeFX's 3D artists and animators to do their art work in 3D Studio Max and easily export their files into a format that worked well with Director.
Benefits include:
Using Macromedia Director, ForgeFX was able to deliver true real-time 3D environments that are capable of running online or from a CD-ROM on any computer.
The projects dynamically check their frame rate while running on every end user’s machine, and scale delivery to meet acceptable performance levels regardless of the end user’s processor speed and video card.
Because 298 million web users have Macromedia Shockwave Player, developers are assured that deployment of sophisticated 3D technology will be available to all users.
While Director is a full-blown, object-oriented development environment, it is also a rapid development tool, which allows the developer to create projects in a relatively short amount of time.
The developers took advantage of multi-resolution meshes and scalable geometry to allow users on low-end or high-end machines to interact with the content at performance levels tailored for their machines.
To reduce download sizes the content of some of the 3D Active Art projects are generated randomly which also ensures that the participants have a different experience every time they access the project.
Project DetailsWith the advancements and rapid adoption rates of the Internet, Pearson Prentice Hall now has companion websites for all of their textbook programs. Adding digital media to the student's curriculum allows for compelling content to supplement the course material. Science Explorer covers a wide spectrum of science content, including environmental science, human biology, chemical interactions, and motion, forces and energy, spanning the chapters of 16 books.
The Pearson Prentice Hall website is accessed by millions of students a year on a variety of operating systems, platforms, and browsers and needs a technology solution that is capable of deploying the projects to all students consistently. At the same time ForgeFX needed a robust development tool capable of creating interactive 3D simulations of ocean waves, seismic waves, the solar system, crystal systems, topographic maps, pheromone trails, volcanoes, cells, and a host of other complex scientific subjects.
"After working with the 3D capabilities in Director since their introduction, we at ForgeFX are still sometimes a little blown away by the strength of the technology that comes right out of the box”, said Adam Kane, lead programmer, ForgeFX.
”Within an intuitive coding framework, you get: on-the-fly mesh deformation, skeletal animation, reflection mapping, specular highlighting, point-based dynamic light sources, alpha-transparent texturing, and more. For physics, you can either use the included award-winning Havok engine or hand-roll your own via Lingo. For Prentice Hall, one project required that students be able to sculpt a mountain in real-time and then be able to see the topographic map that would result. Building on top of the foundation that Director MX provides, we were able to create the custom components for this experience in a relatively short period of time."
Working closely, the Active Art team and ForgeFX collaborated to develop a collection of educational software projects that is both compelling and exciting for the user, and accurate in regards to the scientific principles being taught. With a combination of coordinated conference calls and online meetings using ForgeFX’s extranet and file server, the teams were able to conduct weekly online reviews of every active art project in production and to make changes and corrections in real time, saving time and money for both teams.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Science Explorer© Active Art Digital Curriculum
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pearson Prentice Hall has found that developing projects using real-time 3D has many benefits. Because the 3D Active Art pieces are built using computer generated models, camera angles, and lighting effects, they are easy to modify and make changes to. It is easy for the developer to create a variety of options for the client to choose from while the project is in production. This allows for far fewer changes toward the end of the project and also allows for easy reuse of models and textures in other projects.
"Choosing to develop our project in Director MX was an easy decision”, explained Peggy Bliss, project manager, Pearson Prentice Hall. “We needed a technology to rapidly develop real-time 3D interactive simulations that would be accessible both online and offline, and work across a wide variety of machine platforms, operating systems, and browsers. The powerful capabilities of Director plus the exceedingly wide distribution of the Shockwave Player made Macromedia Director MX the obvious choice."
From Pearson Prentice Hall Science Explorer © 2005 by Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Prentice Hall. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Pearson Prentice Hall™ is a trademark of Pearson Education, Inc. Pearson® is a registered trademark of Pearson plc. Prentice Hall® is a registered trademark of Pearson Education, Inc.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Great Adobe related Blogs!
Adobe maintains its own blog web site. The link below is to the list of Blogs on this site.
http://blogs.adobe.com/blog-list.html
The following link is to a particular blog that is widely read by the Adobe blog readers. Check out the “categories” link and “archive” link to look for information on your favorite Adobe application.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/
http://blogs.adobe.com/blog-list.html
The following link is to a particular blog that is widely read by the Adobe blog readers. Check out the “categories” link and “archive” link to look for information on your favorite Adobe application.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/
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