Sound Mixer, HEADACHE

I have been working on the sound mixer for the past couple of days, cause we have to compile everything into Indesign and make sure it works by Friday. I have gone through numerous tutorials to try and fix the problem I have been having such as the mute buttons not working, to add some animations when the buttons are pressed, the volume control as well.

Finally today after working on the sound mixer for the more than 12 hours, I could finally make the sound mixer work. As seen in figure 1.1, the codes are longer cause I have to create a folder with the working file, and set variable to bring in the audio. This was working fine, till the part where I wanted to toggle the mute button, though I have set a variable for the mute and its action, it was still unable to work.

figure 1.1

Then I thought of another way, to just directly import all the audio into adobe edge animate, from there I just have to select the action for each buttons which made the codes much more easier and shorter as seen in figure 1.2. I thought at first that everything worked perfectly, till I tried viewing it in the browser, some of the buttons don't appear, but the buttons is just there, and I was still able to click it, figure 1.3. Unfortunately I can't see whether there is animation happening on the buttons or not. 

figure 1.2

figure 1.3

Week 12 - Importing html into Indesign, content page interaction

Today in class we continued on working on the features for the magazine. I tried putting the content page into Indesign, first I had to separate all the pictures, the buttons, and create a background to be placed in the content page. Tricky part is when I have to adjust the picture size base and then putting them into Indesign. I created buttons for the content page, so that readers would be able to navigate from this page to their desire page, after working on the buttons and putting the effects on them, it turns out that the button interaction would work in a swf and pdf file. When view in a adobe content viewer, the function would not work, so I had to redo the entire button and try to make them work using hyperlink and object states.

Another things I tried out today in Indesign was putting the sound mixer in, which did not work though it is a html file. Another problem the group is having is that, since the sound mixer is a html file only controlling the audio, we still have not figure a way to make the play better work together with the video file which would be placed on top of the mixer. Other than that, the mixer works find, the buttons are drag-able, buttons work but only for the stop button. The group decided to add mute and un-mute buttons for the instrument of the multi-track to give the sound mixer more interaction.

Week 11 - Instrument set up and recording

Today our group was finally able to get to use the music room, Spencer managed to ask one of the music club members to borrow us the room for recording. All the instruments were available such as the guitar, keyboard and drums, which solve our problem of bringing our own instrument to record. Upon arriving at the room, we had to set up all the instruments and wait for our actors and musicians to come for the recording. During the recording, some parts of the video were really dark, we borrowed a direct lighting machine from Mr.Martin but did not use it in the recording as the lights were too bright, it did not felt like a studio like environment. So we decided to use all different kinds of angle to record the musician and actors as they play the instrument, we managed to take quite a number of videos. Now all its left is to compile them and choose the ones we want, edit, render into a video and place it into Indesign.

One of the shots from the recording today. More updates to come soon

Week 10 - Friday

Since the group did not have much time to fix on the sound mixer today, we decide to try and finish up the cover page for the magazine. Nathania did a mock up design for the cover, we then made changes, everyone giving suggestion on what to change. We tried out different fonts for the band's name on the cover page, the colors of and sizes of the font. One problem we faced today was that the picture that we decided to use for the cover, the bottom right corner has different light exposure, this gave the group a little headache as the fonts could not match the background. We tried different color and sizes for the font but still felt that the words could not been seen properly. Finally I decided that we should just photoshop that certain part of the picture, by decreasing the light exposure, but at the same time matching the color of the wall. It the end the result came out pretty satisfying.

After finishing that part, we somehow felt that the cover page was somewhat still missing something. We referred back to our previous cover page mock up, and notice that we included a saying that is quote from the singer or band, after adding in somewhat a quote into the cover, it look almost complete. Next is to finish up the recording of the studio, instrument set up, and the interview for the singer.

Sound Mixer for behind the scenes

Today our group continued with the prototype for the sound mixer. Many problems occur such as getting the volume tuner to work on a scrolling animation, which we could not figure out how, so the group decided to go with simple buttons that has the volume up and down function. Another problem we had to discuss is that whether we could do the sound mixer in Adobe flash, before trying out, we got some fla files from our previous semester and tried to import the file to Indesign but it did not worked out. Then we proceed to finding ways to convert the fla file into html, Mr.Razif suggested a software call swiff, which was able to convert the file to html, but was unable to read the animation, so the group decided to just stick with Adobe Edge Animate. 

This was a prototype I did for the sound mixer. The 'play' and 'pause' button worked perfectly, together with the volume control buttons, only downfall is that it does not control the animation for the volume as seen on the right side of the stage. Mr.Razif suggested that we just use the scrolling and design on the mixer which would be able to be scroll, but does not affect anything.

As for the sound wave on top of the sound mixer. We decided to import the multi track into audition or pro tools and play the tracks, replacing it with equipment and instrument at the side. With the tracks playing, we would use a screen capture video and then placing this video into Indesign, when click on the play button on the sound mixer, the video on top will play, and it would look like as if the music is playing with the sound wave appearing.