I'm planning to make an animation with Silverlight, i want to export the animation to a video format, to be able to share it on video sharing website.
How can i do this ?
You could use a tool like Camtasia to record your screen or part of your screen. It then can be exported to a bunch of different video formats.
A pure code approach is to write a sequence of images, and then combine those images together as a video file. Eric Gunnerson has code to capture images from an animation , its WPF but would probably work in Silverlight? Codeproject has an example of converting a stream of images to an AVI video file in C#. It creates an AVI output. It would be great to go straight to mpg, but as it's compressed the input needs to be a video stream. If you do need mpg as the final output look for an off the shelf avi->mpg converter.
BTW - Let me know how you get on, I'm interested in the performance/functionality of this solution.
MrTelly: That approach would not work because Silverlight does not expose the RenderTargetBitmap class. (Well, this is not completely true, the class is there, but its constructor and methods are all marked SecurityCritical and as such are not normally accessible.)
The Camtasia solution proposed by Jakers is likely the simplest solution.
It's nuts that there isn't a simple way to do this in Silverlight, it's easy as pie in flash.
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I need to be able to render a silverlight storyboard animation to video. The animated content itself could be simple UIElements, Images or even two or more videos playing at the same time.
Several ideas came to mind like RenderTargetBitmap on a single frame basis, but:
1) I've never tested this against video embedded content
2) Don't know how to actually compose the video from the generated images.
Expression Encoder was also on my mind, but I don't know if it's possible to integrate it in a Silverlight/XBAP app to fulfill what's expected from it.
What's your opinion on this?
Your best bet if you just need to capture this sort of thing would be to use the Expression Encoder 4's screen recording feature, or a tool like TechSmith Camtasia.
I want use photos captured by 3D cameras in Silverlight 3 or 4.
I want use that photos like in maps.google.com. Is it possible to do with silverlight and if yes is there any book, tutorial, video or anything alse, from which I can learn how to use tham.
Thanks.
It is possible to convert a stereoscopic images to an Anaglyph in Silverlight.
Have a watch of this video from Mix10 Moving at 60fps. You want to be 55 minutes into the video (its mainly about video but the principles are the same).
Unfortunately Eric doesn't provide any access to the pixel shader in question.
Check this demo out. It comes with full source code:
http://www.evanjohnston.com/post/Silverlight-4-Webcams-to-the-3rd-Dimension.aspx
They use two webcams and red- and green-filter pixel shaders to separate the streams. Of course the same can be used for static images.
It can be done with panoramic images.
Here is example for cylindric images.
I am trying to evaluate which technology is best for my needs.
I need to display a video I get from some remote device, and let a user
interactively draw on it lines, polygons etc.
I searched and couldn't find any existing applications with this ability
(all the flash applications only displayed video).
Could anyone point me to such an application?
I haven't seen a specific app that allows you to do that, but I can tell you it would be fairly trivial to build it in Flex. You would simply create a transparent Sprite over the video clip, then use the Drawing API bound to various mouse events to do your drawing.
The final image can be saved by using BitmapData.draw() over the container that holds both the video and the canvas, and you can pass a bytearray encoded as PNG or JPG to a server-side script to save it.
I can't speak to Silverlight as I've never used it - but a Flex dev could build a basic sample of this for you in Flex in about 20 mins just as a proof of concept.
Where does your expertise lie?
Silverlight you could knock up a proof of concept rather easily and as Myk points out you could do the same in Flex. So your best bet is really whichever technology your current expertise lies in.
In Silverlight you could use a InkPresenter control above a MediaElement control in about 2 minutes up and running with a video file.
I think the hard part is finding a way to display realtime video from your specific device.
Silverlight supports streaming video so having that device talk with Windows Media Server or Silverlight Streaming sounds like the best bet.
Julie Lerman wrote an Silverlight app that you can draw on Images:
http://thedatafarm.com/blog/tablet/drawing-in-silverlight-article-in-msdn-magazine/
the article was presented at a magazine:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc721604.aspx
Hopes this helps.
We have a Silverlight application that needs to load a number of .png files. We can load the images OK, but Silverlight doesn't support reading the pixel data from the Image class.
Can anyone suggest a simple solution for getting at this data? Our current best bet would be a third party .png loading library, but we are having trouble finding a suitable one.
There is no built in classes for doing pixel based imagine manipulation/generation i n Silverlight. You need to implement your own PNG Encoder/Decoder that works on an byte array containing the image information. Joe Stegman has implemented one such encoder you should check out. He got lots of great information about "editable images" in Silverlight over at http://blogs.msdn.com/jstegman/. He does things like applying filters to images, generating mandlebrots and more.
This blog discuss a JPEG Silverilght Encoder (FJCore) you can use to resize and recompress photos client size: http://fluxcapacity.net/2008/07/14/fjcore-to-the-rescue/
Another tool is "Fluxify" which lets you resize and upload photos using Silverilght 2. Can be found over at http://fluxtools.net/
So yes, client side image processing can definitely be done in Silverilght 2. Happy hacking!
PNG decoding is hard to find.
I wrote an article for MSDN that includes some open source code I cobbled together from Joe Stegman, FluxCapacity, and a few others. It includes PNG decoding (as well as GIF, JPG, and BMP) for those in this thread that are looking for that.
http://www.microsoft.com/youshapeit/msdn/ExpertKnowledge/2008-10/InnovateWithSilverlight2.aspx
If you don't care for my implementation of it for Silverlight, then you can go straight to what I modified for PNG decoding: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pr2/
Cheers!
Update: It looks like they no longer offer the source code on the site, so I re-posted the content here:
http://dimebrain.com/2009/01/innovate-with-silverlight-2-article-code-available.html
Thanks - I've seen the Joe Stegman blog. It's very handy, but the decoder he doesn't have is a PNG one. We're using PNGs as we need transparency. The fluxtools link seems to be broken too.
I'm still looking (unsuccessfully) for a PNG decoder I can drop into Silverlight.
One option that may (depending on circumstances) be easier is to save the color data and transparency data separately, then programmatically apply the transparency to the image once you have it loaded. That way, you could save the image as a 8-bit gif representing the alpha channel, plus a jpg or bmp or whatever for the color data.
Dimebrain - that msdn link you provided doesn't have a valid link to the sourcecode - any chance you have a link to the source that works?
We have a Silverlight 2 project (game) that will require a lot of character animation. Can anyone suggest a good way to do this. Currently we plan to build the art in Illustrator, imported to Silverlight via Mike Snow's plug-in as this matches the skills our artists have.
Is key framing the animations our only option here? And if it is, what's the best way to do it? Hundreds of individual png's or is there some way in Silverlight to draw just a portion of a larger image?
You can use the Clip property on the image itself or on a container for the image to display a specific piece of a larger image, like a sprite sheet. This may or may not be more performant than swapping pngs. Also you could use the ImageBrush on a Rectangle to show just what you want, this would probably be a bit more efficient than the Clip property.
I just posted some code using Bill's suggestion regarding the Rectange and ImageBrush.
Silverlight at this time does not support bitmap effects nor has any libraries to manipulate the images. Your option now is to use keyframe animations from one png to another.
Now you can get at the raw bytes of an image. If you have your own image processing libraries you can compile them with the Silverlight dlls and then use the library in your Silverlight app.