Adobe Air Green Screen Mashup
This Air application is an example of a marketing widget for the television show “The Colbert Report.” The application itself aggregates rss feeds about recent clips and upcoming guests, has a shout box for users to post comments, and uses video with alpha channels to simulate a green screen mashup.
The Green Screen Challenge Effects Console allows a user with little technical expertise to manipulate green screen video by:
The Air classes this application uses are:
flash.desktop.NativeDragManager;
This class manages drag and drop operations.
flash.events.NativeDragEvent;
This class manages drag and drop events. NATIVE_DRAG_ENTER is triggered whenever a file is dragged from the desktop over to the Air application. NATIVE_DRAG_DROP is triggered when a file is dropped onto the Air application.
flash.desktop.ClipboardFormats;
This class gets data about files from the clipboard. FILE_LIST_FORMAT is the format of the data from the clipboard and is used to check to see if the file being dragged is a FLV, as that’s the only file the Colbert Desktop application will play.
NOTE: url property of the file object is used instead of NativePath. NativePath will work on Windows but not on a MAC. Using the url property gives cross platform operability of this application.
Under application & installer settings for Air, the window style has been set to Custom Chrome (transparent). The reason why a transparent window was selected was because users typically aren’t going to have flv files sitting on their computer to create a custom background for the green screen mashup. A transparent window allows users to overlay the footage of Colbert over their default video players, allowing any video format to be using as a background.
The custom class this application uses is TweenLite, which is a compact tweening engine: http://blog.greensock.com/tweenliteas3
Yours in Truth,
Sunil John