Mike Chambers

Prompted by some of the work from Grant Skinner (in particular his FOTB 2009 session) and Thibault Imbert, I have been doing a lot of research lately into optimizing ActionScript 3 content. Not just how to make it run faster, but how to approach the process of optimization.

I am also starting to work on a small project which works with pixel data from images, and on which I anticipate performance might be an issue when working with larger images. I figured this would be a good opportunity to use some of the early code as a case study. I wanted to post the process and results here.
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In conjunction with the CS4 release, the Adobe Developer Center has just post some new articles on Flash Player 10, and Flash Professional CS4.
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Here are the links I mentioned during the SparkProject.org meeting tonight in Tokyo:

Pixel Bender on Labs
Creating ActionScript libraries of Pixel Bender Filters
Tinic Uro’s Post on Pixel Bender in the Flash Player
Flash Player 10 Drawing API overview
Mysql ActioScript 3 Library

Below is another simple Pixel Bender filter that I created last night. This one basically, converts an image to gray scale, using the ITU-R Recommendation BT.709 algorithm described here.

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After seeing all of the cool stuff people have been doing with Pixel Bender, I finally decided to spend a little time and start learning how to build them myself.

The learning curve isn’t too difficult, although you do have to learn some new concepts, and deal with some limitations (at least when creating filters for Flash). The most difficult part for me thus far, is just understanding color and pixel math and manipulation (something I need to read up on more).

Anyways, below if one of my first filters. I wanted to post it as it is a pretty simple example, while still potentially being useful. Basically, it creates a TV scanline effect by making every other row of pixels black.
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Last week I wrote a number of blog posts showing how to work with Pixel Bender filters in Flash, Flex and ActionScript. In particular, I wrote about how to embed pixel bender filters within a SWF and how to encapsulate custom Pixel Bender filters in an ActionScript 3 class. For this post, I am going to take the next step, and show how to create re-distributable SWC libraries of custom Pixel Bender filters that can be used in Flash Player 10 based projects (including Flex Builder, MXMLC and Flash Professional).
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If you check out the Flex SDK nightly builds, then you may have noticed that there are now Adobe AIR 1.5 bits included in the SDK. This is part of the AIR teams ongoing effort to continue to integrate closer into the Flex SDKs build process, and in general to provide more visibility into what is going on with AIR.

As the version number indicates, the Adobe AIR 1.5 release (code-named “Cosmo”) is a dot / incremental release. One of our original goals with AIR has been to update more frequently, as opposed to just having large updates at infrequent intervals. This release focuses on continuing to improve the foundation laid by the 1.0 and 1.1 release, and includes a number of changes and bug fixes, including, but not limited to:
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Ok. Last post on Pixel Bender for today (I promise). This one is simple, but ties together my previous posts.

Now, that we know how to load and use Pixel Bender filters in Flex, and know how encapsulte Pixel Bender filters in an ActionScript class, lets combine the two to leverage custom Pixel Bender filters in MXML.
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If you read my blog regularly (or just today) you should have noticed that I have been playing around with some Pixel Bender filters and ActionScript / Flex (all inspired by Lee Brimelow’s video screencast on creating and using Pixel Bender filters in Flash Player 10.)

Previously, I posted some code showing how to embed a custom Pixel Bender filter within a SWF and then apply the filter to an image. That works well, but the code is not that reusable since the filter loading code is mixed in with the main code.

Below is a simple example that shows how to encapsulate a custom filter inside of an ActionScript 3 class, which you can then use and re-use like any other built in filter.
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Following up on my earlier post on how to embed Pixel Bender filters within a SWF, here is a super simple example that show how to use a Pixel Bender filter within a Flex application.

Compiled using the Flex 3.1.0.2710 SDK, and requires Flash Player 10.
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