Silverlight on the Apple Mac- The Story Continues

by Don Burnett

Since the 1.0 version of Silverlight has shipped on the Apple Mac platform, it has become a very popular plug-in, not just with users but with third party developers. It's hard not to see the potential for the plug-in's great cross platform video solution Silverlight presents. Sure it's new, and there are a few things they are still working out on it, but for most people it's a trooper.  The Mac community has been clamoring for a way to natively on OS X encode Silverlight Video and output it directly on the Mac, especially in broadcast arenas. The Apple platform is famous for it's digital video solutions in QuickTime and  Final Cut Pro is one of the most used professional editing tools out there.. Having said that, to create Silverlight video, until now you could only go part of the way, producing a WMV output file. To create Silverlight video then you'd have to import video into Expression Media Encoder (either .MOV (QuickTime) or .WMVs). That still left no native way of producing Silverlight video natively in OS X until now..

 

Enter Flip4Mac's Silverlight Support..

 

 

 

 Flip4Mac makes a set of well known Components for Quicktime that allow it to play and manipulate Windows Media Video and Audio formats.  The latest beta supports encoding to Silverlight directly and will add the well known media player and media skins that are available with Expression Media Encoder. This is exciting news for those looking to create Silverlight Video and not having access to a Windows box to do it.

Check out the new support today at Flip4Mac.com right now..

 

Technorati tags: Flip4Mac, Native Silverlight Encoding, WMV components for the Mac, OSX, Silverlight Video

Swift 3d 5.0 Supports Silverlight

by Don Burnett

Animation solutions that support Silverlight compatible XAML output seem to be blossoming as acceptance of Silverlight is growing by leaps and bounds.. Interestingly enough they are only to version 4.5 on the Mac yet. That must say something about web artists using PCs, and this company is increasingly targeting Windows users.

Electric Rain's Swift 3d 5.0 animation powerhouse tool now supports Silverlight compliant XAML export (along with WPF)..

The exciting thing about their output is that it works just like their Flash add-in.. So, you can do all the cool things you see people doing in Adobe Flash with Swift3d now in Microsoft Silverlight. The XAML is also quite compliant with Expression Blend, so you'll be able to integrate this tool with Expression Studio... Some of you might ask why then would you want to use Swift3d and Zam3d both? The answer is simple. Zam3d is aimed at WPF based real time 3D interactivity.

While Swift 3D 5.0 can output three dimensional animations in Silverlight as 2D frames (like it does again for Adobe Flash), Silverlight is missing hardware accelerated 3D support. Swift3D is a very cool product and it is proving that you don't need a 3D engine present to still show wonderful rendered 3D results.

Some of the advantages Swift3D has as an animation package are full-featured support for many things you only find in professional animation packages. And very dynamic import and export in many formats.

The Converted scores with work on a new Silverlight compliant version..

The converted is a very cool tool that's in development right now (you can buy it here). The author of this tool has much in the way of animation expertise, and considers the work one that will see much updating as Silverlight itself matures into a more rich and efficient animation environment. For now though this tool is very slick.

Technorati tags: Electric Rain, XAML, Silverlight, the Converted, SWF to XAML, Swift3d version 5.0, XAML and Silverlight Export. Quality 3D now on Silverlight.