widescreen conversion without adobe products?

[tcmt]

i recently discovered dark13's awesome scripts for widescreen conversion (http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/topic/5693-batching-pngs-into-swfs/).

is the same process possible without any adobe products? frankly i just can't afford adobe animator or any creative suite products from adobe.

 

i asked in dark13's thread if its possible to use his scripts with freeware programs but as for this moment no one could answer my question which leaves to be believe that it's probably not.

 

so is there a way using freeware software to do a proper widescreen conversion and if so how would i do that?

 

thanks for reading!

 

cheers

tim

[BakerMan]

i recently discovered dark13's awesome scripts for widescreen conversion (http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/topic/5693-batching-pngs-into-swfs/).

is the same process possible without any adobe products? frankly i just can't afford adobe animator or any creative suite products from adobe.

 

i asked in dark13's thread if its possible to use his scripts with freeware programs but as for this moment no one could answer my question which leaves to be believe that it's probably not.

 

so is there a way using freeware software to do a proper widescreen conversion and if so how would i do that?

 

thanks for reading!

 

cheers

tim

Of course. You can "resize" a picture with all kinds of free software.

 

What adobe flash does, in reference to Dark13's thread you just read.......Is apply a "smoothing" feature to the image. Smoothing makes it look polished without pixelation. Normal widescreen conversion of images leaves pixelation that looks ugly.

 

Let me ask you this: Do you understand the "concept" of resizing the images for widescreen?

 

If not, then I'd be more than happy to help you brother.

[tcmt]

as far as i understand it goes like this: hyper spin uses 1024x768 for backgrounds. when you tell hyper spin to use full screen at 1920x1080 for example the 1024x768 background gets stretched to fill the screen. this results in all sorts of ugly things like ovals instead of circles, disproportional faces etc.. 

so what you wanna do is create some kind of squished image. so for example you squish a 1080p background into a 1024x768 format. of course now your background image looks like everything is squished together: people and faced look very thin, circles get elliptical again but now mostly vertically aligned etc..

but then when hyper spin renders your squished background onto your 1080p display is gets re-streched to a "normal" looking picture (meaning normal proportions of the image). of course stretching an image always leaves artefacts and pixelation. and thats what I want to avoid. (and therefore dark13 uses the "smooth" feature" which basically calculates missing pixels when enlarging pictures). thats what i understand of the process anyway (I'm quite new to hyper spin and all my info comes from reading and experimentation so far, so sorry if got something wrong here).

 

so my question is, is it possible to convert to widescreen with freeware software still resulting in an acceptable picture quality (note that just scaling without additional processing (e.g. "smoothing") is not acceptable for me)?

 

thanks and cheers

tim

[dark13]

Honestly I haven't found a free software capable of outputting .swfs working in HyperSpin besides adobe flash professional. Consider that HS reads only Actionscript3 .swf. About the scripts I think they will not work in another software BUT everything is possible, if the software supports .jsfl they should work. Consider that the code that opens and saves files was not written by me, I added the part that resize images and adds the "smooth" flag, if you open the .jsfl with a text editor you will see the name of the author.

Anyway you can also ratio correct in photoshop or with another software, just resize the image 100% on Y and 75% on X but you won't have smooth.

 

TBH HS seems to render at higher resolution 1080p images inside 1024*768 flash files, the difference with text and tiny images is impressive...