It is more appropriate to say that the CourseMedia Gallery Arrangement Tool has been completely and totally rewritten! The old arrangement tool is actually a leftover from DUVAGA which was updated to work with DUVAGA2/CourseMedia when we made the transition to video and such a few years back. For the more technically curious; the old arranger was written in originally written in ActionScript 1.0 (!) and really requires an update for many, many reasons.

Expect the update to go live in CourseMedia this week or next…

The new Gallery Arranger is built on the open source Flex 4 framework and users will immediately notice it to be much faster at processing information, making database calls, and soforth. We are actually rendering bitmap data from video feeds and text slides as well, while preserving the thumbnails created within CourseMedia. This will allow for much simpler item reuse in this tool and hopefully others down the road.

An important new feature is the ability to delete gallery objects directly from within the arrangement tool! As is apparent from the flames; this is a true deletion of that object. No going back…

A note about video thumbnails and how they are determined:
While grabbing the input frame for a video clip may seem to be the best idea, in our testing we noticed that many clips at the beginning of a film began with a series of black frames. This is obviously no good for thumbnail generation. What we decided was to determine the frame precisely between but the start and end frames for any given video clip and render that frame to be used as the video thumbnail as illustrated below. Hope this works out for most users.

Look for some of these new features to be integrated into the Projection Tool in the future.