I looked at the Microsoft Expression Blend web site today to see if it was anything that I would be interested in. Expression Blend appears to have some of the same features as Adobe After Effects with keyframe animation, support for vector graphics, and video and audio encoding. It can be used to create Silverlight applications for the web. It can also share development code with Visual Studio. In other words, Microsoft Expression Blend seems ideal for my multimedia projects. It even supports databinding with web services.
If you could combine databinding with video compositing then it would be possible to dynamically generate video based on a variety of data sources. For example, you could convert RSS feed headlines into title screens and intersperse them with video clips or transitions. A visitor to your web site could then see a different video every time they visited your web site with current information like the news headline tickertapes that appear on commercial TV news channels. Maybe you could stream dynamically created video. That would really be revolutionary!
