Living for the Truth - revisited

I made this doc in 2001 and was never happy with it. So after upgrading to the new Final Cut Suite, I decided a severe cut was in order. 60 minutes to 7. The longer version is very dry. This is much more lively and helps hide the very bad video quality of the clips. The clips of her performing and lecturing were less integrated into the interview originally as well and I think this new treatment of them helps support and liven up the interview. She is still plugging away on Boston Neighborhood Network, claiming Obama is not really a citizen and that the Haitian earthquake was caused by an experimental bomb in a very "Tea party-ish" conspiratorial way. Disappointing, but since the interview was from 2001, I didn't find it fair to include things we didn't talk about back then.

* This might be better seen directly on Youtube as the blog seems to crop the video a bit.

further along with the Whitman design

the front and back covers how they will look if the book was lying open on a table. (without the spine details for now. )

I like the "makes one face" concept, but I think keamy is leaning towards the same crop of each face.

New Design Project

Just started working out a design for the printed version of a play written by Michael Z. Keamy about Walt Whitman. Working with Keamy is always great, and I thought I'd show some of the early design ideas. This will be available on Amazon's site sooner or later.

Still deciding on the right image and how much of it to show. Right now I'm going for a very "classic book collection" look.

Hdr Options

I am not an HDR expert by any means, but in some ways I think that helps in deciding with software I want to use. I am very «results orientated» when it comes to work and usually the background tech doesn't interest me very much if the final product is what I was going after. So looking at these 3 options I was mostly looking at how easily I got to my goal.

Photomatix: as far as smoothnees went this one topped the others, at 100% there was very little noise to be seen and gave the most «photoreal» images. Options were limited and the interface out of date. It was the fastest processing the images of the 3. More painterly treatments of the image I found harder to control and get what I wanted.

Photoshop CS5: I huge step up from other version, I like the interface well enough and really liked the «details» slider for bringing out details in the images, something the other two was less straightforward about. The «photorealness» of the images was hard to accomplish and it takes quite a while playing around to get what you want. More illustrated looks are much easier to do.

HDR Efex Pro: Very nice interface, the best of the 3 with options to work on portions on the images and not globally all the time. Presets are fantastic starting points and there are lots of them. Images are much noisier than Photomatix, but less than Photoshop and that can be fixed with tweaking to a large extent. As slow or slower than Photoshop importing and processing the photos.

My recommendations...

All 3 are excellent choices, budget comes into play. HDR is included in CS5, the Photomatix plugin is 100$ while the HDR Efex Pro is 160$, a little steep. For a «1050’s postcard» look which I like, CS5 gave me more of what I wanted with HDR Efex a close second, Photomatix was a hands down winner in realistic treatment with HDR Efex a close second there. So a lot will come down to personal taste but I’d say, despite price a little too high, that HDR Efex Pro is the one I’ll go with. A big advantage is the speed of use. Getting what I wanted took less than 2 minutes while it took at least 30 in CS5 and never quite made it in Photomatix. (for this style of image). All 3 needed tweaking in Photoshop proper afterwards, which is to be expected I think.

HDR Efex and Photoshop : Glowing around edges much more noticeable in Photoshop


Photomatix: much more realistic, but falls short on illustrated look

FInal Cut Pro Studio 3 review

Final Cut Pro Studio 3 has been out quite a while, but because of budget and fear of a disastrous upgrade attempt (almost every update i’ve bought has been problematic to say the least) I hadn’t bought the new version.

Positive start:
The upgrade price is very reasonable, I can’t complain that Apple is trying to bankrupt it’s client base, which might be said for other companies like Adobe. For the first time in a very long time, the installation was beyond smooth. I have a million serial number issues since as an early adopter to Final Cut, I bought the various programs in the suite separately and my first version was installed on OS 7 (I think) which made the command «insert the disk from your first version» an impossible task, as it wasn’t long before OSX could not read «classic» disks. This time it didn’t even ask me to re-type in my earlier version serial number. As a dyslexic, these numbers which seem longer than any alphabet is a particularly daunting task.



Final Cut:
Not too many obvious changes here, but nice ones. The export options are greatly simplified and you can drag a clip into a new sequence and the sequence will conform to the clip and all the following clips inserted with too. I find it much snappier overall in speed as well.
Motion:
This program always had it’s plusses for me but the painfully slow speed of it kept me away for using it for more than the most simple tasks. A good part of the problem might have been related to my upgrade issues as it never seemed to quite change it’s features despite a new version number. This time was a revelation. It now renders in real-time quite a few layers of emitters and video with no slowdown at all. I’ll have to re-learn it and take in all the new 3D features. While I doubt it will replace After Affects in my workflow, it will find a very important place in it.
Soundtrack:
Again, not many changes but some nice interface and workflow enhancements. This software completely ceased to function for me about a year ago with no explantation and I really missed it. Garage Band is not exactly a replacement for Soundtrack Pro, but it had to be until I got this update installed.
Colour:
A lot of promise in this colour grading software. I’ve been playing with it and find it does a great job in first and secondary colour correction and the presets are ok as well. The interface is like something from the Amiga in the late 1980’s and nothing like a modern one. Some of the values are put in by hand, no sliders and you literally have to type them in and hit return, then do ti all over again if you guessed wrong. Live updates in the image are the way to go with this sort of thing so I don’t know how it ended up like this. The node concept of constructing colour grading is likely alien to many users unless they were using Shake or maybe the Expresso system in Cinema 4D for example. (slight correction: you can adjust some numbers by using the middle mouse button, or scroll wheel,not the best solution but better than entering manually)
Compressor:
I have to confess, I rarely use this program and I’m well aware of how helpful it can be if you take the time to learn it properly. For some reason, it seems too complicated, but I suspect it’s not really at all.

DVD pro rant:
This program hasn’t received even a backwards look from Apple since Roman Empire fell. It was a great idea but never even seemed to get the same quality output as iDVD. You could set up more complex menus but not much else. It is so far behind the times it’s a hinderance to workflow and not a help. I recommend Adobe’s «Encore» over it any day. I know Apple thinks that we’ll all be streaming movies and info tomorrow, but in reality we wont be anytime soon and not supporting Blu-ray and current DVD authoring features is shameful from a company that revolutionized the video editing market.

Conclusion:
I have to say I'm impressed. The price and features combined with the speed increases and compatibility with my current OS and hardware set-up makes me wonder how I held out so long to get this.

2 almost ready

They both need to be rigged, but I'll make the 3rd before i do that. I am hoping to adapt one rig to work for each and use different morphs for each head.

Moving forward

EDIT: October 5
Almost ready for rigging now I think.

She has a head now. Still very generic as I am hoping to use this as a base for some other characters as well. Edit: photo with ears added.

Edit: textures started.

4th Generation iPod Touch

Earlier this week I received the new Ipod touch, something I’d ben toying with buying since they were first released a few years back. It wasn’t cheap, I bought the64 gig version, but it was less money than the lowest storage capacity iPad and for my uses, more practical. I’ve never had a smart phone or touch device, so it was all new to me and therefore likely a little more exciting than it would be to many people who are used to these sort of devices.

This is one impressive device, easy to use, fast, versatile and very useful. This new version comes with 2 cameras and can take video and also take advantage of Apple’s new «Facetime» feature. This is a feature many people will have hard time trying as it only works with new iphone and ipods touches. I only know one person who I might be able to video chat with and we haven’t been able to set that up yet. The camera quality isn’t great, isn’t terrible. I see complaints on many sites about this and I don’t quite get it.... it’s music player, not a camera after all! It’s perfectly fine for taking snaps here and there and sending images of the vase you just have to buy to the spouse for approval. «Skype» on it is a dream, if you live in a heavily covered wi-fi area as i do, it’s almost like having a cell phone without the extra fees. The mail app from apple, once you get it working which was , to say the least, a very frustrating experience for me, is fantastic and syncs seamlessly to my mall app on my computer. The ability to group apps into folders is so useful, I can’t imagine how people managed on older versions. Book reading is easier than you’d think and browsing the internet fairly simple. The lack of «flash» is not really a problem. I’ll be updating the Behemothmedia page over the next months to make it more mobile friendly and «flash» will no longer be a part of it. I imagine eventually, the player will come to Apple devices but until then, it’s not exactly crucial. Watching videos, especially after years of watching them on an Ipod classic is a dream. The next 8 hour bus trip to Boston won’t be nearly as dull.

Short comings are what I would have expected. My fingers are not small enough for fluid typing, the auto correct is a horror show if you write often in 2 languages as I do... one of them will always be «corrected» with words that are hard to remove once the ipod has decided what you meant to type. The app store is a nightmare, trying to find things can be tedious and a chore. Electronic books should not cost the same as printed ones and many apps are not updated enough, but that is more a complaint about apps in general and not limited to the touch.

Anti Social (Network) behavior

I am, by nature, not a very social person so anything I say on this subject should be taken in that light. I have also been someone who embraced the new technologies and the internet from the very start. I had a «car phone», which was later a cell phone. Yes, at first there wasn’t much battery life in a portable phone despite the fact they were the size of a handbag they needed your car battery to keep you talking more than a few minutes. I was also on various profile driven sites, AOL chat, even «Friendster». I still like video chat and meeting new people that way, just no where near as much as I used to. I no longer have a cell phone (which sends most people into a fit of confusion).

As these social networks expanded and took over more and more of people’s lives I’ve found them to be the exact opposite of social. «MySpace» and «Facebook» for example give you the ability to post your activities, photos and thoughts to all your «friends» in one space at the same time. Sounds good, except there is nothing social about it. It’s no more social than writing a message on a wall on a street many people you know, and many more you don’t, pass by every day. You’ve managed to transmit personal information without any social contact whatsoever. People can know the details of your life, but not you. It’s like an interactive form letter some send out yearly. Sure it gives everyone information they might be interested in knowing but it eliminates the most important part... that the information comes from interacting with you as a real person and in person. As a result we see the real skills of socializing in groups or even one on one in the physical world suffering. I’d much rather get a short email sent from a friend to me and get feedback from the email. Better yet, a phone call or visit now and then would be nice. I still write and recieve letters sent by post now and then, it’s quite pleasant to get a letter in the mail from someone you like.

The «electronic text only» way of communicating leaves out all emotions. A cartoon happy face does not take the place of a real smile and it’s just plain impossible to tell someone’s state of mind, even if they are happy or sad from what you are reading most of the time. It is far too easy to interpret things according to your mood at the moment and not as the sender intended.

I don’t knock these avenues of communication as useless, just overused and a lazy and even cowardly way to interact. I can’t tell you how many times recently an old pal I have lost contact with has has asked for my «Facebook» page, not to get back in touch, but merely to increase their «friends» list numbers. Me, I’d rather stick to my small circle of real life friends than have 1000’s of impersonal contacts that don’t talk to me personally but to the nameless crowd, many of whom they’ve never met.

new animation project

As usual, it's a long slow start to getting an animation short done. I am hoping to have the character(s) modeled and rigged by winter to start animating. I always try to do a little more each time out, this time I am hoping for a very stable rig and to animating more than one character on screen at the same time. (I did Nomi and Chog a while back, but these will be humans). I think this clay render looks promising. I really have issues getting what's in my head realized in the 3D model.... but it's gets a little easier project!