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Showing posts from November, 2010

Change is required for Change

If we agree the old cliche "If it ain't broke don't fix it" is a wise saying... then wouldn't it make the opposite true as well? IF IT IS BROKE THEN FIX IT! So many people claim to want change... they complain and complain about the way things are and then as soon as some agent of change comes along they then complain about the agent of change and usually try to stop it... If things don't work then change is required... and change is required for change... you cannot create change by doing the same things you did before...by following the same patterns... that's called INSANITY ^ ^ We don't expect to travel by sitting still... by not getting in the car or on the plane... YET people claim to want change YET they don't do anything different... they don't change theY patterns... AND they expect things to turn out differently... it's sort of like magical thinking... I'm not going to do anything differently at all YET because some magica

I really don't like Windows 7 : (

After working for a year+ with Windows XP I never got ANY BSOD's or system crashes ever... my system was SOLID... Same Hardware but now to use After Effects Cs5 I had to install Windows 7 and in the past few months since I've been using it... I've had about 10-15 BSOD's, freezes, crashes... Just now I had comping for the past 7 hours and things were great... then BSOD... and now After Effects says the project file is corrupt... tried a bunch of solutions I found online but none recovered my work so I start it over again... thanks Microsoft for "improving" upon XP 0_o If Win 7 stays this shitty I'm going to have to do something drastic to get work done 0_0 FAWK and the shots were looking so awesome and it lost it all for this sequence 0_0 So I go try to replicate and NOW I'll have to save incrementally so if Windows decided to BSOD for whatever reason I won't be FAWKED like I am now.... SIGH... back to it UPDATE: Took 3 hours to redo that wo

Comp noteS 11-28-10

So I'm compiN away now... here's a screen cap of an average shot.... Just yer average heart string marionette shot comP These comps aren't too slow to work with now that I'm using a still proxy in place of the animated matte painting compositions...seeing sittin on the bottom there... So I went and comped the first sequence and now that its done I'm rendering out the matte painting multilayered compostions as image sequences... its like baking them so they dont MURDER my Cpu and Ram... so I'm rendering the baked matte painting BG's now.... and AE will automatically put them in place of the proxies so the final renders will be ready ^ ^ Ran into a weird problem wherein blotches of orange, white or black would be all over the screen... some times white screens, some times black... I went through to isolate the problem... wasn't any plug-ins... ONLY happened in 32bit mode... they go away in 8 and 16mode only to reappear when I switched back to 32bit.

It's coming together quite nicely...muahahahaaa

So after I finished compositing the prologue of the film I decided at 4am to cut it together using a temp track Endika gave me a few months back AND it almost brought a tear to my eye because is was AWESOME ^ ^ That was the first time I had seen any finished footage with the music and I must say we are on to something here 0_0 I make what I want to see... and there is nothing that exists that completes this vision I have but I think HSM is going to be it 0_0 There is a Japanese word that describes what I have been after... I came across it while doing research for the film and when I did I was like OH this is what I am after?!?!?! So it was the perfect time for me to be hellS_AH excited because Endika and I were just talking about getting a pair of ribbon mics to do the final recordings... why was it the perfect time? because ribbon mics are expensive and sometimes you need a lot of enthusiasm to put things on credit ^ ^ So after consulting my pals Adam and Tomek here who are lik

ComP Start COmp_WHA?!

So after finishing up the matte paintings I started compositing final shots today... Here's some notes... My workflow for making the matte paintings was this... Render out a bunch of still elements from C4d to use (mountains, statues, trees etc) Export a still from a shot/set that needs a matte painting...  Bring that into Photoshop with the other elements visible in Bridge so I can easily grab stuff and use it in Pshop... Create the matte painting through mega photoshopping... Open a shot in After Effects Import the Pshop file for the MPainting as a Compostion so the layers are intact in AE Drop the matte painting into the bg of the Ae compostion Turn it into a 3d layer, add an expression to the Position and use the pick whip to make it a child of the "Sky tracker" lights that came in from C4d Rotate and scale it into position, levels adjustment Add anything else to the Mpainting composition do necessary adjustments I created my matte paintings at 2500 x 20

Left Right Left Rights ^ ^

Jimmy Urine talking about The Left Rights... seems like the right way to do things eh? Get together with yer friends and just do fun stuff ^_^ It was fun both times I worked with them and I look forward to hearing the crazy voices Jimmy does for the new film!

Survey results

I'd like to thank the 201 of you who filled out the survey... here are some of the results... There's still some available at Amazon and filmbay if you want one ^ ^ That's good to see ^ ^ Seems like it would make some people happy... So I pretty much have to make ALL THIS stuff available ^_^ Seems I need to make it available in theaters somehow hmmm...   Most of the data I requested was write-in so I'm going through that now... thanks again!

MisC things I've learned on dis film+being a WHore on FACEBOOK

Just some miSc thoughts on doing this thang... - I won't buy/build another dual CPU system... for price/performance its not worth it... which limits your ability to upgrade in a timely fashion... and because of the law of diminishing returns you'd get better rendering performance spread across multiple systems... We geeks probably feel the need to build some like ultimate computer for our film but thats not the right approach and it ends up wasting teh $$$ - I would go all ssd on my main workstation... I have an ssd boot drive but my media drives are sata... I'd just spend the money and use ssd on the mainboard or through pci-e   like this   for my media drives... 2tb sata drives are great for storage and they 125 megs/sec aren't bad but when dealing with huge files and massive image sequences the near zero seek time and 400+ megs/sec of good ssd drives make work more fun - Try not to "final" or send shots off to render when your really tired at the end of

Letting the fruit ripeN

So the matte paintings are coming along pretty good... This is the first time I ever did "matte paintings" for anything I've made... I used to just have the 3d render then I'd stick a sky behind it in After Effects... as I'd be in a hurry to final shots UNPROFESSIONAL! ^ ^ It's like buying some fruit thats not quite ripe and eating it to soon... and your all like...that was ok but it probably would have been better if I let it get ripe first... Ideas and creative work kind of work that way for me... I have to let them sit for a bit... its an iterative process... so for the matte paintings...I first looked at stills of each of the sets that needed matte paintings... and took notes about what should be there... then I went through and made the matte paintings... looked at them all took more notes.... then went through them all again...so now they look pretty tite BUT I told myself I'd dedicate this week to them so I'm going to go through them again...

I gotta start moving that other progress bar--->

So after tweaking with matte painting stuff for a bit the past few days I was able to complete two and figure out the workflow  for the rest... and for the rest of the compositing phase.... So I went through and exported stills from each of the sets that needs a matte painting... I brought them all into an AE project and grouped them accordingly...its 16 sets total in which I'll make at least 2 matte paintings for each one... So starting tomorrow I'll go through and start on completing the matte paintings... once they are done for all the sets... then I'll start from the beginning of the film and Composite all the sets in order.... I won't render as I go as I'll probably make some discoveries as I work and I wont make the same mistake I did on the last film where I was too eager to make "final renders" and I would keep going back and changing things bringing up the need to re-render over and over... For the matte paintings I render a still from the s

Comp TWEAK Comp

So I'm still tweaking on comP stuff... Now I did try to go as far as I could in 3d so that my final 3d render was looking pretty tite on its own... NOW if ya didn't know After Effects was like the first program I got really good at and I used to do everything in it way back when I was doing like whole experimental short films in it with 200-300 layers 0_o back in 2001.... So after getting so deep into the world of my 3d rendereR... I forget HOW MUCH you can do in the compositing phase... I knew I was going to do my DOF blur, atmosphere and FX, matte paintings in COmP...but I had to watch a bunch of reference vids to remind me of all the tite stuff that can be done in COmP... Just go to Youtube or Vimeo and search for "Compositing breakdown" and in watching those you'll get tons of ideas... Also by watching Andrew Kramer at videocopilot.net work in some of his tutorials you'll get tons of ideas too... When you get too deep into 3d you tend to get stuck

Post miscellanii

I'm still working on creating the matte painting stuff for the film... decided to comp an average shot with a matte painting... Render froze halfway in AE CS5.... seems you have to tweak the AE multiprocessing settings with heavy comps even with 16gb of ram with 4 cores.... I'm used to killing After Effects ^ ^ So the lil trick that SAVES you is to hold down Shift while accessing the prefs and set the "purge ram" frames... if things are really bad set it to "1" it will slow down your renders a lot but at least they will finish... for WATS I had it set to 1 for the whole film... I set it to 5 this time around and the render finished.. The look I'm workin on in the comp phase is to make it look like an old dusty place... and maybe the I also want the media to seem old and worn out and I'm not talking some "film damage" plugin ^ ^ Most all the 3d I see is WAY TOO CLEAN I understand most of it is for kids film but still... I really like the l

I be CompiN sooN

So my goal for this month is to composite all the shots for the film... BUT before I do that I have to create some matte paintingS... I did as much as I could in 3d but there's a few sets that could use some 2.5d extensions so thats what I'm doing now... First I'm rendering out the elements... creating groups of hills... using Surfacespread to distribute trees, statues, etc all over them... then rendering them out twice... once with a wide lens and ones with a narrower lens... Then I go into C4d and render out an example still of a shot thats needs a matte painting and I bring it into Pshop and drop in the bg element and tweak it out till it looks right... then after I create all the bg PshOps... I'll render out other bg elements...animated clouds, the moon etc... then bring all that in After Effects and start compinG shots... But right now I'm out of hard drive space...and Fry's is out of the Hitachi 2tb drives I've been using... I should have bought mo

Oh yeh my new 3d animation film school started?!

I was just creating some new Cinema 4d animation tutorials for fun but I've decided this is going to be the first run of my online film school course... The first 4 vids are HERE I just started making those while I'm bored waiting for the last renders to finish so I can start compositing BUT I've decided too make a lil film within the tutorial series... allowing you to follow along with the whole process...  BUT its going to be out of order since I started with animation stuff ^ ^ So it SHOULD have started with the idea--->Script---> Storyboards etc THEN get to animation but since I didn't intend to make a film with the series it will be out of order... BUT this is only the first "semester" Here's is an outline of the classes I will be doing PROBABLY ALL THIS MONTH ^ ^ I already did the ones in bold and I'm doing 5 and 6 right now... 001 Making characters come to life for beginners 002 How to use my pre-made rig with your ow