January 2012
7 posts
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Test Your Color Matching Skill →
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Open Letter To Companies Considering Crowdsourcing →
For months I’ve been trying to articulate a blog post about crowdsourcing and design competitions. This post by Heather Parlato on Creative Freelancer sums up my feelings exactly and offers several suggestions to those considering these contests (especially smaller businesses).
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“Keep a folder for the digital equivalent of crumpled up pieces of paper with...”
– Me
December 2011
3 posts
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“As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000....”
– Louis CK
An interesting experiment and I’m glad it’s working. But as Anil Dash noted, for this to work you have to “start by being one of the greatest talents in the history of your craft.”
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“You cannot eat exposure, nor pay your rent with it, nor buy health insurance...”
– Scott Benson
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Compositing Tip: Quick Grain
Film grain is one of those things that can really help sell your composite or graphics (or help reduce banding). But it can be a pain to render on top of an already complicated effects stack. To make this much easier, here’s what I do in AE:
Create a one second comp that’s the largest size you’ll use—for me, that’s 2k (2048x1152).
Place a 50% gray solid and add the Add...
November 2010
1 post
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October 2010
2 posts
Lost In the Details
We keep getting lost in the technical details. I don’t want to go to a panel to hear what role Avid/FCP/Adobe played in your post-production pipeline. I don’t want to be sold to. I’d care more about the creative decisions and obstacles overcome in the process.
[End rant about Lost editors panel at the Savannah Film Fest next week.]
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September 2010
1 post
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Music for Designers →
Interesting find by @odd_enough. A tumblog with random music to design to. Now I just need a script to go through it like a playlist on random.
August 2010
2 posts
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Combined Reels
One of my biggest complaints against combined reels (e.g. editing/vfx/mograph/color) is that I have no idea what I’m looking at most of the time. Is this a shot you color corrected? Did you do vfx on this shot? Is this an edited sequence or just a combination of shots?
The other problem is that if someone is looking for an editor, they won’t want to spend time reviewing vfx. If they’re...
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andoru.LABS
As a designer/editor who often develops scripts & utilities to make work easier, I can really appreciate what Andrew Hake has put together. I’ve covered AERender before, but realized I never posted a link to his R&D page where he hosts all his useful utilities.
Some of my favorites are AEae (opens multiple instances of After Effects), AERender, difference, and projector (pairs...
July 2010
3 posts
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Gfx Hotkeys (iOS App)
So Gfx Hotkeys ($2.99, iTunes link) was just release a few days ago. A nice little app for quick reference to keyboard shortcuts, complete with search and organized by function. Very handy. The following apps are included:
After Effects CS5
Cinema4D r11.5
Final Cut 7
Maya 2011
Photoshop CS5
Flame 2011
Smoke 2011
NukeX v6
Illustrator CS5
With the potential for more to be added.
As I...
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May 2010
5 posts
5 tags
WatchSlowly but surely getting more time in C4D. Just a quick simulation with an attractor and Mograph 2 dynamics.
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Hair Conditioner
[via cameronw]
April 2010
9 posts
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“Anyone on the planet can afford a pen and a piece of paper. So out of 6.5...”
– Terrence Curren on the impact of a $995 daVinci
It seems that for some crafts, we inherently understand it’s the craftsman, not the tools that make the difference (writing, wood-working, painting, illustration, etc…). But for some reason this hasn’t really translated to the digital...
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“This is not to say that 3D can’t be compelling - in the right hands, and with...”
– Bruce Johnson (ProVideo Coalition)
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Red Giant Sale
Red Giant Software is having a 30% off sale through the 18th for NAB. Use promo code NAB2010 and pick up the Trapcode suite or any of the Magic Bullet plugins for a great price.
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WatchNice take on stop motion with graffiti as the medium. It’s interesting to see something procedural done this way, where elements must be painted over and re-painted.
(via Computerlove | Motion)
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Dolby Reference LCD Monitor
Dolby is producing an LED backlit LCD display that is said to rival CRT monitors. This is what I find most interesting, though:
Power said the new display is not only a reference monitor, but an emulation device. “Once you’ve used our known grade-1 style reference mode for color-correction decisions, you can press a button and have it emulate your favorite consumer displays,” he said. “We can...
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Open Source & Creative Projects
Joe Clark’s “Denial of Expertise” is a good, concise response to many of the critics of the iPad. But this little bit applies to much more:
Expertise needs schooling, maturation, taste, and quite a lot of attitude.
The foregoing explains why open source has nothing to teach literature or indeed any artistic creation, since talent doesn’t scale as you give more and more developers check-in...
March 2010
9 posts
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GIF, H.264, and Patents
Being in the precess of redesigning my portfolio, I’m very interested in current web technologies. One of those technologies is the HTML5 working spec and its <video> tag which I’m hoping to use. It may seem like a geek thing, but it can make embedding a video as easy as embedding an image. Compare that to the current method of embedding video… you’ve seen the complicated...
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AERender
AERender is a nice little “dropplet” app to launch AE renders in the background by just dragging a project file to its icon. No need to launch After Effects. It’s a nice complement to the BG Renderer script. It comes in both CS4 & CS3 flavors.
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More VFX Shops Shutting Their Doors
Scott Squires over at Effects Corner has a good write up on the current state of VFX shops and that two more are shutting their doors: Image Movers & Core Pictures.
It’s a shame so many good shops are shutting their doors. But The industry is so fragile. Everyone is trying to underbid the next guy and margins are extremely thin. It doesn’t help that there’s always the push...
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Freelance Standards of Practice
I’ve been meaning to write up a thorough post concerning work conditions for freelancers in post-production. In the mean time, there’s another resource recently set up by the staff at Motionographer, inspired by a cautionary tale from one freelancer.
Motion Design Standards of Practices is a public wiki for freelancers and employers alike. Right now it has some basic terms &...
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Why the Wacom Intuos4 Nibs Wear Down So Fast
I noticed that the nibs on my Intuos4 seem to wear down pretty fast (I’m on my third one since June ’09). So, in the tradition of the Internet, I complained online.
@conigs: I’d really like @Wacom to tell me why the Intuos4 nibs wear down so fast…
@wacom: @conigs I asked about this. Because customers asked, we gave the new I4 tablet surface a more tactile, traditional pen-on-paper...
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“With a little time, most people can make a shot look good. A colorist can make a...”
– Owen Williams
I am really tring to work my way to under ten seconds. Right now, I’m at about a minute for light correction.
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“Publishers can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it, don’t send them...”
– Marco.org: News flash
The same can be said of music, films, tv, or just about any content. Just because you don’t like a publisher’s method of distributing content, or the terms of that distribution doesn’t mean you are entitled to it anyway.
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