A friend of mine posted this on Twitter the other day.
Despite current labor struggles, #vfx has been and will be an industry that thrives on creativity, intellect, and gut instinct. #jobsecurity
Could not have said it better myself. Be great do good work the rest will fall into place.
A couple weeks ago I did a cell phone comp. I changed what the display of a cell phone said to better tell a story.
I went to the vfx producer and said I needed a font to match the font of the display.
He went on to breakdown the combination of all the letters i needed to spell the words I needed for the comp. All from what was supplied from the SRC plate.
Talk about producing.
I need to play more scrabble.
The other day I posted a 140 characters rant about paint in compositing packages. That got me thinking. What is the problem with Paint?
I have a saying.
Composite your way into a corner and paint your way out
I don't remember where i heard it as its not mine. but it stands true. Compositing and Paint go hand in hand. So why do all of the big comp packages have paint that is horrid. I am tired of compositors lieing to themselves and saying the Paint is fine. Is that because most compositors will do anything to stay away from paint, maybe. If the paint node is horrible then maybe they can pass it off to a paint artist. To my suprise Avid is the winner on this one. matador is old and you will have to find a SGI box but it works really well.
You know what I say.
Learn to paint its a skill that will make your comps look that much better.
HIERO is a desktop application for collaborative VFX workflow - a scriptable timeline tool that conforms edit decision lists and parcels out VFX shots to artists, allows progress to be viewed in context, and liberates your finishing systems and artists for more creative tasks.
One of the biggest hurdles we as artist can face is where and what.
Arri Alexa Meta-Data Extraction
Mike Seymour:
Snehal Patel, Sales Associate (Pro Camera Accessories) at ARRI, has been working with Bill Bennett, ASC to test out a workflow for VFX to extract Lens Data and Tilt/Roll information from the Log-C Quicktime files coming out of an Alexa Plus. He posted this information which allows one to extract dynamic per frame Alexa metadata from Alexa files.
The dream is getting closer. I'd love to have camera data for all shots in house in a simple csv file.
"You have a right to your own opinion, but you do not have a right to your own facts"
This quote jumped started my bain this morning. I love when that happens.
Not my favorite. Everything is harder to hit.
With Lion, Apple has changed OS X interface and how we interact with the computer.
It's easier to invoke mission control or launch "pad" with a mouse. Apple moving away from a system that works well with a mouse. It now works better with your fingers.
Most days my hands fly across the keyboard and move the cursor with a mouse, or a drawing tablet pen. Not with a track pad. I have never wanted to control Nuke, or Shake for that matter with a track pad. It's terrible. Ask any digital artist if they use a track pad, they don't.
As a Nuke artist I'm still not getting used to the new operating system, Lion.
What's good about the iPad. It's not what you think.
I am a compositor. I sit in front of a computer all day long. I use every bit of RAM and all cores. When I get home the computer can be a very deep dark hole. The screen sucks me in. An update to the Web site or edit the lastest photos. maybe learn some Python or compositing trick. I could sit at a computer for hours.
Enter iPad.
The iPad provides a rich experience but scales it down for me just enough where I do only what the iPad is good at. I read, return e-mail. Surf the web. I do not listen to music on the iPad, but I play games. During the baseball season I watch or listen to baseball games. Thats about it.
Perfect.
Complaints or not iCloud has been good to me. Nothing has changed. Calendars still sync. My wife and I have the same calendars and that works fine. Contacts/Address Book keep all my contacts up to date. With reminders app I can share reminders with my wife as well as dates and grocery lists or multiple stores. For the most part things are great.
The thing that I find frustrating is the syncing. I have no idea that it's happening or is it going well. That's what Apple wants?
Dropbox works so well my dad doesn't get it. You do what? It does what automatically? Strangely dropbox has a Apple like UI element that Apple can't use. MobileMe used the spinning dashes. But Dropbox doesn't so much better. It's a feel it not see it element. It's really good.
I recently took off 3 weeks of work. It was a great time. [Look here] [1] for all the images you will ever need.
Right before I took time off I had upgraded my MacbookPro to Lion.
Most of the reason why i did this upgrade had everything to do with iOS 5 and iCloud. Not because I wanted versioning or reversed scrolling. That in itself is strange.
When I came back to work my MacPro is running Snow Leopard. Such a contrast previous versions of Mac OS X.
Nuke with reversed scrolling turned on? Navigating the DAG takes thought again. Up for out and down for in.
Apple, please do not forget about your pro users. We love our software. But only
When it gets work done.
[1]: http://mbfx.me/photoblog/month/november-2011 "Photos For Nov."