film is so dead so is video......

Welcome to the digital revolution called RED. You probably already were seeing it even without knowing. A good example is the movie "Jumper". Not that I am interested in the movie itself, but mere the picture quality. You talk HD? This goes beyond HD it various from 2 times up to 4 times bigger. And it's all digital. 4K shot in raw footage and in the same time the camera creates quicktime movies. They can be used as reference but also as final production file. How does this camera look?

This is just the body, but it's all it is. The camera can be build up with all the gadgets and periphals you need to make it work. It weights a 4.5 kg and is more powerfull then any 35 mm Cine camera. It can record to Compact flash, Harddrives and special solid state flash drives. You wonder? Ok so it's better then film it's bigger then HD, but how does that look? Here is a still, be warned it's a still directly taken from the movie "crossing the line", shot with prototypes. It's 6,8 MB large so it will take a little time to see the original: (4096x1743 pixels not even the full size)

To make it clear again, this is not a photo, this is a movie still. There is so much to tell about this amazing technology, but you can find all the info on the RED website. Ow and don't forget to check the "shot on red" page. There you can find more examples of movies shot with RED. You will be amazed about the crisp and clear quality. There is nothing really nothig comparable. The small movie Mythbusters gives you an inside idea about how it works and how the workflow deals with the RED 4K RAW files. Ow and something else, there will be a 2K pocket pro version in 2009. Maybe it will wake up the moviemaker in you!

To close, here another picture of the RED ONE 4K:

Building a new website

For a client I am building a new website, because her website is a total disaster. From design view but also from commercial attractivness. Because her shop is in the erotic business of fetish clothes and lingerie I was looking for a special touch. Representing the boudoir like feeling but also the edgy atmosphere of a dungeon. Here is the first look into the project. I started by replacing her home screen with this flash intro. At least so people know something is going to change soon.

I started by designing the different parts in Adobe Illustrator and importing them into Carrara Pro 3D. From there the meshes were worked into 3D parts. Text was added as well as different  textures like the wallpaper in the back. The wallpaper I found on the internet and I had to rework it into a texture with photoshop. Then lights were added and the virtual camera movement. The rendering took about 1 hour in good quality. I rendered the 3D images as sequenced tiff files without compression. After this I used photoshop and Adobe Bridge to batch the sequences into jpeg's with progressive quality, after this the sequences were seperated into 2, one for the first clip and the second for the mouseover interaction. Then these sequences were imported into Flash. From there I had to programm the timeline as well the old movie scratches and dust. This is done with the help of some scripting to get the random effect of movie flickr and dust spots. At some point I wanted some small 3D interaction and I created the mouseover. Therefore I had made a second sequence. The problem was to keep the size of the flash down. I did this with the help of photoshop, by using a progressive compressing method. It's close enough for good quality. I ended up with 40% smaller file size. The original can be found here. To give you an idea about the work that get into this, It took me about 2 full days to build this intro.

The biggest problem for me was the overall design. The name of the shop is Catchu - 2bkinky. Making a logo for this name is not quite simple. It's to much information to make a simple design. I started with the character U shape and I thought of a shield. Then I came up with the idea to put it together as some sort of Blacon or family weapon. The owner of the shop was questioning the readibility, because she didn't see the letter U at the beginning. So I moved it more forward on the shield to make it more visible. What do you think is it a good design? Here you see the old design, that in my opinion is far from a design, it's created with the Word Art feature in Microsoft Word

La Môme Piaf

The sparrow girl. A small person with a tormented soul like that of many lifetimes, she will never be forgotten. Edith Piaf. I've been always impressed by her, though many people these days don't know much of her. The movie La vie en Rose or La Môme is an excellent movie. Though for many the choice of flashbacks and flashforwards are pretty confusing, and the difficulty to put all the major events of her life in 2 hours and 20 minutes, you will be astonished about the acting qualities of Marion Cotillard. She is not an actress playing Edith Piaf, she IS Edith Piaf. Not a moment I realized that I was looking at a 31 year old actress. I had the feeling to see Edith playing her own life. I think this is the best acting I've ever seen so far. I can only imagine the difficulty and stress it must have been to play this big part. Even when she is playing the 47 year old Edith, right before she dies, there is no doubt. Especially for Marion this was the hardest part, because she was afraid that it would look rediculous. So she stayed in bed during the whole shoot, even when off camera. Sleeping before she had to perform again, from this position she felt she could put a realistic picture. I think that Marion as an actress comes close to the greatness of Edith Piaf. Though she will never become immortal, she made Edith come alive and immortal again for those who discover her for the first time. It's a must see movie, but be warned, for the sensitive people it's quite a rollercoaster to see this movie.

Hooking up a guitar to the Mac

With Garageband in iLive you get a sophisticated recording and sound manipulation device in your hands. I've been playing classic guitar during my youth, and since I have my Mac and seeing some guy giving a demo with an electric guitar hooked up to a Mac at the store, I wanted to pick up my old hobby for playing myself. So finally I got me this fine piece with warm sound. But then came the question how to hook it up? I saw in the shop then, that somekind of nifty little cable was attached that transformed the mono signal into a 1/4 plug stereo. And of course that was nowhere to be found or it had to be ordered, and I can't wait for orders, I hate that. So I went to the electronics shop, bought me shielded wire and plugs and soldered the bunch together. Excited if my little experiment would work I fired up Garageband and to my suprise an overhelming crisp sound was filling my study. The Mac just did the rest, no amplifier, no nothing. Just staight into the Mac. In Garageband you only need to choose a guitar style: clean Liverpool, 60's structure or what to think of the scorching solo, it's all there. I am not a sound engineer, but I hardly can tell the difference from a tube amplified sound.

Here a small example of the sound, playing the first part of the national hymne of Holland:

The power of miniature worlds

When I was about 7, I liked to walk thru the pages of "Revell"  a famous German brand in toys that made products for miniature worlds for train lovers. Besides that they had all the material to create your own downsized copy of reality. I remember how I loved these pictures coz they seemed to reflect a sort of utopia to me. Especially the post war architecture of Germany was somehow attractive to me. Still this architecture can be found traveling around in Germany.

To reflect this old memory I created two pictures of miniature words myself. The fun thing though that this is all software based and are actually real worlds that I manipulated with the tilt-shift technology. Normally this is done by using a special device to tilt-shift the lens, in this case I found a neat trick within photoshop to create the same feeling. I hope you were fooled by the first look at these pictures.....

Migrating my website

Today I finalized a long prosponed matter, of migrating my website to another hosting company. For years now I've been paying way to much money to the stupid provider that gives me acces to the net. The problem in Belgium is that there are only 2 major players in the market for internet acces. Belgacom, the former state owned telecom company, and Telenet, a private company. Because of this situation there is no competition whatsoever and the prices are sky high for accessing the net. As much this counts also for hosting fees. To give you an example, I payed about 240 euro's a year for maintaining my website with a ridiculous 160 mb size. I moved to one.com, they offer me 2000 mb for 49,50 including the fee for moving my DNS address. 

You wonder why I didn't move before? Because since a few months the .be extension is available in Belgium and also did one.com not operate in Belgium before. 

Anyway, another problem occured moving my files. Before I used to work with my Windows XP pro PC, and I created my files in Flash and HTML with Adobe CS2/CS3. So far so good, untill I discovered today the problems with installed fonts. Of course I should have known this but I never had a thought that one day soon I would start working on a Mac. The difference is the kind of fonts that are OS wise distributed. For instance I used Vrinda as my main font for my website, but it turns out that this is a Service Pack 2 deployed font. So no way this font is available for the Mac unless I have to pay an additional fee for it. It wouldn't be such a problem if the complete layout get's screwed with bigger replacements. This is probably a glitch as well in the Adobe software. I have no clue why suddenly the fonts become bigger, for example from 11 dots to 20 dots. 

Anyway, a tip for y'all out there. If you design something, either break down the font to a graphic or choose the ordinairy known fonts used across the web.

Nostalgia new

Here is an example of running a C64 emulator on my mac. It's funny to see how big the difference is in size. The original resolution of the C64 was 320x200 in screensize and mostly TV-sets were used for hooking up the Commodore. You can image how large and rough the graphics were. But nobody bothered, because nobody new better. Today with screensizes like on my mac of 1920x1200 it seems so primitive. It's possible to run many of the old programs, demos and Arcade games on these emulators. Though some won't really run on the mac others do on my Windows PC. The second screen is a demo running in the C64 of a 3D glass. Boy these things were so exciting in those days.....

Nostalgia

In 1981 CBM (Commodore Business machines) introduced the Commodore 64. It was an exciting time because for the first time computers were brought home for "reasonable" prices. They were even very competitive to the professional IBM computers, and even brought more additional features like a synthesizer chip and for that time amazing color graphics. I remember how I got all my money together to buy this miracle of modern technology.

I went on my bicycle to the nearest shop (30 km) and became the proud owner of a Commodore 64. It's even funny to think of the fact that there was no internet, and that for anything you needed on software or any other kind of peripheral that was needed I had to travel distances.

Most programms were sold on ROM cartridges, cassette tapes and later on 5.24" floppies, the other possibility was to programm yourself in Basic or to type over listings in magazines. After a few years I was getting into the army as a pro, and I needed to have something that was portable. I remember that the SX-64 was released in 1984 and it consisted of a 5" color screen and a built in 5,25" drive (named 1541). Portable was hardly a name for it, you could better call it luggable. In the beginning the price was sky high, I remember a mere 3999 guilders. It was this price that made it not much of a succes. But I was still very impressed.

Hardly to believe these days that those dinosaures of the computer age could stir so much excitement compared to for exampel the Macbook Air. In 1985 prices went suddenly really down and it was available for 1699 guilders, that would be about half in euro's, about 800 euro's. Anyway I went to Rotterdam by train (overcome another distance of 100 km to get to the long wanted gadget). And by the time I returned home I was the proud owner of the SX-64. To give you an idea I added some pictures. Next time I am going to write a bit on some amazing programms that were released and were the messengers of things that would change the computer use forever. 

The technical sheet: (batteries not included, it only worked on AC power)

Commodore SX-64 "Executive"

Introduced: January 1983 Released: January 1984 Weight: 23 pounds Price: US $995. CPU: MOS 6510, 1MHz Audio: 3 channels RAM: 64K Display: built-in 5" color screen 40 X 25 text 320 X 200, 16 colors max Storage: internal 170K floppy drive external floppy drive Ports: S-video, composite video 2 joysticks, cartridge port serial and 'user' ports OS: Commodore BASIC in ROM