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Jay’s Notebook

Dolby E Decoders in Cortex

by Jay Versluis on October 22, 2011

in Broadcast Nuggets

So we’ve got these Dolby E Decoders and Encoders at IMG MCR.

We need to use them more and more for various client requests – but for the last year or so Richard Bagnall was the only human in Chiswick who understood how to make them do something useful. We all had a look at them and most of us are still clueless as to how they work.

In many attempts he was kind enough to explain to me what we as operators need to do in order to utilise them, and I’m exicted to say that last week something made CLICK in my brain when I understood the magic behind them: they’re not complicated as such – they’re just incredibly badly labelled ni the Cortex system!

Let me pass on this essential knowledge in this guide and assure you this: if you know how to work an Axon Shuffler, you sure can operate one of these Dolby Cards!

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Wacom Intuos 4 = Happiness

by Jay Versluis on September 27, 2011

in Jay's Notebook

A couple of weeks ago I ordered us some proper Wacom Intuos 4 tablets – a small one and a wireless medium one. It’s love at first touch ;-)

I’ve had a first generation Wacom Bamboo before and thought it would come in handy for touch up work in photo retouching and some other pen related activities, and even though it worked I never quite warmed to it. That was in 2008.

Back then I even invested in Manga Studio EX4 which had just come out thinking that my drawing skills would improve when I rtied the two together. Unfortunately the software is so unintuitive and the tablet was so basic that I soon lost interest in further explorations.

With the Intuos 4 that has all changed: it’s like drawing on a piece of paper with incredibly accurate feedback. It even recognises the angle of the pen to the tablet and changes the brush size and stroke accordingly. Whoa!

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How to render with Alpha Channel in Anime Studio 8

September 11, 2011

We’ve been playing with Anime Studio 8 Pro and love it – for years I’ve been bombarded with “special offer” emails that told me how amazing this programme was so we finally gave in. I’m glad we did – Julia and I are having lots of fun creating 2D animations. The included tutorials are great, [...]

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Woody dancing at the office

September 3, 2011

Woody is our favourite wooden artists’ manikin. He currently lives on a shelf with two woolly ninjas (Blackberry and Blueberry) but we though it was time that he was brought to life. I was delighted when I found him in the additional content for Poser 7. I animated him using Animate 2 in DAZ Studio [...]

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Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5 – my personal hands on review

September 1, 2011

To complete my migration from PC to Mac I’ve downloaded the trial version of the latest Premiere Pro CS 5.5 yesterday. I bought CS 3 a few years ago and haven’t regretted it, but at work we have CS 4 and now CS 5 and I can see the feature improvements and benefits to our [...]

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Dancing Robot Splash Screen

August 28, 2011

I thought I’d share a couple of Splash Screens I created for my (since rejected) iPhone Apps. Splash Screens are loading screens which are shown while the sometimes lengthy startup process would show a black screen – unless you provide an image. Makes for a much nicer user experience. Dancing Robot (above) is lovely cartoon [...]

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Twitter for Beginners

August 27, 2011

In a surprise move, my wife Julia has just joined Twitter. Welcome, @Julia_V1! When I was at that point a couple of years ago I remember thinking “why oh why would I even consider joining this… er… movement?” I admit it’s hard to explain what makes it interesting. Twitter needs to be experienced to be [...]

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London Riots Business Idea

August 10, 2011

With Anarchy breaking out in London over the last few days, I had a great business idea: sell remote controls for TVs that have been looted! We can also sell chargers for laptops that went walking from PC World & Co. We’ll create an interface where customers can pop on the serial number of the [...]

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Simon from Poser: 3D Animation gone bad

August 1, 2011

Here we have my good buddy Simon – he’s one of the default figures that comes with Poser. I accidentally added two animation imports on top of each other which wasn’t so good for his hip. It looked rather amusing as he twists out of it so I thought I’d post this. It’s also my [...]

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Two weeks without glasses

June 25, 2011

I went for an eye exam last week at Vision Excess in Wood Green. Turns out my prescription was too strong so I needed a new pair. In fact, I wanted to keep the frame and just have the lenses replaced. This leaves me with my old glasses (which were too string before I got [...]

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