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!

What’s Dolby E again?

It’s a system to encode up to 8 discreet audio channels into one data stream which occupies only one AES pair. Undecoded it sounds like rather horrible white noise at full level. You use a Dolby E Encoder to create this stream and a Decoder respectively to turn said stream back into discreet channels.

We use the 8 channel system here because we’re recording our audio in 20 bit. Modern Digital Betacam machines do this too as do HD Cam / HD Cam SR machines and our EVSes.

Axon Crates and Cortex Software

In our current setup, all our audio gadgets (such as Procs and Shufflers) as well as certain video equipment are all fairly generic cards that sit it crates made by a company called Axon in The Netherlands. We communicate with these cards via our software called Cortex.

We do this every time when we want to setup our Shufflers for example. Playing with the Dolby cards is done in exactly the same way: pick your favourite position (far left or far right) and look for Cortex on the desktop.

Our Dolby Cards can be found at the bottom of the list on the left.

Dolby E Decoders

There are three cards per decoder in total but we really only care about a signle one:  the Embedder. That’s the card in charge of inserting our audios back into our SDI video stream.

They look exactly like the ones we use on our Shufflers and Procs, don’t they? That’s because technically they ARE. You already know how to operate them – how exciting! Just as a refresher: Embedder A/B determine where the first 8 channels will leave the card, while Embedder C/D do the same for audios 9-16. Easy.

The NEW thing for our Dolby scenario is the dropdown menu just in front of each channel selector called Source: this box selects the input into the embedder card  which on our Procs and Shufflers is always set to Rail 1.

Rails and Locals

The Source dropdown box contains three words we’re not familiar with: Rail, Local and AddOn. This is where we need to replace a couple of words with something more human. Let’s forget AddOn immediately – we won’t ever use it.

Let’s think of Rails and Locals simply as inputs – that’s all they are. Rail 1 and Rail 2 are phiscal inputs at the back of the card, while Local A and Local B come from the bus of the crate in which the cards are seated. Think of it as internal connections between cards in the same crate rather than cables sticking out out at the back (like Rail 1 and Rail 2).

It gets even easier: we’re not using Rail 2 or Local B. All we’ve wired up for our needs are Rail 1 and Local A.

So Rail 1 is what we switch into our Decoder from the matrix. Say we’re switching AJDF v52 into Dolby Decoder 1, all 16 audio tracks are available via Rail 1. We can now route them to the output channels we want. If we were to leave all our Source boxes on Rail 1 and switch out channels 1-16 as they are (1 onto 1, 2 onto 2, etc), the card would simply pass the audio without doing anything.

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!

It’s got 8 programmable buttons on the side that even show you what’s currently on there (6 on the small edition and without the labels). You can program this for each application seperately if you wish which makes it even more versatile.

The wireless option is great and I’m happy to pay the extra £20 to not see another cable hanging off the table, but it’s not essential. The small one works just as well and is great for portability, Julia loves it. You can always zoom into detailed areas. Medium works great for me and I wouldn’t want to go any larger than that (unless I win the lottery and shill out on the new Cintiq 24).

Photoshop CS 5, Manga Studio EX4 and Anime Studio Pro 8 work really well with it – so does Sketchbook Express and SketchPad. I’m looking forwaard to trying it with Poser Pro 2012 and maybe even Premiere Pro CS 5.5 – who knows how this will change my workflow. As a long time mouse user I never thought how much this could enhance the user experience.

The Intuos 4 comes with one of three free software suites so you can start drawing straight away:

• Autodesk Sketchbook Express
• Adobe Photoshop Elements 8
• Corel SketchPad

You can only pick one per tablet so I decided to go with the latter two. If you’re on a Mac, you can get Sketchbook Express from the Mac App Store for free so don’t waste your Wacom freebie. The Sketchbook Copic Edition is available for free too for both Mac and PC. You can treat yourself to a download here.

Corel SketchPad deserves a special mention here: it’s one of the best doodling tools I’ve ever seen! Super easy to pick up, highly intuitive and features a selection of really lovely brushes. Where other packages take a lot of getting used to and are rather user-unfriendly (*cough* Photoshop *couch* Manga Studio), SketchPad is a pick up and go suite. Very lightweight yet powerful, worth the freebie with your Wacom purchase if you ask me. Check it out here.

Let me show you some results I’ve been able to draw with my new toy over the next few weeks. I’ve never had that much fun drawing, not with a pencil on paper nor any other piece of kit.

I know that the hardware doesn’t make me a better artist, but it certainlymakes me want topick up that pen and start doodling a lot. And excitement is what it’s all about.

Thanks, Wacom!

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, but I believe they’ve been made for previous versions of the software. Some features have changed, and this is one I’ve had trouble funding on the web:

How to render an animation while retaining the Alpha Channel.

This feature is useful if a render takes a long time and you’d like to import the final render into another project, or duplicate the same render in your existing project (say an explosion, just like in Tutorial 6.4). The manual states to use the Quicktime export option with 16mil+ colours and PNG codec. Doesn’t exist in Anime Studio 8.

Instead, choose Animation and select “do not premultiply alpha channel”. Do not choose PNG here. Even though this will retain your alpha channel, it will render your movie as an image sequence which makes importing difficult and messy. Click OK and give your movie a file name.

On the next page choose Animation as your compression codec. That’ll keep it in one neat file. On the bottom of that page, select 16 Million+ colours (the + being the Alpha Channel – that’s very important to retain transparancy information in the movie). Hit OK and let the render magic begin.

And that, as they say, is that. Hope it helps

You can currently get Anime Studio 8 Pro for $149.99 and Anime Studio Debut for only $29.99 – only until the 14th of September! It’s worth getting, trust me

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 4, then exported the sequence into Poser 7 and rendered it, much like Dancing Alien and Dancing Robot before him. I wanted to make the scene more interesting so I tried orbiting the camera round Woody – that’s different to rotating him, but not a hard job thanks to Poser.

Even though there’s still a lot that could be done to make it more realistic (Woody’s feet don’t cast shadows, and sometimes he sinks into the office floor) I’m quite pleased with the results. My MacBook was rendering for over 24 hours on this one – that was before I told him not to go to sleep – it may have been done quicker, who knows. I can imagine how the Pixar guys are sweating – render a full day just to find out it was all for nothing. That is one thing I don’t like about 3D Animation – the rendering to appreciate the full effect isn’t instantly visible.

The backdrop in this scene is Ratracer’s Film Noir Detective Studio. I added some colour correction in Premiere Pro CS 5.5 to brighten the dark scene up a bit. Julia kindly showed me how to use Garage Band on her iPad so that’s how we made the music (including robot sound samples).

Enjoy!

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 workflow.

As last time, this is a rather large expense for me (£285 for the upgrade, which is still better than £810 for the full version) – however Premiere is a fascinating powerful programme and I know how helpful it is.

My old version has made its money back many times over so I’m sure this version won’t disappoint me either. In fact, I’m quite excited about the new options in version 5.5 and the idea of having it on my laptop.

Here are my hands-on notes, my first impressions and my two cents about Adobe’s rival to Final Cut Pro.

For the geeks: I’m using Premiere on a MacBook Pro with 8GB of Ram, 64 bit OS (Lion) and an Intel Dual Core i7 processor at 2.7 GHz.

I was more than happy with Premiere CS 3 on my aging PC and I wouldn’t have upgraded right now – had I not discovered the amazing world of Macintosh. I’ve tried my share of virtualisation options but I find that approach a bit clunky for creative endeavours (albeit impressive).

Since I’ve already side-graded to the Mac versions of Photoshop CS 5 and Dreamweaver CS 5.5, all that’s missing in my arsenal is a good video editor. Getting tired of learning new platforms every six months, and hearing too many mixed reviews about Final Cut X thought I’d stick with what I know.

I’ve been a Premiere user since version 5 (when it wasn’t CS) so that’s been well over a decade now. With today’s powerful hardware there has never been a better time to edit high quality videos on laptops. CS 3 had its faults but when you know what makes it “not crash” you can get by well. Importing files with odd codecs and mixing them on the timeline really doesn’t play well with CS 3. I’m thinking of footage from my plastic cameras like the Harinezumi or my Keyfob jobby  here.

The New Adobe Media Encoder

When CS 4 came out we got it at work, and one of the major changes was the addition of Media Encoder. I loved it but not much else had changed. There had been more export presets and codecs, many of which we never touch due to specific client requirements. We are using Media Encoder so much these days, probably a hot property across the industry – so I’m very happy about the changes I can see in CS 5.5.

In comparison to CS 3 and before, you could only work on one file at a time – when Premiere was encoding, you couldn’t setup your next job (i.e. go back into the timeline and edit). This seriously slowed down workflow. Media Encoder is a queue which you send a job to and start it at your own leisure. Since it’s a separate programme, you can keep editing while the encoder does some work. That’s great already.

But the new Media Encoder is like having Pro Coder thrown in with Premiere – that alone is worth the money for the upgrade! Media Encoder is now a standalone programme that can be used with files other than Premiere Projects. This is huge!

It loves to batch encode anything – which is such a helpful feature for a chunk of files your client brings along on a hard disk and demands they need to be done by tomorrow morning. No problem: drag them into a watched folder, hit “start queue” and let the computer burn the midnight oil.

It also gets less in the way as Media Encoder CS 4 did (or so I find) and it’s super speedy, yet takes a back seat while you’re working on other applications. And I’m on a 13″ laptop here!

Content Delivery Integration

Under File Export – Media, you set all your video and audio parameters, as well as where your output file should live – but with one incredible addition: you can now also tell Premiere where to FTP the file!

This my friends is big news: it means Premiere CS 5.5 is now becoming something comparable to Content Agent. Not exactly something we associate with video editing but rather a file delivery suite.

Again you get this thrown in – major brownie points go to Adobe for this addition! I am not sure if this feature was present in CS 4 or CS 5 – if it was, well that’s even better

Yes, you CAN export to tape

The Export to Tape option is still there by the way – it’s been removed from Final Cut X but the broadcast industry is far from tapeless even in 2011. This has caused major uproar among Final Cut Pro editors who are probably as confused about X as I am: Are Apple abandoning Pro and Studio? Is X an amateur version? If so, where does iMovie fit in?

Let’s not worry about this for now. Premiere Pro CS 5.5 can export to tape, that’s all we need to know at this point (and before you ask, it’s greyed out because I haven’t got a tape deck attached to my laptop right now). This is such a welcome addition to my vast DV tape library that needs some transferring, weeding out and cutting down.

You can of course import from tape as well – as before either via FireWire or a connected HD-SDI card.

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 figure called Klank by 3D Universe – I absolutely love their style! I have a couple of other figures made by them and I’ll show you some pre-production artwork a bit later.

As you may have guessed, Dancing Robot is essentially the same app as Dancing Alien with a different character, an animated background and different music. Guess I won’t be submitting that one to Apple…

Here’s the Splash Screen I had designed for Dancing Alien. He’s a friendly Smith Micro figure called EF Grey Alien that came with Poser 7.

Even though I render the animations in Poser, these Splash Screens have been rendered in DAZ Studio with Stonemason’s Generic Sci-Fi Corridor set in the background (without textures, hence it’s grey – which I thought worked very well). I do this because DAZ Studio renders depth of field a bit nicer than Poser does.

I’ll see if I can integrate these into the new app we’re currently working which will feature more of 3D Universe’s work.

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 appreciated.

Here’s a little how-to guide about the language and conventions used on Twitter, I thought this may be useful for other newbies too.

Grab a coffee while I tell you everything I know about the (apparently) hottest social network in the blogosphere.

Quick History Lesson

Twitter is a rather new service which launched in the summer of 2006. It only took the two developers one single day to come up with the concept of a text message like “microblogging” system.

Twitters big breakthrough came in 2007 at the SWSX festival in Austin, TX and gained popularity ever since. As of 2011 Twitter has 200 million users worldwide and generates 1.6 billion seach engine queries every day. That’s impressive!

More women than men use Twitter (53% vs. 47%) and most users are “older adults” (whatever that means) instead of teens. The top five countries using Twitter are

1. USA
2. India
3. Japan
4. Germany
5. United Kingdom

This article on DigitalBuzz – albeit from 2010 – has much more detailed statistics.

Twitter’s Language and how it all works

As my friend @almonty puts it: “Everything on Twitter is inane shit”.

In a nutshell (and what Al really means to say is): you can write a 140 character long message which can be read by anyone. I guess you already knew that. You can implement links to other places on the web which Twitter automatically shortens for you (so there’s more room for “inane shit” in your message).

You cannot natively share anything other than text, however there are services like Twitpic, Twitvid and Yfrog which let you share pictures and videos too. All they do is upload your media to a server and then embed a link to that upload into your tweets.

To read what specific people have to say you can follow them. Likewise, they can follow you. You’re not obliged to follow them back and you never have to interact with your followers unless you choose to do that. By default all your tweets are public so everybody can see what you say – unlike on Facebook where you can only read somebody’s updates when they have accepted you as a friend.

You can reply to any tweet you see, so if anything catches your eye and you’d like to respond – no matter if you follow that user or not – you can. It’s a very open format without obligations.

User Handles

If you’d like to reference other people in your tweets, you can use their handles. These begin with an @ symbol, like @versluis. So rather than tweeting “I’m at the pub with my friend Ray” you would tweet “I’m at the pub with @windust”.

When you do that, Ray will see this under his @Mentions section – he may not know otherwise that you have mentioned him. You can place handles anywhere in your tweets and you can use multiple ones too. Consider this: “@windust Have you received the package I’ve sent you? It’s the same I’ve sent to @almonty last week”.

Not only people have handles, but pretty much everything that can be on Twitter has a handle. Companies, websites, iPhone apps, everything. Have a search and see if Heinz Baked Beanz have a twitter account…

Don’t be surprised about responses when reference people, wether you know them or not. I remember bitching about a product, using said product’s handle in my tweet, and the next day the owner was offering me support!

Remember though that all these conversations are public – so don’t tweet your phone number or email address to somebody unless you’re prepared for tons of spam. If you want to tweet confidential information, consider using Direct Messages.

Direct Messages

At the top of your web interface (or in your favourite Twitter client) you have access to your Messages. These are like internal Twitter emails so nobody else can read those apart from the sender and the recepient. A year or so ago you had to put D or DM in front of your tweet to send a Direct Message but today this has been made more convenient.

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 device in question, then we’ll sell them an original accessory for £5 – £10 with free postage. eBay and Amazon will suffice, let’s not build a website for this.

Once we have their addresses, we’ll hand them over to the police who in turn can take care of the rest. We’ll beat them at their own game. We’ll donate the money to a fund helping people and local businesses who have suffered from idiots with Molotov cocktails.

Good plan?

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 first iMovie experience on Mac – all this was done in about 15mins (including the upload to YouTube mind you). Music written by Julia courtesy of Garage Band on iPad.

Enjoy!

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 the ones that are now also too strong) so it’s royally screwing with my head.

Unless I just don’t wear glasses for a while – which is what I’m doing, and I gotta tellya: I’m enjoying the side effects!

I’m a little bit short sighted but not a huge amount, it used to be -1.75 and less on the other eye. What does interfere with my vision is astigmatism. That’s caused by the lens not being round in relation to the eye (eye think… har har) and can be corrected easily with contact lenses.

I’m not wearing any though because when I tried them nearly 20 years ago they made my eyes itchy. This is not the contacts’ fault but probably due to me working in air conditioned rooms without sunlight most of the time. At least I was back in those days.

In fact I started going to see an optician for the first time because I kept missing mistakes that the telecine was producing, which my other colleagues were clearly picking up. I’ve worn glasses ever since.

Here are some examples of what my world looks like without glasses:

OK I’m exaggerating as I tend to do, in reality it’s not quite as extreme but you get the drift. At first I thought this extremely annoying, but I have to admit the effect is growing on me.

Reality seems to have become an artistic representation of itself. Everything looks like painted in watercolour to me. People look more beautiful, I can’t see their expressions clearly so I can interpret anything I see fit into them. Advertising doesn’t work anymore (I may read that a product is chocolate, but not actually know what product it is) so my life is becoming much more interesting to me.

The only downside is perhaps that I can’t read the monitors at work anymore (but hey, for those short moments I always have my old glasses).

I encourage you to try it out! You may find the world is prettier than you think