Wassup, y’all? I’m back! Back from the vault, back from grinding merrily away 20 to 30 hrs a day on my diploma thesis and back from LaTeX formatting hell. Through my veins still runs a little amount of blood among all that caffeine and so I’m announcing my new credo for 2010: Make Something Creative Every Day Week!
Recently my first video tutorial for AEtuts+ went online. I have mixed feelings about it because I thought they would give it away for free. Instead it launched as a premium tutorial in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong, I am flattered that it is that way (and the pay didn’t hurt either) but on the other hand this makes me seem like a greedy asshole, who posts a tutorial on a simple effect anybody could figure out for themselves.
7:30 am and somebody walks downstairs. Good morning to me. My program for today was mostly about tracking and motion capturing and heavy duty compositing. You might have guessed: It was the day of Benjamin Button.
Another night cut short at 5:30 by people walking downstairs. Or upstairs. So I already knew I would spend another evening on the floor of my car napping. But until then there was so much to see and learn.
I woke up early. Too early. My room is located under the stairs to the third floor so it’s needless to say that it’s noisy. The day started off rather cloudy. But it got better along the way. The last two conventions where as sunny as California in any orange-juice commercial so it was okay this year that the weather took leak a break.
I got this problem occasionally on different machines running Vista when firing up After Effects CS3. When it said “Initializing User Interface” it froze. Sometimes it would start after 15 minutes but, seriously, that’s not how I like to work, although I use any delay to excuse a round trip to my espresso machine. I didn’t find anything about it on the beloved internet so I had to figure it out myself. And here’s what you can do:
It’s been quite a while since my last blog entry. In fact it has been so long, that I had to think twice to recall my password for this sweet blog o’ mine.
You ask “What’s new? What’s cool?” and I tell you: A lot: I’ve been in the trenches with Nuke and fought After Effects so there’s a lot of stuff I want to show and tell what I’ve learned in the past weeks, not only about VFX.
On Wednesday it was the day I had been waiting for since August. It wasn’t a spectacular day for many other people and by god not one of the best days in Germany’s TV-film era. It was one of those days the people in Germany, Switzerland and Austria were sitting in front of their TVs, eventually watching Die Patin on RTL. What’s so special about this mediocre adaptation on a random day? Ten shots of this movie were composited by yours truly.
It was the first day that brought the smell of winter. Along with it two emails from Amazon tumbled into my mailbox, asking me whether my wishlist is ready for Christmas (it’s not). Today also is Halloween here in Berlin. On my way home from work the streets were filled with drunken people, costumed people, drunken people in costumes and punks (who I count to the latter group as well). People were carrying around pumpkins, I saw a guy carrying a ribcage around that looked shockingly real and giggling girls wearing pointed hats. Only one misguided blonde was wearing a Father Christmas Hat. That was my day…
EDIT: Thanks to some Russian Malscript the rest of this post has gone into nirvana. And there was so much more ranting going on…
…and we all are worried and upset. Just look at that and tell me it doesn’t look scary. Maya, any former *discreet products such as flame, smoke, inferno, combustion, further 3dsmax and so on all come from Autodesk who will become the Adobe of post production. So you either buy from Autodesk or you switch to charted accountancy.
I guess they will become what Electronic Arts is in games: Every year a new update of the same old shit with not more than one new feature but for the same price as the previous version. Not to mention cash-cowing with add-ons. So watch out for Avid 2009, 3dsmax 2010, Combustion: Tournament and the Maya Add-On Maya: Masters of Mayhem.
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