visual machine no. 1

i'm a bit late with posting this entry on the indiworks blogger blog - it was posted to my wordpress one on june, 28 2007. this double strategy of wordpress/blogger is not really working and i am currently thinking about all available options of having my online projects in one place. maybe one of the two blogs will have to go, maybe both. i'll post the details once a possible new - and hopefully permanent - indiworks site is up an running. - valentin

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a year of blender

it's been now a year since i started with blender/3d and i am pretty happy with how things went so far. there is still *a lot* to learn for me here, yet at the same time i never expected to be able to produce so quickly the kinds of videos blender allows me to make today.

visual machine no. 1

while i am still working on that first (short) 3d animation of mine where i'll have some (simple) characters with "real" bones, i now finished a 3d visual music video:

Click To Play

or

watch/download the mpeg-4 (h.264) encoded version

visual machine no. 1

(higher resolution)

note that the mpeg-4 (h.264) video might require a relatively fast machine for smooth playback - it works fine on my imac g5, but it did not work well on a friend's g4... i did not want to upload a smaller version, since the edges of the 3d objects/graphics tend to look too pixelated when viewed full-screen.

but the blip.tv flash video version above looks astonishingly good (for flash) even when viewed full-screen.

editing by number

maybe something about the editing: i think this is the first time that i cut a complete video using only clips/blocks of video with exactly the same length (or half/a quarter/an eight of that length). this was necessary in order to have the visuals really fit to the minimalist 120 bpm techno(id) track that i had previously prepared in garageband. i am surprised how well this "editing by number" worked out and how organic in fact it looks...

enjoy!

tags: visuals, 3d, blender, editing

michel bauwens interview: what is peer to peer? - thoughts on jump cuts - new: flash for internet archive videos!

michel bauwens interview: what is peer to peer?

here is a 4 min. interview with the p2p foundation's michel bauwens, centred around the question what is peer to peer?, that i just finished editing. the full length 20 min. interview is featured in this robin good article. the music used is the cc-licensed track my piano sings (part 2) by john holowach from his archive.org hosted album piano works.

while i think the end result is quite acceptable in terms of technical quality, i just want to mention that the original audio recording was not ideal from an editor's point of view and that i also only had a lower resolution version of the original video to work with... well, this was a no budget production and so compromises had to be made.

thoughts on jump cuts

i opted for hard cuts only (exception the dissolves for the titles) and since there was just this one camera angle those cuts are all jump cuts. i think it works quite well, still it might appear a bit experimental to some people, but i think after a minute or so one adapts to the slightly unusual style. i could of course have easily added (quick) dissolves, but somehow did not want to do that. dissolves tend to be overused, specially in broadcast tv where there is often not enough time for an editor to make cuts really work... and i admit it: i just love jump cuts - my most radical attempt at jump cut editing so far is my his girl friday - between the lines edit (2005), this one is an 8 min. jump cut orgy (those few dissolves you can see are from the original footage).

new: flash for internet archive videos!

the embedded flash video by the way is from the internet archive - yes, archive.org now also offers youtube style flash video next to the download option! it's still in beta and sometimes the video takes too long to load, but i'm sure that they will eventually fix that.

two tips:

• you can "activate" the flash option for older uploads via "Edit item" > "You may also visit the Item Manager" and then "derive" (third button from the top). after a few minutes you should see the flash version of your video... for all new uploads the flash video is derived automatically from your upload.

• once you hit "play" there is a blue "?" underneath the video - if you click that you'll get another page that shows the code for embedding the video in a blog post - i did just that for the michel bauwens interview and this is how it looks - enjoy:

update: ok, somehow the archive's embedded flash video does not play back for me, until i find out how-to fix this, here the blip.tv flash version (and this is the video's internet archive page if you want to download the video.)

update ii: the archive's flash video now works after i added the embedding code again - i'll see if i can find out what exactly first caused the problem...

(still here the blip.tv one:)

click to play

testing "tags" - do we still need them now that blogger has "labels"...? is it doing just the same (e.g. for technorati search results)...? and what about the wordpress "categories"...? any way of unifying all of this...? i'll find out...: p2p, interview, jump cut, editing, flash, internet archive