DataMike » audio/video

TrueSpace, you will be missed

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:29:07 +0000

This is an old video from the late 90’s,and is basically a collection of test video animations (with paths and particles) I made with TrueSpace. It’s low rezzy, and very basic, but I thought I’d throw it out there. (it’s fascinating what you can find on old hard drives, this was an old MPEG2 video for conversion to VCD, I stripped the Boz Scaggs music for copyright reasons and found some audio at podsafeaudio.com). Truespace basically tanked after version 6.0 (for me), was bought by Microsoft only to be shut down. You can get 7.6 at caligari.com for free, although the website supposedly was slated to go down last year. I’ve since moved to Blender, because it has the community and excitement that TrueSpace once had. R.I.P. TrueSpace, you will be missed

The basic Blender 3D modeling interface

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:49:53 +0000

Blender is a free open-source 3d modeling program available from blender.org.

There’s no shortage of tutorials regarding modeling, texturing, animation and other subjects for blender, but basic info on the user interface is tough to come by. Surprising, considering that 90 percent of understanding blender comes from wrapping your head around the interface. Once you get past that, it’s a whole new world and a what was once a dense program suddenly makes a lot of sense. Some fine tutorials can be found by searching youtube; some more cool tutorials can be found at gryllus.net

The cool thing about the UI is I started to wonder about it being applied to other programs like a word processor. What if you could just slide open a new window in Word, and then make that window another view port in a long document for easy cut and pasting, then make that window into some type of sub-menu system, drawing area, wysiwyg output. or html preview, withouth having to hunt for them in menus. Really cool stuff.

Zoom H4n “Handy Recorder” Overview

admin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:15:18 +0000

I’ve owned a Zoom H4n recorder for about a month now and have to say I’m still pleased with it. I use it for nature sounds and eventually want to start doing interviews with out. You can buy it now for roughly $300 (lucky you, when I bought it, it was $350) at Amazon, but there are plenty of bundles on Ebay (where I bought it) the will include extras like a corded remote , extra memory card, and a mini-tripod for the same price. The only disadvantage is you have to wait a week instead of the 2-day amazon delivery. The Video I put on youtube shows the menu structure and gives a general overview.

At the risk of sounding old, I get excited with objects like these: for $300 you’re getting the equivilent of technology that would’ve cost $1000 to $5000(and this is being conservative) 20 years ago at the dawn of digital recordings (you know, the audio CD area). Technology has removed another barrier to getting your voice out there, an idea which is worthy of a whole separate post.

Here are some recoded clips made with the onboard mic’s:

rainwater

crickets

Rio Grande bosque area