fs-100

I recently had problems with my firestore drive that I use to capture footage to from my Hvx200. Like a fool I switched the camera into tape mode while the firestore was connected and they not surprisingly lost communication. (I thought I had turned the camera off, whoops) So in doing this I found that the drive would no longer display anything when I turned it on, the camera or computer no longer recognized it. It must have wiped the BIOS off the drive somehow.

So I contact focus support to see what I can do. They tell me there is no way to reinstall the BIOS in “the field” I would have to send it in to fix it for 300$ So I bite the bullet rather than try to fix it myself and risk losing all the footage I have on it (assuming its still there). I get the drive back in a couple weeks and voila , its working again with all my precious footage.

So a month later I decide to upgrade the harddrive in it from a 100gb to 250gb which will give me 1.5x recording time. I have changed harddrives before and there is only six screws keeping me from that badboy, so I say go for it. I format the drive to fat32 with an external enclosure through usb and partition magic. I swap it out in no time, get it back together try to turn it on and what do ya know, it does the same thing it did when the BIOS got wiped. I think for a sec, duh, I forgot to copy the fs-100.bin file and other files from the old drive to the new one. So I repeat the process, get the files off the drive through the enclosure copy them to the new one and what to ya know , it works just fine. So next time I am told I cant do something “in the field” I guess I’ll just have to explain to them that I’m not in “a field”.

Posted by Administrator, filed under Tutorials. Date: January 11, 2010, 10:56 pm | No Comments »

An identity animation created for an upcoming indie horror flick release.

Posted by Administrator, filed under Motion Graphics. Date: October 19, 2009, 7:44 pm | No Comments »

Last night we had our shoot at expressions in emeryville for the first Change! music vid. It was awesome, the room was bigger than I expected and Nathan who is the equipment room manager that got us the access, provided us with everything we needed to get our shots. Heck, he was even our key grip, lazy susan assistant, wardrobe assistant and co- director, thanks for everything Nathan. It started out with me having problems with the firestore drive that I was capturing to, so Nathan started throwing 16gb P2 cards at me, sweet.
We shot until about 3 AM and got everything we needed and more. The talent even dressed up in some green suits and started dancing a jig with some masks on. Cant wait to do it again. I’ll post the video when its finished.

Posted by Administrator, filed under Visual FX. Date: February 26, 2009, 7:00 pm | No Comments »

17  Feb
Fractal Background

Here is a pretty simple background element I created using the fractal noise and H&S effect with blending modes. It is 10 seconds long and seamlessly loopable. Be sure to select a layer and hit UU to reveal all the properties I’ve adjusted. And for those without After Effects just sit and stare.

Posted by Administrator, filed under Project Files. Date: February 17, 2009, 5:30 pm | No Comments »

Wow six whole blog posts in one year, no wonder I forgot my user name and password. Anyways I had some free time over christmas and thought I would show an example of a simple 360 degree camera orbit simulation. I just used a cheap greenscreen, some lights, and one of those spinning discs kids sit on and spin around. So I basically just spun my Daughter and I around a couple of times on it while the camera was locked down on a tripod. I keyed the footage with keylight tooned it out using some filters and blending modes then used particular with a basic star preset and animated the camera around the footage as many times as we spin on the disc. Set the footage to always orient itself toward the camera, and you have the look of a camera orbiting around us. Pretty simple, but effective. Happy New Year everyone maybe my resolution will be to actually make some posts this year.

Posted by Administrator, filed under Visual FX. Date: December 31, 2008, 8:08 pm | No Comments »

21  Aug
Playing with fire

It took me a quite a few tries to get the look I wanted and I’m still not sure its what I want, but sometimes overdoing things just doesnt work. The napalm look was created in 3dsmax with particle flow attached to a collision event and a Udeflector tied to the logo. A delete event with 10% variance at 50 frames kills off the particles, simulated in fumefx with a particle source.Two Sparks passes were rendered, one through Krakatoa with a fumefx follow operator and the other through the original particle flow source. Icy logo also rendered in a seperate pass through Vray and an HDRI environment.

Posted by Administrator, filed under Motion Graphics. Date: August 21, 2008, 3:30 pm | 1 Comment »

30  Jul
Kaleida-eyes

Here is what I was thinking of. A neat little effect that might belong in an x-men movie. It might look good in a music video.
The track is by Mare Island, called Gunslinger. I like it, go get your copy. mareislandmusic

Posted by Administrator, filed under Visual FX. Date: July 30, 2008, 3:24 pm | 1 Comment »

29  Jul
Brainstorming

Im trying to come up with different ideas for a music video for a friends band. Here is a kaleidescope animation that is tied to the audio amplitude of an audio track. I think this might work as a background for some sort of grateful dead video, but it would be interesting to composite it in the iris. I will have to experiment with this to see how it looks.

Posted by Administrator, filed under Motion Graphics. Date: July 29, 2008, 7:12 pm | No Comments »

This gave me a laugh, i need to try some stop motion one of these days.

Posted by Administrator, filed under Inspiration. Date: July 27, 2008, 10:34 pm | No Comments »

25  Jul
Inspiration

Posted by Administrator, filed under Inspiration. Date: July 25, 2008, 9:08 pm | No Comments »