I know it's short notice, but anyone in the Austin area should come to the Three Nails Short CD Release Party, and not just to see the video montage I put together for them.  They're a pretty wicked band which is truly comparable to the David Crowder Band of several years ago.  This is their second self-funded CD of original work.

The drummer was a student in my sunday school class a few years ago.

You can get more information about the release party at threenailsshort.com.  Doors open at 6:30 at Grace Covenant at the southeast corner of Mopac and 183 (on Jollyville).  See you there.

Hey hey! I'm taking some time here at lunch to reflect on the holidays.  I was hoping to have some time to work on some FilmProjects and other things, but ended up not spending much time at home.

We had a wonderful time in Belton with my family for Christmas and and in El Paso with Becky's parents for New Years.  I got more video games than I have time to play now.

I also got upgraded to the new version of Adobe Premiere.  I haven't had a chance to do anything but pull up some projects I'm working on and play.  The main new features I was looking forward to were:

• Sub-pixel motion paths rather than the crap for crap motion effects in 6.x
• Better color correction capability.  The new version keeps everything in the YUV colorspace so there's no loss in a YUV-RGB-YUV conversion.  This also makes it easier to do correction for broadcast since NTSC is all YUV-based.
• Audio enhancements - 5.1 audio mixing.
• Better DVD support - It was a pain in the rear to export to MPEG2 for DVD, especially for true 24p 16x9 projects and I was very jealous of iMovie's quick DVD capabilities.

Things I wasn't expecting were:

• Nestable timelines - Fantastic for organizing scenes
• Transitions on any video track - I'll have to get used to not having the A/B track editing, but that's been discouraged for a while anyway.

That's all I can think of right now.  I'm working on sort of a music video montage for the Three Nails Short CD Release Party.  I've got TONS of footage captured from analog sources that has to be organized, and already the new tools are helping.

Becky and I went to see the Return of the King again last night.  It was just as enjoyable as the first time, if not more so.  We live very near the Tinseltown North theater in Austin.  Although I'm sure it's not as nearly as nice as the ArcLight that Peter is always raving about, It delivers a very satisfying experience.  Except for the little girl chewing gum behind us.  LOUDEST...CHEWING...EVER!  Seriously, I think if there was a competition for loud gum chewing, she would have beaten even the steam-powered chewing machine invented solely for the purpose of chewing loudly.

Although the movie was fantastic and well worth discussion, there were some very interesting previews.  The one for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow looked particularly interesting.  The story seems like a cross between Batman, The Rocketeer, The Shadow (knows), and Flash Gordon. (Ok, It's been ages since I've seen Flash, so I may be way off there.  It just brought it to mind.)  What really interested me was the visual style.  First, everything looks old, but futuristic at the same time.  Like how people in the 30s-40s may have envisioned the future.  The cinematic style is very much like an old school comic book and there is heavy use of digital grading to give the feel of black and white film, but with color.  Lots of contrast, lots of soft lighting from the back.  You don't get a really good notion of the style from the website, but watch the trailer and you'll see what I mean.

I'm excited I gotten some interest in my Wiki.  Some of us have already benefitted from the exchange of ideas.  Some people have inquired on some things. Like:

• What is the purpose of the Wiki?
• How do I add A FilmProject?

As you can see, I've addressed these issues in the Wiki itself.  If you have questions about it.  Feel free to add questions to the FrequentlyAskedQuestions.

Don't worry, I don't plan on abandoning the blog.  I believe it serves a different purpose than the Wiki though.  Many blog entries came become Wiki content as people are more engaged in discussion.

Several of you know that for the last year or so, I've been toying with building a camera crane, or 'jib'.  I've been putting it off for technical reasons until recently.

The main thing that was deterring me was building a pan/tilt head.  I have one pretty much designed, but I really don't have the equipment to be able to do a proper job of testing it as I go.  I even have a microcontroller programmed with my assembly program for controlling the stepper motors with a standard computer joystick.  Anyway, it was too big a job for a simple hobby.

I went as far as designing a crane with no pan/tilt head, attempting to acheive it all through pulleys and cables.  It wasn't capable or portable enough to be much use for my projects.

So, I'm going back to my original design, but I'm purchasing an off-the-shelf solution for a pan/tilt head.  I managed to find a full solution for around $100, and it's simple enough to be easily stuck on the end of a very long jib arm.

Hopefully by Friday I'll have a crane to use at the CD release party for Three Nails Short, a band that one of my former Sunday School students is in. I've talked about them before.

No one but Webdell seems interested in my Wiki.  I've got a few projects up there.  I'll give it a few more weeks to catch on.  I really find it useful for quickly cross-referencing my thoughts on stuff.

I just read a fanstasic article on designing for performance by Rico Mariani.  He's the .NET runtime performance guy at Microsoft.  It's a great article.

Ok, we have alot of discussions here in blog world.  Blogs don't lend themselves to discussions.  They tend to get left behind when new content arrives.  It's hard to get notified when someone answers your comment on someone else's blog.

Wiki to the rescue!  As an experiement, I've set up a Wiki where we can have our discussions about the BCS, smoking, Clinton, marshmallow peeps, or whatever we want.  I'd also like to collaborate on film projects and whatever.  It's a big experiement, much like this blog was so many moons ago.

Here's hoping I can start another trend.

Since I've been on a diet, I've been bagging my lunch much more often.  Actually, I should say Becky has been bagging my lunch much more often.  She does a fantastic job of putting that together just about every morning, and I would like to thank her publicly for that.

She is also becoming very resourceful.  For instance, we must be out of plastic sandwich bags because my carrots, sandwich, and multi-vitamin were all encased in Saran Wrap today.

Dave and I rented the GameCube version of Return of the King yesterday.  It was really awesome.  For someone really looking forward to the movie, it really heightened the anticipation.  It follows the storyline from the end of Helms Deep through the end of the movie (I guess, we didn't finish it by any means).

If you are a fan of the old Gauntlet arcade game, and a fan of the books/movies, it's fantastic.  It does contain real shots/environments from the movie, so if you're looking for that sterile movie experience, don't play it until after the movie, but this is such a well-known story that it shouldn't matter much.

Anyway, it's real cool, and has a nice multi-player cooperative mode.  I've heard the PS2 version doesn't look as nice, but should be pretty cool as well.