They’re not called WIN-scapes for nothing.
I totally want this. Can you imagine this with a pair of 60″ screens? It’s a step closer to scifi holographic windows.
This’d be nice for an underground/basement office/lair, especially if you could calibrate the light frequencies to match actual outdoor lighting, and maybe reinforce the illusion by piping in real light with some of these.
I came across an excellent short article series here. Among the key thoughts was this one:
Since much of the audio process doesn’t happen until after the cast and crew have gone home, the sound usually isn’t addressed seriously until that point – which can be a big mistake. If you prioritize your audio well and plan for it from early on, you’ll reap all of the rewards of a completed and marketable project. If you underestimate your audio needs you may find that your project never seems to end.
That’s so true. I’m embarking on the mix for Paradise Recovered, the film that took our small team three weeks to shoot last summer, and I’m so glad that the director and producer took audio seriously while on set (in spite of the grumbling from certain other parts of the production crew). There were a few unavoidable compromises made that will take costly and lengthy repair in my post production phase (among them, the necessity to recreate sound during several MOS scenes), but I’ve come across many, many scenes where the director and producer actually listened to the sound dept (a rare thing!) and made the right call. It means that the final film is going to sound that much better. I think the end result will be a film that comes across as being much more professional than it would have if there was a lot of room noise, uncontrolled ambient sounds (airplanes, air conditioners, cicadas), or bad dialog. There’s always a lot of post production work to do on any film – just listen to the audio from the “deleted scenes” from any of the DVD’s you may own- but the more consideration that’s given to production sound, the better the final product. You can always fix stuff in post if you have the budget (redo every bit of audio, loop all the dialog, send out a crew to recreate all the ambient sounds, etc), but just take five minutes on a rushed set to let the sound crew do its job and you’ll reap huge benefits in post, not to mention getting more natural sound because it was actually recorded in the environment that the audience sees.
I sat in the Starbucks just up the street for an hour this morning drinking free Tax Day coffee and creating a big spreadsheet of all the scenes in the film and everything that needs to be mixed in each (dialog edit, ambient edit, foley creation, music, etc). As I typed the scene descriptions I kept remembering how Storme and Andi (the director and producer/writer, respectively) kept balancing the needs of camera and sound on set. I’m sure glad that they listened to me at the time because, not only did it save them thousands of dollars in post production costs, but the final film is going to sound so much better for it. Thanks, Storme and Andi!
I’m excited to get going on the edit. It’s a long, sometimes tedious, painstaking process, but it’s something that I’ve gotten good at it (toots own horn).
Erin just called me from her UIL performance and told me that she nailed all the songs! She’s been down in Buda for two days working with the choirs. Congratulations to my sweetie for working so hard for so long on these tough, tough pieces. Drop her a line or hit her FB page to say congrats.
Steak dinner to celebrate. I’m proud of you, Erin!
Dean Kamen’s recent TED talk. Absolutely riveting. Don’t miss it.
h/t Sean
An open letter from Neil Armstrong on recent NASA cuts. The words “long downhill slide to mediocrity” appear.
Just got through watching the final (well, almost final) picture lock of Paradise Recovered with Storme and Lee. Now comes a solid month of sound mixing. The movie is great and I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me! Looking forward to it.
Had an early morning today (3:30) thanks to insomnia. The upside was that I got to see the extreme fog outside. It’s a few minutes past sunrise and I can barely see the houses across the street! It’s not whiteout conditions, but it does put a neat blanket on things.
In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come with practice. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought. In some cases you literally train your body. An expert pianist can play notes faster than the brain can send signals to his hand. Likewise an artist, after a while, can make visual perception flow in through his eye and out through his hand as automatically as someone tapping his foot to a beat.
Just sold my old Camp Trails external frame backpack on Craigslist. It went to a dad who is taking his boy scout son on his first backpacking trip, so that was a huge bonus that made me smile.
I bought the pack over 20 years ago and carried it on my back for probably five hundred miles over two summers as a backpacking guide. It went with me on the trail as Robert and I explored the wilderness together. It was replaced a few years later by a much nicer internal frame Gregory, but the Camp Trails will always remain my first pack, and the one that was with me when…
Farewell friend!
David Weber on learning
The problem was that genuinely self-motivated people are rare. Without someone else to explain it to them, most young people don’t understand why learning is important in the first place. There are always exceptions to that broad generalization, but the majority of human beings learn from experience, not precept, and until someone experiences the consequences of being uneducated, he seldom feels a driving need to correct the situation. Creating a desire to learn in someone who hasn’t already been caught in the gears requires an entire support structure, a society in which one’s elders make it clear that one is expected to acquire knowledge and training in its use.
Every so often you come across a tool that completely changes how you work. Even more, how you think about your work. It’s the equivalent of a hand saw user suddenly being given a bandsaw, or a guy with a shovel sitting down in a backhoe. It’s not just that you can do what you used to do faster, it’s that what you used to do suddenly seems very limited as whole new areas of ability open up to you.
That’s the way I’m feeling right now about Logic Studio. I got Logic as part of my major studio upgrade a few weeks ago. The upgrade has been in the works for several years and I’ve been postponing it for a few different reasons. I knew it was going to be expensive (deep into the four figures), and I knew that it would come with some growing pains. How would I continue with the workflow that I’m so accustomed to? What if the new hardware and software won’t allow me to do something I want -or need- to do? How much will it slow me down? What if it’s all a very large, very expensive mistake? I’ve been boring friends and family alike for years with my nervous ramblings.
Now that I’m on this side of it I wish I could go back in time and club my former self over the head with an outdated MIDI interface. Of course I’m going to have to change work habits. Whenever you go from this:
to this:
there are going to be some growing pains. And brother have there ever been. I spent four whole days trying to get something simple to work with eventual hard-fought success. Yes, Logic is a professional level MIDI sequencer, but that’s only a tiny, tiny percentage of what it does. I won’t go into it here, but you know that guy with a shovel? Yeah, I’m him, but my shovel was buried and I’ve been given a whole team of dudes with heavy construction equipment and a serious set of blueprints.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time working through the concepts of Logic. It’s been immensely helpful for me to subscribe for a month to Lynda.com and work through their online video courses. I feel like I’m back in school getting my audio engineering degree again! I can’t say enough about this great site. They have hundreds of online courses covering just about any software topic you can imagine. The $25/month seems paltry now compared to how much I’ve learned in just a few days.
Anyway, I’m still a total newbie at it, but I’m gradually scooping out a Logic-shaped hole in my brain as I try to get my mind around how it thinks and what it can do. What’s this funny button here? What’s that command mean? Why does everything about the program change when I click this simple toggle? HEY! WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!?! Stuff like that. It’s not that the way Logic does things is bad, just different. And, Apple software though it is, it was still designed by a bunch of left-brained Germans. I guess it’s appropriately named.
I keep having epiphanies and running downstairs to tell Erin about them (bless her). I’m slowly and painfully uprooting my workflow which has developed over two decades, but I’m finally starting to think that I’ll be better off in the end.
One more thing. When I bought Logic Studio I decided to go ahead and upgrade my current version of Digital Performer- a competing product that is more like Studio Vision Pro than Logic, and much more limited than the Apple software. The upgrade price was small compared to my overall investment ($195), and there are some older files I might need to access. The package just came via UPS and I’m looking at it next to the computer now wondering if I even need to install it. Oh well, at least the big thick manual looks impressive.
A Primer on the Large Hadron Collider. What it is and how it works. You know, for all the theorists out there who don’t get engineering. 
iPad MIDI/DAW Control Surface. For $9.99 (well, plus the iPad), you can get functionality that would cost you a whole lot more in a closed ended, non-updatable hardware control surface. Sold.
A good explanation of why so many constitutional scholars (not to mention average Americans) believe the new health care bill is unconstitutional.
The new health care law has states and citizens lining up — but not quite in the way President Obama or Congress had hoped. Across the country, lawsuits are being filed that could have sweeping implications, not just for health care but our constitutional system. To date, 14 states have joined the stampede to the courthouse to challenge the legislation. One of the most contested issues is the so-called individual mandate under which Congress has ordered all citizens to get medical insurance or face fines. Though the federal government has the clear advantage in such litigation, these challenges should not be dismissed as baseless political maneuvering. There is a legitimate concern for many that this mandate constitutes the greatest (and perhaps the most lethal) challenge to states’ rights in U.S. history.
With this legislation, Congress has effectively defined an uninsured 18-year-old man in Richmond as an interstate problem like a polluting factory. It is an assertion of federal power that is inherently at odds with the original vision of the Framers. If a citizen who fails to get health insurance is an interstate problem, it is difficult to see the limiting principle as Congress seeks to impose other requirements on citizens. [emphasis mine-read that again!] The ultimate question may not be how Congress can prevail, but how much of states’ rights would be left if it prevailed…
Congress is declaring the failure to insure oneself to be an interstate matter. There is no question that being uninsured contributes to the national crisis in health care. If [an] 18-year-old has a car accident, it is the public that is likely to bear the costs of his care. However, if the failure to get insurance makes one the object of federal jurisdiction, it is hard to see the why other acts of omission will not be tied to national deficiencies in public health or education or family welfare.
via usatoday
Let me say it yet again (to head off the emails that I keep getting whenever I post something like this). I am not a cruel capitalist who is against making sure people have good health care. I am against an overreaching federal government that uses health care to vastly expand its powers.
Reform health care, but do it right, and do it within the system.
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