New film 'Still Walking' using blender masks

I have just completed a little film for the Butlers which will be on show as part of their appearance at the Flint Microfest, Wiltshire, England.

Flint Microfest will take place at Salisbury Art Centre on the 17th of November and Pounds Arts Corsham on the 18th of November and the Butlers will be walking from one to the other armed with Victorian maps and traditional measuring equipment to record their progress as they go.

Their 'walks' are inspired by Richard Long's artwork 'A Line Made by Walking' (1967) where he got of a train, walked up and down a field for an hour until he had made a path, took a photo of it and went home.

I made the looping walk cycles in Blender using the lovely new Masks feature in 2.64a. I was going to use AfterEffects, but after five minutes of hating AfterEffects I returned to blender as 2.64a was released and the new Masks saved my life. I did need to upgrade my computer as the interface needs plenty of horsepower and it is still buggy so save every time you make a change.

I ran out of time to completely smooth everything out but I'm pretty pleased with the results. It was all shot on a 550D at Frogs Copse in Southampton, sadly under threat of development.  The soundtrack is made from all the sounds we found there.

Still Walking - Following in the footsteps of Richard Long from Larryboy Eutopia on Vimeo.

Windows 8 won't boot - SSDs Gigabyte mobos AHCI UEFI

(edit: This is becoming my most accessed page - so don't forget to complain to Gigabyte because they've obviously done something wrong - if they don't know they can't fix it)

Well I just been in a week of hell as my new computer will only boot on the 5th attempt or so. It was fine at first. I have a Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H motherboard, an OCZ Vertex Plus SSD and a Segate 2T HD.

This all started after I installed the F18 version of the bios, I can't remember which version was on there originally. After that on most attempts to boot I would get 'data can not be read from disk'. Also the SSD (which contains the operating system) would disappear from the boot list in the bios. I think changing the cooler was a coincidence to throw me off the track.

The following worked for me, it may or may not do the same for you so do some research.

I did some research and it seemed I should turn on AHCI (whatever) in Peripherals in the Bios (Sata Mode selection) and that would make good. Well windows did boot and then crashed. One time then I did this and set it back to IDE Windows said I had to use a restore point to get it going.

So further reading and apparently its not straight forward enabling AHCI after you've installed windows 8. There is a link here but the info is wrong in the main article and only corrected in the comments so I thought I would put the correct solution here.

This uses Regedit and you can completely destroy your system with regedit so use with care and I take no responsibility for any damage trying to do the following might cause. Also you need to have installed the Motherboard disk controller drivers.

amended from their website

• Exit all applications
• Go to the start screen and type in regedit.
• If you see the UAC (User Account Control) dialogue box, just click continue
• Locate the the following registry subkey:
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\StartOverride
  In the right pane, you will find a key labelled O with the value '3'. Double click on this and set the value to '0'
   
• Go up one level to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\
  there should be a key called ErrorControl which has a value '3'. set this to '0'
  
• Reboot your machine and set Peripherals / Sata mode selection / to 'AHCI'. 
• Save and exit and all should be good.

I shall be monitoring my system. Hope this post cuts down the time it takes you to solve this problem.

Back borders, pixel aspect, HD, SD, and Adobe CS 5.5

This is well documented except for the solution. ( and I will be concentrating on PAL here ).

In the days of Premiere CS3 we were blissfully ignorant. Standard television was 4:3 aspect ratio and wide screen was 16:9. HD telly was 16:9 - all was well.

In premiere, as with other software, if you wanted to make some computer generated footage you would make it 1024x576 (576 for the number of vertical lines in PAL and 1024 because 1024:576 is 16:9) Magic. Also of course HD was 16:9 so you could just scale it down.

This all changed with CS4 ( and the chap on this forum suggests it was coincident with a juicey contract with the BBC). Because if you do the boring maths, 4:3 is not really 4:3, and neither is 16:9.

So SD widescreen is actually a bit wider. 1.46:1 and you are suppose to crop 13 pixels of the top and bottom of you picture. Or, as has been stated elsewhere, widescreen SD is 1050x576...

As one non BBC engineer said to me once, ' you can do it the right way or you can do it the BBC way'.

In the end, as someone who is producing finished material destined for DVD and playable on modern digital devices capable of playing right up to the picture edge (no need for the safe zone), I just want it to work. I don't want to suddenly have thin black borders at the sides (which will show up on Youtube and Vimeo) for the sake of some engineer being right. The software should be there to enable you, not to prove a point.

Forum contributors have been posting how this is not a problem with other editors and apparently there is a button in encore CS6 which corrects the issue. But there is still the problem in Premiere as all the presets for PAL will give you the 1.46:1 aspect.

My workflow is thus:
I work in true 16:9 (usually HD) on my project. When I render for youtube or vimeo I render in true 16:9 using the custom settings in Premiere. These heretical services don't seem to mind this.

When exporting to Encore I take in the rendered footage and scale it (for HD) by 53.4 vertically and 54.7 horizontally. (My reasoning here is whatever the BBC says my telly is 16.9 and the telly will stretch the picture accordingly when dealing with the non square pixel aspect ratio). In the end its 26 pixels and its up to you if you want to loose it. Scaling the vertical by .5 will give a better result)

I then export to Encore so that the Scaling and the transcoding are done in one step thus reducing the number of times the footage is mangled.

Well that's my solution and for people who don't want / can't afford to upgrade to CS6 I hope it helps.

Windows 8 Ugrade with Classic Shell... Very good indeed

So I finally took the plunge and purchased my Windows 8 upgrade for £25 (you can use Paypal). I actually used the Windows 8 trial to run the Upgrade Assistant (XP was also resident on the system) and that caused the Assistant to say that the upgrade wasn't available, but, following a thread on a Microsoft site I ran the assistant in Windows 7 compatability mode and hey presto!. I already had the 64 bit version installed so I can offer no advice on choosing 32bit or 64bit when upgrading.

The upgrade was a piece of cake. I selected 'custom' and wiped the Windows 8 trial version (as it was on my new SSD. Windows 8 activated without asking me (in fact I had to check it had happened.)

You are then presented with Metro which you instantly have to do something about - so off to Classic Shell (and why not donate and buy this chap a drink for all he's done). With Classic Shell installed Windows 8 boots to the desktop rather than Metro and you can choose between Windows Classic, XP or 7 menu. I chose Classic. Classic Shell also adds the XP file manager menu we miss so much.
(Get rid of the stupid ribbon on FileExplorer with http://winaero.com/download.php?view.18)

Apart from that it's plain sailing. Windows 8 boot up times are fantastic. I was able to install all my old software. The taskmanager has great new features and the File Copying in progress dialogue has natty graphs if you want them.

One note though. Windows 8 seemed to find all the drivers without so much as a dialogue box. When I went to install my manufacturers video drivers (coz I thought they would be better), the screen stopped working on reboot and I had a hell of a time - eventually going back using a restore point.

Windows 8 desktop design seems more thorough (windows 7 looked pretty ugly if you turned off Aero). Working with two monitors is easy and the Taskbar now works in all monitors and you can choose how it works.

Not much else to say really. My PS2 keyboard wouldn't work and apparently that's a bug that being fixed. Apart from that it's business as usual.

Metro really is an irrelevant bolt on. Using IE brings you to the desktop. With two monitors you can have Metro in one and the Destop in another, but Metro disappears when you touch the desktop so there's no multiple screen working. Metro shows an irrelavent bunch of your programmes cluttering the Metro desktop. All in all, Metro is a dead loss on a desktop system, but with Classic Shell you don't have to worry about it.

All in all, if you fancy a few days mucking about with your computer, £25 will give you a fresh, new and most useable OS. I don't really know why its getting such a lack luster press - Microsoft have done a good job!

enjoy