dcinput

Those of you who visited the site over the weekend might have noticed this page here instead. I managed to exceed my bandwidth for the month and have had to double it. It’s nice to see more people are reading! Sorry for the outage.

I was up in Nottingham this weekend with Toby Harris (*spark) doing the visuals for a huge bank holiday Sunday club night called Detonate. The night brought together the Rock City, Stealth and Rescue Rooms venues to create one big drum & bass / hip hop / electronic bonanza with a few live bands thrown in for good messure. We were in the main room and Toby’s incredible VJing onto two enormous screens each side of the stage was the focal point for the 1000 strong crowd during sets by LTJ Bukem, Andy C and others. Many thanks to James and Kath
from Detonate for putting us up in a lovely hotel and thanks to Toby for showing me the world of VJing.

I’ve been finding Ze Frank pretty funny. Especially the ‘poop’ showdown with Rocketboom in last Friday’s episode.

Creative planet have put together some video footage of interviews at NAB 2006. Great if you couldn’t be there.

The Burning Man 2006 funded installations. I like the sunflowers.

The Wall Street Journal tells of how hedge funds are getting into movies.

There’s been much talk of the LindenLabs online game/virtual community Second Life recently. Adam Curry has been having parties at his virtual Castle attended by listeners and podcasters alike.

I bumped into one of the producers / designers of the game last week and had a very interesting chat about future plans for the game. The infrastructure they are building to accomodate their predicted number of users is simply stagering and it seems they are looking at improving image quality too. The sort of definition they are talking about is going to take some serious bandwidth. When countries like Japan can get Gigabit speeds to their mobile it’s no wonder they are planning big and it’s no wonder they are looking at what part mobile technology will play aswell.

Project Entropia which competes directly with Second Life is offering a real world cash card to gamers so they can spend the money they accumulate in the virtual world…in the real world.

BBC News: “Last year $165m passed through the game and the founders of the online Universe expect that to at least double in 2006″. Is there a virtual tax man too?

Engaget: “Apple patent embeds thousands of cameras among LCD pixels”. Old news but I hadn’t heard about it till last week.

Jobserve: “The successful candidate will have excellent experience of Web editing/content management within the on-line space and ideally have experience or an understanding of blogging, on-line communities or user generated content”. Oh how new media.

I’m on a Redhat Linux training course all week in the affluent suburb of Guilford. The course has been pretty good so far, maybe a little slow though the pace seemed to be picking up a bit this afternoon. The commute is taking me a little over 2 hours: bus, underground, overland fast train and finally taxi. For such a small place, Guilford sure has a serious congestion problem. I’m not keen on getting up at 5:45 but it does mean I get to catch up on all those podcasts I never get to listen to.

I’ll be at the Gronland Records Showcase tomorrow night at 93 Feet East. It’s the beguining of my effort to go to interesting gigs this summer. Thanks to MK of NYUB for making me remember how much cool music is still out there.

Bre Pettis is officially a Rocketboom correspondant. Bre used to work for the Creature Shop here in London way before I did but we ended up meeting by chance over the interweb after the Shop closed down. When he came to London with his lovely girlfriend we met up with Kosso and Joe Twist whom I had by chance met previously. Bre is such an awesome guy and is one of the best video bloggers out there. I’m really happy for him!

Mark Nelson: “The use of the JPEG format is becoming so mired in patent snarls that it is quickly becoming an albatross around the necks of any companies doing imaging”.

Mark is worried about people developing things around standards such as JPEG-2000. I don’t know enough about what he’s talking about but something to keep an eye on considering the DCI adoption of the format as its standard.

Lots of interesting digital cinema things happening at NAB. I’d love to be posting about them but I’m just too busy at work. Great coverage over at Digital Cinema Matters. Also daily podcasts from fxguide.

fxguide have anounced their fxphd beta, a sort of online university specifically geared towards the visual effects industry. After registration you become a post grad and attend 3 courses a term of which there are 4 a year. There is a background fundamentals which is compulsory and then you can choose from many courses covering a wide variety of subjects: Toxic, After Effects, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Avid Express etc. You receive one 30 mins training video per week for each course.

“As you work through the video your professor is online to answer questions and guide you. There are practical files to download from real shots and projects- you can then compare your results with the final.
AND running along side fxphd is Creative Jobs Network recuitment - as you develop your reel and portfolio you have direct access to senior post recuiters the world over.”

Another interesting thing about it is that they are distributing the course material using Bit Torrent. It’s great to see some legal uses for this great technology and even better to see people actually trying to make money with it. Another Next Step for Bit Torrent. Class enrollement beguins 1st of May. It may be time to get a new pencil case.

One thing I note is that there do not seem to be any courses covering the more technical/engineering aspects of the industry. The sort of infrastructures that are required to support all the fabulous work that digial artists do are specialist and highly complex. Workflows and their implementation within a company and the management of enormous quantities of data are all very important aspects of the VFX world. It can be hard to find good people with the right skills for these roles.

Digitaler Film has an interesting flash movie thingy of how digital distribution works. It’s in German so no real clue as to what the guy is saying but liking the demo anyway. Here is his site through Google translate.

Avid anounce Avid Interplay: “The world’s first nonlinear workflow engine that fuses integrated asset management, workflow automation, and security control into a single system, delivering a business-wide workflow for postproduction and broadcast settings of any size”. It looks seriously cool. The real question is how well it integrates with 3rd party software. If you end up getting locked into Avid products it wouldn’t be so good.

Happy St George’s Day!

Saint George is the patron saint of England, Georgia, Bulgaria, Portugal, and Catalonia and the 23rd of April is the aniversary of his death in 303. In England it is the National Day.

The legend of George and the Dragon tells the story of a town that was forced to offer a daily living sacrifice to a local dragon in order to get to get to the town spring. As the victim was chosen in a lottery eventually it was the beautiful princess’ turn. Only moments before the princess was gobbled up by the evil dragon, George, who happened to be passing on a white horse, interveened by slaying the dragon, saving the princess. The grateful citezens who had previously been Pagans all converted to Christianity.

NAB 2006 has started in Las Vegas and runs until till Thursday. From what I can remember fxguide podcasts will be doing podcasts or possibly live webcasts during the event. James Cameron, the famed director, will keynote the Digital Cinema Summit on Sunday. Mike Curtis from HD for Indies is there and has already posted very extensive notes for Saturday.