promo image of the moose

Ok, so the film isn't available on DVD yet, but it will be soooooo soooooon ;o)

recentering audio to 0 in SoundTrackPro

Sometimes an audio recording is not centered at 0. To fix this in SoundTrack Pro, switch from Actions to Analysis, expand Analysis type, check DC_Offset and click Analyse. Then select the item on the list below and press Fix.

Smoke and Fire

Everything is rendered and composited and unless there are some hidden compositing issues I am almost ready to press the final composite button ;o) The last thing that I'm tweaking is the smoke and fire on the sofa. The start of it is great, but it's not working when the emitter on the sofa is scaled. I've just switched from having 1 emitter on the sofa to having 3 and it looks good in the render region. I also removed the collision that I had set up to the sofa geometry, I'm hoping that this is what was causing the fire to take so long to render.

Anyway, here goes to launching the smoke and fire renders and hoping that will be it!

Fire crashing

hmm this is the second time I've had trouble rendering a fire particle pass (using sprites). Rendering from the command line would render 2 or 3 frames and then the window would close. Rendering interactively would crash XSI. The first time this happened a few months ago I changed the sprite (just by duplicating it and changing its name). Today changing the sprite didn't solve the issue. Today's solution was to duplicate the entire PType (I have 2 emitters that were using the same Ptype). I saved the PType preset and applied it to the second emitter. The color animation on the Ptype didn't get saved :o( so I copied the animation from the original ptype to the duplicate. The pass is now rendering more than 2 frames again from the command line.

rendering and compositing

Yes the smoking moose film is still in progress. I'm still rendering and compositing however I have started to finalize the sound track because I believe the picture is locked. I needed to add a few highlights and shadows -- these are rendering now. Next I need to render a few tweaks to the fire and smoke (but these are quite close to final). I'm not 100% happy with the water so that is next on my list of fixes.

I will post a picture of scene 3's fxtree soon. It is completely insane and although I'm sure there would be a better way to composite it, I am just making it work to get the film done ;o)

creating QuickTime movies for Flash Video

The sync of the FLash Video of my Eyedoll video is much better. After struggling with the Raccoon animation I did for Strut your Reel (and blaming it on Flash video ;o) I did a bit more research on Flash Video encoding and found this article on the Adobe site which helped a lot. Although it recommends using a frame rate of 15 or 12 fps, I stuck with 30 fps (the original animation was at 24fps and I used the retime linear tool in the fxtree to retime the rendered pics). The big piece of the puzzle though is the data rate, which for some reason I had ignored when encoding the raccoon. Big mistake, I'm pretty certain that is what is causing the bad sync.

I might try 15 or 12 fps next time I do one of these things. Especially since that will mean fewer frames to render ;o)

Just a Little Bug

Here's something I did for the AniBOOM's Eyedoll contest. If you like it, head on over to AniBOOM to vote for it!