…speaking of Machinima. I was hired to do a sample project for Moviestorm in Cambridge a couple of years ago when they we’re just starting out. I think they are progressing along nicely. You can download Moviestorm from their site. Modding is still a bit of a hassle and I don’t know how far they have developed imports of motion capture files (something I was really eager for them to do). I’ll keep watching them and I’m using Moviestorm as a previz tool on some of the things I’m working on. Another note is that they should clean up the interface design a bit.

I thing Machinima software should be developed to support 3rd party rendering engines – so that you can buy a powerful renderer and ad it to your workflow if you need it. I’m not a programmer so I don’t know how difficult that would be but a lot of 2D packages works that way.

I believe we’re all going to be making our films on or GPU:s in real time in the near future. The “old world” have a bit of a problem adjusting to this. A lot of the large software houses are adding GPU acceleration to the CPU work flow – but that will always be an “add on” until everything is written from the ground up for complete GPU computing.

I found this software the other day. It’s from Refractive Software and what it does is give you real time photo real rendering. Something that takes for ever on a CPU. The extreme high quality stuff takes a few minutes – but it’s far from what you’d expect from most other packages with that image output quality.

I’m still waiting for the first Machina animation package to utilize a higher end modern GPU engine like CUDA. Most of what’s out there uses the old game engines like Quake. The technology is here. Now it’s up to a creative and innovative company to utilize it for profit and benefit creative’s all over the world.

Have a look in the gallery and check out the video clips.

This piece of Japanese software is in it’s infancy – but this is amazing. I’ve downloaded and played around with the 60 day trial (watermarked) and the way this software uses CUDA is just amazing. Finally an NLE completely built around the GPU. And I really like the design paradigm. It’s fluid, intuitive and extremely fast. This type of software challanges the paradigm. I only wish they would ad a version with pro features that had export functionality like XML, AAF, OMF and so on. Even simple EDL’s (CMX will never go out of style).

And the funny thing about this is that LoiLoScope actually reminded me of the original concepts of Non Linear Editing using computers – the CMX 600. I’ve always thought we screwed up that original concept with the Avid paradigm – after all trying to emulate tape to tape linear editing. The CMX had a pen controlled surface (two CRT’s). Now touch is back big time and LoiLoScope is pretty much built around that.

If you haven’t already discovered Microsofts great (and completely free) compression tool Expression Encoder – try it.

Expression Encoder let’s you capture super clean screen recordings, encode QuickTime/AVI/MPEG and other formats to the VC-1 codec and it let’s you automatically embed the video into a Silverlight app for publishing. In my experience this free alternative is far better than many of the commercial solutions out there right now. Expression Encoder is a free component of the commercial package Microsoft Expression – a software suite for web site authoring.

In case you’re wondering about the specifications for authoring stereoscopic video supported by Nvidia (and other) hardware there’s a great resource over at 3dtv.at.

I use their Stereoscopic Player and Stereoscopic Multiplexer all the time. Great tools for streaming left/right video files in and out of you machine.

Here’s Microsofts technical overview of the VC-1 codec that is used for streaming stereoscopic video.

Palais de Tokyo is having an exhibit of Serge Spitzer. I’m not going to be in Paris during the period I’m afraid but I’m going to recommend it anyway.

Spitzer is an artist that is trying to reveal hidden structures, communications, perception and consciousness. He lives in New York.

I’m going to write a bit about french company Dassault Systeme (partly Microsoft owned) and their free offering 3DVIA Shape which I think is a powerful piece of software. The modeling tools resembles Google Sketchup but I think the software seems more mature even if Sketchup has a bigger industry support right now. I also like the fact that it’s an online tool and that you publish everything you create to the community. It’s a sharing thing the way it should be.

3DVIA has recently introduced a plugin for Photoshop Extended that let’s you open community meshes straight into PS for texture painting (and further export into After Effects).

I found this nice clip on Vimeo:

3DVIA Shape from BostonDave on Vimeo.

And now I’m running everything on the new Vaio F11. Quad Core notebook. So far so wonderful. The F11 is a great notebook for running After Effects and Premiere Pro. It’s got a GeForce GT 330M GPU with 1 GB of memory and it capapble of running most things. The models stock 6 or 8GB of RAM and has all of the connections you need if you – like me is looking for a desktop replacement that let’s you do all the post production work while staying mobile.

I’ve had huge problems with my server and Wordpress that I run this site on. I’ve not been able to upload images to my posts the regular way using Wordpress. After trying a thousand hacks in Wordpress I found a work around to it all – Live Writer from Microsoft. I just set an FTP location for my images and do all of the writing and posting from Live Writer and now it works flawlessly.

I’m a bit late to the game – I know. But I must say I’m completely hooked on the Lightroom 3 Beta. It’s simple, intuitive and extremely powerful. Go get it!