omino pixel blog

Only had a short interval today. Did a first implementation of camera management. Here, it cycles between a street view and an aerial view.

Second day, built a scene management tree helper and some camera moves. And some rather basic shapes.

This is about 1988 era screen-saver quality now!

Oh, Walter, Walter, Walter!

If you have not yet read Walter Murch’s book “In the Blink of an Eye”, get thee to a one-clickery and remedy that.

The book is about film editing… I guess. It’s an insightful meander about human perception, dreams, storytelling, and the question: “Why can we understand film-cuts?” He’s intelligent and articulate, and of course he’s a behind-the-scenes guy who worked on Great Movies so he’s got cred too. Really thought-provoking and inspiring.

Alas, I fear he is on weak footing with his recent dismissal of stereoscopic movie-making.

Roger Ebert includes a letter from Walter Murch in a recent column.

His central thesis: 3d movies don’t work, because focus and convergence are misaligned, and 600 million years of evolution don’t support that, so 3d movies give you a headache. That is to say, when the hero-prop thrusts out of the screen til its a foot from your eyes, you need to cross your eyes (convergence) but the actual image is still 50 feet away on the screen (focus). Never happens in nature.

Walter, Walter, Walter! You of all people, who have exploited and shared your deep understanding of just how malleable our percept-system is, should know better! We are more flexible even than evolution requires! By your reasoning a movie closeup shouldn’t work, because it’s 50 feet away, but as big as if it was next to you! It makes no sense. And neither do photographs or cave paintings.

Don’t get me started defending my beloved collection of vintage ViewMaster discs. And why does written language work? Why, why, why.

But it all does. Somehow. And stereoscopic movies are Known To Be Fun.

Every art form has a learning curve. Some art can’t be enjoyed unless you’ve built up to it, learned its language.

Every technology has its artifacts, but its the artists who work with them that determine their ultimate value and efficacy.

And, kids these days, they’ll just keep coming up with new combinations of them. We’ll never keep up.

Still. I’m… sorry that 3d glasses give you a headache. 🙁

Glory

Time marches forward. Computers are faster, hard drives and screens are bigger, cameras are smaller.

My usual settings have grown from 8 bit, 640×480 to 32 bit 720p. (Yeah, I’ve lost my fear of nonsquare pixels.)

Adobe just announced After Effects CS5, and I’m happy to report that the Omino After Effects Suite is fully ported for Mac OS X, 64-bit, and getting ready to roll.

And they’ve started their migration from humble 8-bit processes to glamorous 32-bit floating point processes, as well.

Tragedy

The great tragedy is that CS5 broke backwards compatibility with CS4 plugins. Oh, there were Reasons, oh yes, there always are. And, oh, they’ve made it relatively easy for developers to recompile, which I’ve done. (Worked like a charm.)

But between Apple’s fickleness (68k, powerPC, Intel) and, now, this… there’s a trail of plugin corpses. Great sadness.

Some of my favorite Plugins don’t even exist for AE Intel Mac. Actually, the only ones I’ve paid for… WalkerFx’s stargate, and dvGarage’s dvMatte Pro. How I do wail!

Rays of Hope

But are things, overall, getting better? Oh yes, much better.

My CS5 plugins are Mac only, for now.

The Mac/Win CS4 versions will remain available. Or should I say, will remain on display in the Marketplace that all may witness their demise and death, their only crime having been to be compiled at the wrong place at the wrong time.

http://omino.com/sw/.