NEW HEAD. (16/08/14)

A better title might have been “NERDY AGAIN” but I’m not nerdy. Nerds know what they are doing and I keep getting all muddled up.

I’m still struggling to produce my opening video animation. I want a globe hovering in a ring made up of the letters that spell Adrian’s Images. Optimistically I’m halfway there; pessimistically about 30% from the bottom. Animations tend to go belly up right at the end. It’s possible that Blender would auto save but I do it every now and again. I write on a bit of paper where I have got to.

     This is a Blender 3D screen grab whilst it is rendering. It does the animation one frame at a time and the black squares are the bits it was processing at the moment of the screen grab. It takes 100 samples in this case which is about the minimum. What the minimum of and what it does with them I’m not sure; in fact I have not got a clue. If I wanted sparkling quality then I would sample at 300. It would take all night to do 300 frames. It’s okay though because once it starts I can go for a walk, read a book, cook a meal. It’s like doing laundry in a washing machine. You don’t have to sit and watch it.

Someone, a misguided fool, asked what the video editor looks like. I used CS6 for todays video. Blender also has a video and audio editor. I sometimes use Lightworks which is a free version of PS After Effects or Video Pro. Lightworks I must start using more often but it makes my head spin. This is a screen grab of two screens. I load everything on to separate layers. The time line is on my laptop screen and the video is on the monitor to the right. Also bottom right you will see a big list of other things. The only thing missing from this is the last audio track. They are the green bits. I have to render the video. Then turn off the sound and record commentary whilst watching the rendered video. There must be an easier way.  This is what the time line looks like when I have trimmed clips popped fades on almost perfectly. I missed a fade on the title. I’m not a nerd; I’m a Muppet. I did hit the four minute target length though. If there is sod all going on then four minutes is more than enough. Photoshop make life easy. They make audio green, video blue and if you modify the video they convert it to a purple smart object. I am getting to grips with this job.

All audio on the following video was recorded on the Zoom H1. It is brilliant for the money but unfortunately doesn’t make me sound like a thespian.

The gales are here so I will delay my departure to Ullapool by a couple of days. I only stop at Ullapool for the supermarket and it breaks the journey to Inverness where they have another supermarket for what I forgot the day before.

Have fun.