Since the launch of my new podcast, I’ve been trying to keep track of stats on podcast downloads and subscribers. FeedPress has been my feed tracker of choice recently, and seems to work very smoothly (even if they only update stats once a day).
I’m also a big fan of Panic’s Status Board iPad […]
I find it hard to believe than anyone who follows me here doesn’t also follow me on Twitter or Facebook or somesuch, so you’ve probably already heard way too much about this, but just in case…
I’ve been blogging at a Tumblr site called The Optical for the last three months or so, posting cool movie-related items every day: mostly behind-the-scenes stuff, but also videos, photos, art, and links to interesting movie articles.
Just a couple of days ago, I launched The Optical podcast, which has been 9 months in the making. In the monthly podcast, we’re revisiting the very first issues of Cinefex magazine, talking about the movies and topics they covered 30+ years ago, one issue per episode. We talk to people involved in the films, people who make movies, and people who love movies, and try to have a fun time doing it.
In our premiere episode, we talk about Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien with my good friends AAl and Matt from the Post Atomic Horror podcast, chat with Daren Dochterman, VFX Supervisor on Star Trek: The Motion Picture — Director’s Edition, I admit my 2001 shame, and we ask: just what is an “optical,” anyway?
If revisiting old effects movies from the ’80s sounds like a cool idea to you, I hope that you’ll join us on the journey and give the podcast a listen.
I realize this is probably something that only I want, but just in case, here it is for Google (and for future me, who has forgotten how to do it).
Run this in the Terminal:
defaults write com.barebones.bbedit WebKitShouldPrintBackgroundsPreferenceKey -bool YESThanks to my pal Jim Correia for figuring that out! He asked me to name a background color in his honor, so I choose “Correia Battleship Gray”.
Usually, I’m the only one in my house who likes to have coffee every morning. My wife says she enjoys coffee, but she actually prefers weak “coffee-flavored tea” (as she calls it) with copious amounts of cream and sugar, and more often than not, prefers instant coffee or Roma to real, brewed coffee. I prefered […]
I’ve been trying to decide how to best go about building a site for a personal project I’ve been working on for a while. I’ve tried building it with a wiki back-end — and used DokuWiki, which is the least annoying wiki software I’ve had the pleasure of using. However, I’ve come to the […]
This new video is a great introduction to tracking screen replacements. Imagineer Systems makes Mocha, a planar tracker that will allow you to get excellent tracks of a flat (or flat-ish) surface, often without tracking markers. A lite version, Mocha AE comes bundled with After Effects.
Obviously, this isn’t a complete solution for iOS developers looking to demo their apps with live hand-held iPhone and iPad shots, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle. Imagineer has another screencast that shows more of what goes into a screen replacement on a touch screen. Even though it demonstrates the final compositing steps with an outdated version of Final Cut Pro, it gives you a good idea of the steps that go into this kind of shot.
If you produce or edit video, you might like to know that I’m selling my Mac Pro system. It’s a little overkill for what I need at home right now, so if you need a powerful video system, read on.
If you’re in Seattle, see the Craigslist ad.
This Mac Pro has been used as […]
