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CodeOptimist

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Posts posted by CodeOptimist

    My Films

    in Arts and Entertainment

    Posted

    *double-post alert*

    Help! Cannot acsess Server! and I have DSL.

    Sorry about that, I had to take down the tracker I was previously using for a while and replace it with a better program. Everything's up now :)

    Unfortunately, that means the torrent URLs changed slightly. :P I'd appreciate it if everyone could continue seeding (er, re-seed) the torrents :P

    My Films

    in Arts and Entertainment

    Posted

    I think I agree with that :). And there seems to be a fairly significant step up from DOTA to DOTA2 - story, characters, cameramanship, as well as being able to hear what people are saying :P.

    Yes, DOTA2 was definetly a step up from DOTA. Some of this was due to the small amount of planning we did beforehand on DOTA2 - as opposed to DOTA, were it was more or less, "Hey! Why don't we shoot a movie this evening?".

    Of course, getting a new camera helped a considerable amount as well, especially in the audio department :D

    How about finishing the trilogy, and seeing how much further your filmmaking can improve? :D

    I have very seriously considered it, and even began the very early stages of screenwriting a while back. The only thing holding me back is that these are being produced with a very low (or zero) budget, and already DOTA2 nearly pushed our software nearly to the limits. (Software being Axogon Composer 0.93, Anim8or, and the Adobe Premiere 30-day demo :P)

    Naturally, I'd want to take another big leap forward with DOTA3 in terms of quality and "professionalism", but I think I would be severely hampered by my current software arsenal.

    The Adobe Digital Video Collection (Premiere, After Effects, mmm... :D) is the king of amateur filmmaking software, but is also prohibitively expensive. :D However, the acaedmic version is more reasonably priced.

    Were all the lasers just done by guessing where to draw them, frame by frame? At least with lightsabers you can follow a stick... How much time and patience did it take to get it all looking good? :P

    A lot of both :P Actually, Axogon supports keyframing, so in some cases, all that was required was to position the laser "bolt" at the beginning and end of the logical path. In most cases, the animation required a bit of extra tweaking to look "right".

    The lightsabers are actually harder to animate than the lasers, because keyframing doesn't work so well on randomly moving sticks. Basically, it breaks down to adding a keyframe, advancing a few frames, adding another keyframe, backing up to tweak the animation, advancing a couple of more frames -- lather, rinse, repeat. :P

    My Films

    in Arts and Entertainment

    Posted

    Already seeding the first three, at a whopping 5KB/sec each :P (and only 25 minutes to go on DOTA, and 90 on DOTA2...)

    I've never had a decent video camera, so unfortunately I missed out on all the excitement of rotoscoping. I tried some computer-generated graphics; but my only completed attempt at a movie is here (7MB QuickTime, far too heavily compressed, because I had dial-up at the time (about three years ago) and didn't want to upload anything larger, and I didn't have enough disk space to keep the uncompressed version, and I've never got around to re-rendering it all...). I was inspired by things like Duality (a short fan-made Star Wars film, with quite impressive lightsaber combat), but unfortunately it turned out to be very hard, so I never really got anywhere :P

    Looks nice - much nicer than my couple attempts at CG. (I was stuck with using Anim8or)

    Duality is extremely well-done. I still watch it from time to time :D I've wondered if CrewOfTwo will ever make any other shorts.

    Hey Phil, this movie is pretty good, nice work :)

    EDIT: Lol, I like the credits :P

    Me too, that's classic! :D

    Hmm - does anyone know of a tracker site that allows anyone to set up a torrent? I Googled for a while before I simply used the Azureus local tracker, but the program (and/or the Java runtimes) keep running my CPU usage up to 100% every minute or so. If I could track the torrents somewhere else, it'd be much nicer :P

    My Films

    in Arts and Entertainment

    Posted

    I'm downloading, but the Laser Fight and the Jumbo Fight videos have no seeds. Anyway, I have an interest in film making as well. I'm more interested in being like the cameraman guy, I'm making a movie with a few friends called Ash Black. It's very early in development at the moment (only filmed 2 scenes) but when it's done I will put it up on here for you :) (By the way, the camera is poor which will make it look really amateurish. But I suppose that's not too bad, because it is amateurish! :P)

    Yeah, I'm the only seed on those two. It looks (based on the hostname) that Phillip (Ykkrosh) is downloading everything, and is pretty close to starting to seed. It'll pick up soon :P

    Your film sounds intersting! How soon do you reckon you'll be done with it? (feel free to answer just as I would, "no clue!" :P)

    My Films

    in Arts and Entertainment

    Posted

    Gah!  The download is sooooooooooooooooooooooo slow!

    Sorry about that. I only have 300kb/s upstream, and I have to limit Azureus to ~25KB/s up so I can still have enough upstream left to do anything else (mostly browsing).

    EDIT: I'm getting some other people to seed, so it should pick up a bit.

    My Films

    in Arts and Entertainment

    Posted

    I thought it was about time I shared my films with you guys. Since I was very young (say, six or seven years old), I've been fascinated by filmmaking.

    Sometime around 1997 I made a Star Wars knockoff ("Space Wars" :D) that didn't turn out at all as I wanted - I was still in the "childlike imagination" stage and really thought it would look like a Star Wars film - but ended up being a very funny (and embarrassing) ten-minute clip to look back on: plastic lightsabers, a "spaceship" constructed by putting two sofas together, and so on.

    Despite being a bit disappointed at how it turned out ("it wasn't supposed to look like THAT!" said I), I wasn't deterred. I wrote up a script for another sci-fi-type movie, which was a better start than filming a movie "on the fly", but the result was still fairly comedic. One problem was that as I had no way of editing the tape, each shot had to be filmed in order, and I only had one go at it - if I messed up the shot, it was nigh on impossible to back the tape up and try again.

    However, in 2000, I got a hold of the freeware program Axogon Composer, along with some video capture hardware. This changed everything: not only could I now edit my films on the computer, but I could add special effects (rotoscoping, compositing) with Axogon.

    Unfortunately, around this time, our good 'ole full-size VHS camcorder stopped working. That left me with only an X10 surveillance camera (you know, those tiny cameras that were spammed all over Internet pop-up ads a while back) to test out my new hardware and software. (That's the reason why the first two clips are of such low video and audio quality.)

    Note: I've set these files up as torrents so that I can distribute them even with my meager upstream bandwidth - alas, I don't have a web server with gobs of bandwidth available. :P The downloads may start slowly, but should pick up if enough people download and seed them. (hint, hint - leave that download running! :P)

    Saber Duel 1

    The first thing I tried was a simple lightsaber rotoscoping experiment in Axogon. My brother and I (yes, that's me on the left - I was eleven or twelve by now) choreographed a simple one-on-one duel and flipped a coin to see who would lose - I did, as you can see. :P

    The clip turned out very well for a first try, although I nearly bit off more than I could chew. I underestimated the work required for hand-rotoscoping a couple hundred frames of animation :P

    Our duel clip turned out to be quite popular, so we went on to make two more: "Laser Fight" and "Jumbo Fight". (Cheezy names, eh? :D)

    After doing these "effects test" clips, we (we being my brother and I) decided to make something a bit longer. Being Texans and all, we decided on a sci-fi-style adaption of the story of the Alamo. The result is this:

    Defenders of the Alamo

    By now, we were pressing the limits of that little X10 camera, but still had to use it as we had nothing else to film with. We actually had to bring our VCR *and* TV set outside (yay for long extension cords!) as the X10 camera can't record anything by itself (it sends the video to a receiver, which plugs into your VCR). Unfortunately, the audio quality is so bad that sometimes it's hard to tell what is being said.

    Rotoscoping the sabers was extremely tough because of the low-quality footage - when I zoomed into the video to attempt to follow the sabers, they would disappear against the background of trees (or sky). :P

    We drew straws to see who would die first (how creative!). The guy who ends up dying - a neighbor of ours - lost the draw. Originally, we were all going to die heroically, but some of the footage from the end was messed up, which resulted in the cliffhanger ending - and the possibility of a sequel...

    In 2002, we got a new digital camcorder, which resulted in MUCH HIGHER video quality. We decided to do a sequel to Defenders of the Alamo, creatively titled:

    Defenders of the Alamo II

    This film is much longer (our longest yet). So far, it's also our "best work". There's plenty of things I'd change or do better, but I think that a filmmaker is never totally satisfied with his own film. Unfortunately, this was actually done without a script - something I will never do again :P.

    Still, I think it's pretty good for a couple of guys banging around in their backyard. :D Some of the effects sequences took a while to composite and rotoscope, especially the (relatively) big battle at the end - the climax, as it were :D

    As you can see, we gave ourselves the title "Purring Studios" out of our love for cats. It's kinda catchy. :P

    Anyway, I just wanted to share those with all you Wildfire'ers (hey, I coined a new term!). :) Lemme know what you think.

    All the files are also accessable here.

    If you download, please seed the files so the transfer rate will pick up. :P Thanks...

    BitTorrent test

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    Worked for me.  I'm seeding right now.

    EDIT: And now it's on my iPod :P

    :)

    Great, glad it worked. I was hoping I set everything up (and was seeding it correctly so other people could actually grab chunks of the file). Looks like it was set up fine :P

    EDIT: Taking it down now, at least for a little bit (need to update Azureus and J2RE)

    BitTorrent test

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    I'm trying my hand at hosting files via BitTorrent (using the built-in Azureus tracker) and need some help testing it.

    Could a few of you go here and attempt to download the file hosted there? (I think you'll recognize it :P)

    Thanks :)

  14. Bored

    in Introductions & Off-Topic Discussion

    Posted

    You can talk to me! Do you have MSN per chance?

    Nope.  It's a microsoft product.

    How about GAIM with an MSN plugin? :)

    I view Spring Break (and all other holidays/breaks) a lot differently than most people - instead of "hey, I get a break from work", I think "yay! I can get a bunch of work done!"

    :P

    Automatic Downloading

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    I have a similar sort of thing set up - a batch file is triggered by the Scheduled Tasks control panel every night to download some files (Tiny KeyCounter statistics).

    I recommend grabbing wget - it's easy to put into a batch file (*.cmd on NT-based systems) and grab files via HTTP or FTP. :)

    Mail Clients

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    I use Outlook 2003, currently - it's a tad more secure than previous versions. I use Thunderbird for my wildfiregames.com mail account (and as an excuse to check out the program).

    I really like the GMail interface, and may start moving most of my correspondance over there :)

  23. Divorce/Marriage Interviews

    in Introductions & Off-Topic Discussion

    Posted

    IF YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN MARRIED

    Name: Nathanael Barbettini

    Location: United States

    1.) Do you plan on getting married?

    Yes.

    2.) About what age do you plan to get married?

    Late twenties, or later - whenever God brings the right person into my life. No sense in rushing the whole thing; I want to make sure I'm all set (financially, etc.) before I marry.

    3.) What are the motives that you want to get married for?

    Because marriage is something God created, and because I have such an awesome example of marriage (see below).

    4.) Have you had positive or negative experiences with marriage?

    I've had very positive experiences - my parents have an amazing marriage.

    5.) If you got married, do you plan to stay married for life?

    Yes. I can't really imagine not staying married for life - "till death to us part".

    (Mine is strikingly similar to Paul's :))

    firefox has gone all weird

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    I have a folder C:\1\ that I use as a psuedo-temp directory for downloads, archive extraction, and all sorts of stuff. A friend of mine gave me the idea - he has folders '1', '11', and even '12' I think, all for different sorts of things.

    Last I checked, the folder was around 12GB since I haven't ever cleaned it out. I think I even have three versions of the ~700MB America's Army installer (v2.0, v2.2, v2.3) - it's about time I clean up :)

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