The Blog of Glen Moyes

You might have noticed that I started using a different service to host my videos on this blog. I've been looking for something better than Google Video and YouTube to host my videos. So I did some research, compared the services, and found a service that I really like. I uploaded the same video to test each of these services, and here are the results. Google Video YouTube quality. This is what I've been using previously. The bitrate is low and the frame size is small. Blip.tv I've heard that these are the best guys to go through for high-quality video hosting. And they are not bad. The quality per frame is the highest out of any of these services that I've tested, and they also change the aspect ratio of the movie player so there's no letter boxing for my widescreen videos. The big problem is they dropped the frame rate to reduce bandwidth. That's a big bummer, and is why I decided not to use their service. You can enable advertising (which is off be default), ...

This was the final assignment for my motion design class (the same class that I did Wonder for). The assignment was to create a title sequence for a movie, preferably one that didn't already have an elaborate title sequence. So I chose one of my favorite movies: Sneakers . >> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p) I wanted the first part of the title sequence to look like the good old days of the BBS and ANSI art . The only way to do that was to animate the text frame by frame. In After Effects you can change the content of a text layer at any time, so it was just a matter of filling a text box full of white space (using a mono space font), and then edit the text for each frame as if you were using a text editor. The funny thing is that this crude bit of animation is the strongest part of the motion piece. I used to be an ANSI artist, so animating text in this way felt pretty comfortable to me even after all these years. It was a nice departure from all the key-framed anima...

I've been using this nifty little program for a while. If you've ever used Quicksilver on the Mac and wished something like that existed for Windows, Launchy is it. The way it works is you press a keyboard shortcut (Alt-Space by default) and start typing the name of the program. It has a memory of everything in your start menu and browser bookmarks, so as you type the name it'll show what it thinks you are referring to. For example, all I have to do to launch Adobe Illustrator is press Alt-Space, type "illu" (for Illustrator) and press enter. I don't have to use the mouse to launch the program. I used to have a really organized Start Menu becuase that was my primary method of running programs, but now I don't have to. In fact I don't use my start menu anymore. Even things like the Control Panel are perfectly accessible from Launchy. It's open source and apparently written in Qt, which means that there could be a Linux release soon. Yes, I know the...

Apophysis is an open source program that creates flame fractals. The only thing I can say about this program that contains any amount of profound insight is this: the fractals look awesome! Seriously, tinker around with the program. It comes with plenty of presets and all kinds of ways to manipulate them. I'll probably do a series of sketches based on the designs of these fractal patterns at some point because they look so cool. I'm also planning on using Apophysis to create animated magic/sci-fi effects for use with 3D animations. And I can finally make some cool dual screen backgrounds too. Anyway, lots of potential applications for these images and people will wonder how you did it. Expect more blabbing about Apophysis-generated content in the future.

I decided that I'll start sharing software that I've discovered to be massively useful or just really cool. I'm not talking about popular software, I'm talking about obscure or open source programs that people don't really know about but has lots of value. So let's start. When it comes to recording ideas and collaborating on stories and other projects, our team has used our private wiki for the past few years. Wikis are great because they're accessible online and you can edit any page you want. But that's pretty much all I find them useful for. I have some issues with using wikis: I have to wait for a page to load, tree-like organization of sub-articles is a big pain in the neck for large projects in that you have to click and load a new page to go to the next sub-article, unless you manually create a table of contents, and when you finally get to the page you want you have to go into edit mode to make changes. That's a lot of clicking links and wait...