The Blog of Glen Moyes

Celtx 1.0 finally got released today. Go check it out at celtx.com .

I have a habit when it comes to playing newly purchased games. It's basically a planned splurge of my free time. For about three days, or how ever long it takes me to beat the game, I'll use all my free time to play it until I've completed it, at which point I'll move on with the rest of life. For this reason I usually buy games on a Friday and then play it through the weekend. If it's a really good game I'll play through it twice to relive all the good moments or to find/unlock things I've missed. If it's an exceptional game I'll play it often for a few months or even years. This doesn't happen very often, and I can only recall doing it with Descent and Unreal Tournament 2004. This habit lets me play plenty of games and gives me a pretty uninterrupted experience of the entire thing. I've also found that I can get through games faster this way since I don't have to remember what it was I was supposed to do when I left off. Thanks to Steam...

Adobe Gamma is one of those massively useful programs that many people already have installed but don't actually use. If you've installed Photoshop, it's running on your computer right now. If you haven't actually calibrated your monitor with it, you should do it right away. At one of the places I used the work at, we used the Spyder2 colorimeter to calibrate all of our monitors to have a perfect white point and gamma. Having a calibrated monitor makes a huge difference. The colors on the screen looked more vibrant, the contrast was perfect so you could see all the colors without them being clipped to white or black, the blue tint was gone, and the colors on the screen actually matched the colors that were printed. It was such an improvement that I decided that there's no point in buying an expensive screen if you are not going to callibrate it using a Spyder or something similar. Even our inexpensive LCDs looked like high-end $800 monitors once calibrated. Unfortun...

Like most people, the first time you need to use a macro program it's for something completely immature and nonconstructive. For me, I needed something like AutoHotkey to quickly generate my 3-line Cute Bunny Giving You the Bird ASCII graphic into the game chat before someone realized what was going on—which was usually around the "( ._.) ..!." line—and then they assault it by quickly sending something like "asdf" which decapitates my bunny! I wasn't going to take that kind of treatment anymore, and no bunny deserves to be decapitated, so I used AutoHotkey to create a macro that creates the bunny immediately without having to type it in by hand. No one could stop it and no more bunnies ever died again. Well, that's not entirely true. There were a couple of stray lines of text that killed a few Cute Bunnies Giving You the Bird, but the mortality rate was much lower. Of course macros are useful for constructive things too. This neat little open source Wi...

I never intended on revisited any of my school work, but since Vimeo's HD service is so good I was strongly compelled to re-render my motion design work in 720p. It also helped that I have a trial version of After Effects installed, so this will be the only chance I'll have to do this for a while, now that I'm away from school and don't have access to the Mac Lab. So here it is: all three projects from my motion design class, including one which you haven't seen before, in HD. Wonder This is the first project that I revisited earlier this week. I had to determine what version of Blender I used to make it because it wouldn't render properly with the newest version. Instead of rendering at the original 1024x576 resolution with no anti-aliasing , I re-rendered it at 1280x720 with 8x anti-aliasing. It took 2 days, but it's oh so pretty! Of course only after rendering did I noticed a couple of mistakes with the petals in the background. One would snap to a differ...

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...