A friend of mine has been trying to get me into the Flight of the Concords HBO show lately, but up until a few days ago I had only seen a skit or two while over at his place drinking. But then I decided to look up a few more videos on YouTube and I’m now I’m sold! I already bought the first season from Amazon.com, which should arrive later this week, I hope. In the meantime, I’ve watched these short clips a few times through and I crack up every time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FArZxLj6DLk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT5AQIlmM0I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY8jaGs7xJ0

Well, it’s been a while since I posted. Again. I’ve been busy with work, wedding plans, and University State. Not a good excuse, since a post doesn’t take that long to write, but there isn’t much new to report.

I spent Sunday night reading up on some interesting information on frame rate encoding in MPEG-2 files on DVDs. Commercial DVDs that are transferred from film (film = 24 fps) can be encoded into the DVD MPEG at 24 fps, with extra flags encoded in to instruct the DVD player to correctly and easily convert the video to the US television standard, NTSC (NTSC = 30 fps). And the 24 fps MPEG gets encoded with progressive frames rather than interlaced, which further improves the quality (as long as the source was originally 24 fps). For those of you technically inclined, check out these links:

http://www.dvdfile.com/news/special_report/production_a_z/3_2_pulldown.htm
http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_4/dvd-benchmark-part-5-progressive-10-2000.html
http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/support/productinfo/24p.pdf

On a different topic, check out the amazing CGI work at the end of this 30 second clip. I wonder how much the special effects company got paid!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YozMDzOAGxk

Finally, production on University State is moving along, although my work has been slower than I expected. The combination of my recently busy schedule and the learning curve for animating in LightWave have limited my output so far to one complete scene, plus the storyboard and initial animating of a second. Not bad, but hopefully the speed will pick up as I get better.

I just discovered that double layer DVDs have significantly dropped in price since I last checked (that was about three years ago). When I originally bought my first DVD burner (the Sony DRU-710a), double layer writable DVDs cost about ten times the single layer discs. Now, Ritek Ridata (a very reliable brand) double layer DVD-R discs cost about $1.60 per disc when you buy them in packs of 100.

For those that don’t know, single layer DVDs hold about 4.7GB of data on one side. Double (or dual) layer DVDs can write/read from a second layer within the DVD to store up to 9.4GB of data on one side of the disc. Each layer’s data is completely separate, but from a user’s perspective it all appears as usable space on the disc. Many commercial DVDs are dual-layered to fit all of the movie and extra content.

Anyway, that is a very reasonable price for twice the storage capacity per disk than a regular single layer DVD-R. For comparison, the current price for a 100-pack of Ritek Ridata DVD-R is about $0.30 per disc (now – I bought a pack a year ago and it cost closer to $0.60 per disc).

This means that for anyone looking to produce and distribute original video content without paying for DVD pressing services, double layer discs are now a viable and potentially profitable option. The only real stumbling block left is professional looking DVD labels.

I’m back! I didn’t go anywhere, but I haven’t been posting for a long time. I’ve been crazy busy between my day job and other obligations, so I haven’t been able to focus on this site or any of my other projects. Hopefully I’ll have some new gallery posts in the near future (it’s been a really long time since I’ve added to that…. damn).

I found a new anime show that is published online, Revelation. The show itself is just okay. Although some of the stills are created with a 3D program, it is animated in Flash. Also, the storyline is overy driven by religion. Of course, only the first episode is available, so maybe it will get better….

Anyway, what I really find interesting about the site is the presentation of the episodes. You can watch each episode for free, streamed from the site within a slick Flash viewer. Or you can purchase downloads of each episode for a reasonable price, available in various formats. You can even download them in full HD and soon they are releasing a DVD (or maybe downloadable DVD format, I’m not sure).

It’s a pretty smart delivery system.