Motion-Tracking comes to Blender with Project Mango
The Blender Foundation has started a new "Open Movie" project called "Mango", and this one is of particular interest to me for Lunatics, because of the technical goal: motion tracking. Motion tracking...
View ArticleCreative Commons and FreeSound.org Phase Out Sampling Licenses, Choose More...
A few years ago, I discovered a site called "FreeSound.org" which sounded quite exciting, but turned out to be rather disappointing because the content was released under the Creative Commons...
View ArticleVideo editing with Kino: Simple, but very limited
I've been shopping around and trying different video editing tools, and now that I have some basis for comparison, I'd like to share my impressions of them. I'll start with Kino, which I described in...
View ArticleVideo editing with Blender VSE: "It's complicated"
Coming from Kino, Blender's "Video Sequence Editor" is a huge step up. Most people don't think of Blender when considering video editing tools, but in fact, Blender contains a very good one. This is...
View ArticleVideo editing with OpenShot: Capable, but lacks some polish
The OpenShot video editor was the easiest to get in Ubuntu Studio's "Oneric Ocelot" release, so we had a chance to try it out recently. It's pretty good -- much more capable than Kino. It provides...
View ArticleVideo editing with Kdenlive: Might be the sweet spot
So far, my favorite video editing app is Kdenlive. I found that it provided a relatively shallow learning curve and a familiar multi-track interface, but it also didn't make it hard to get to the kinds...
View ArticleObject and Camera Path Tracking in Blender - "Monkey See Monkey Do"
Blender has a useful set of constraint-based animation tools which make it fairly simple to animate motion of objects or of the camera along controlled paths. I expect to use this a lot, so I want to...
View ArticleNielsen's report and Video on the Web
In the United States, Nielsen has long been the main source of data for evaluating television shows and stations for advertisers. It's considered a very reliable source. So their inclusion of data on...
View ArticleBook Review: Bounce, Tumble, and Splash! by Tony Mullen
Modeling every single aspect of a scene in a 3D application like Blender is hard when details are very fine (as with hair, bubbles, smoke, or a field of grass), and so there are a variety of automated...
View ArticleBook Review: Sound Effects Tips and Tricks by Eddie Bazil
Not so much a software book as a book on theory and technique of sound processing, "Sound Effects, Tips and Tricks" is a concise look at what can be done with good signal processing software. I found...
View ArticleBook Review: Animating with Blender by D. Roland Hess
Among the books I've read to get my head around the process of creating an animated film with Blender, this one is definitely the best. Nowadays you'll probably want to use Blender 2.5 or later, and...
View ArticleBook Review: Machinima by Matt Kelland, Dave Morris, and Dave Lloyd
If you're wondering what machinima is, this book is a good starting point. If you're wondering what machinima is likely to be capable of and what its history has been like, then you'll likewise find it...
View ArticleBook Review: Introducing Character Animation with Blender, 2nd Edition by...
This is the Blender 2.5 update to Mullen's very successful book on character animation. Since Blender 2.5 introduced a fairly dramatic change in interface design, this is a very useful update. This is...
View ArticleLib-Ray Video Standard: Moving to SDHC Flash Media
In Spring 2011, I started a project to attempt to create a free-culture compatible / non-DRM alternative to Blu-Ray for high-definition video releases on fixed-media, and after about a year hiatus, I'm...
View ArticleA MediaWiki workflow for screenplay development using Labeled Section...
We use a common extension for MediaWiki for managing our script-development process on "Lunatics". It works quite well, and it might not be obvious, so I thought I'd explain it here. The idea is to...
View ArticleLib-Ray Video Project Now on Kickstarter -- Let's Make it Happen!
Today is the Free Software Foundation's "Day Against DRM" and it seems like an auspicious time to launch a Kickstarter campaign to support the completion of the Lib-Ray standard for publishing...
View ArticleHow and How NOT to Re-License your Work for Free Culture
The last week has been terrific for "Lunatics". We've cleared the licenses on almost all of the music -- and certainly the most important pieces. However, for a moment, I want to focus on the little...
View ArticleLib-Ray Video Standard: Handling Languages and Localization
I'm used to thinking of region codes as an unmitigated evil, but they do serve one useful purpose: they divide DVD editions up so that any given regional edition has fewer languages to support. It's...
View ArticleLunatics is now Crowd-Funding for a Pilot Episode
If you've been following my column for the last year or two, you already know that "Lunatics" is the free-culture animated science-fiction series that we are creating with free-software applications...
View ArticleUsing kdesvn on a multimedia project
This has been a very busy year for our "Lunatics" project (a free-film/free-culture animated web series about the first settlers on the Moon). As with many software projects, we keep our assets in a...
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