Rick Reifenstein

Learning how to do camera tracking and some animation using Blender and Voodoo. It not too difficult. In a normal production having a story board and shot list would make things easier when you trying to keep track of where you are during the animation process. Plus I was doing this at home so there were some interruptions. This example didn't have a lot of tracking for Voodoo to do. It was a still shot which and was pretty steady. I have another example which I'll post later that shows footage shot with my iPhone and tracked. Then flew in a model from "Sol Command". It turned out OK. I want to next work on creating some atmosphere effects as well as some blender "camera" focus effects. Not bad for an hour or so of work.

Planning on doing some test shoots in the Digital Media Labs new video studio today. Testing audio from the Countryman mics, through the M-Audio console to the camera. While tape is rolling might as well test the new green screen backdrop installed this summer as well. I hate doing things with out any direction. Maybe I can come up with a little skit or subject to shoot around. In this picture you can see the new studio, the DeSisti lights in the grid, the SmartBoard in the background, and of course the Sony DVCAM with the new teleprompter attached.

While it's been availabel on YouTube for a while; I thought I would post it at the bottom of the blog page. It's in HD so you can enjoy all of LE Spry's great computer generated 3D images. The images include images created by the SDO (Solar Discoveries Observer) probe from NASA. We took first place with this video in a NASA sponsered contest, and got some pretty cool swag from NASA's Goddard facility. In other news just got word from Gary Streiner that this years Living Dead Festival is canceled. I'm deeply dissapointed and hope we can all look forward to a good scare in 2011.

July has been a busy month and one that went by at light speed. July was very busy at work. Kaltura video and audio content editing and delivery software has been a tool that is being adopted very rapidly here. Faculty are using in Wordpress sites for their classes, and departments are using it for delivery of content for websites about specific projects. I have been part of the team helping the a a couple of the first "test" cases. Eventually the whole University will be using Kaltura as a piece of the newly designed Collab (Sakai). I finally get to use my 14 years experience in audio production for web delivery. All of the above has made for a lot of meetings! I have also bee involved in getting our telecine machines up and running. I've been leading a team in figuring out what we need to get the telecine operations working. We have a very talented student doing the heavy lifting. After a few phone calls and hours of trial and error we think we are where we need to be t