ricardocabellov5.5

David Domingo aka Sml/Fuzzion ha escrito un muy buen articulo explicando el porque y el como de la demoscene para la revista Mosaic. El articulo esta vez no esta en ingles, asi que para todos aquellos que ponen como excusa el ingles para no enterarse de que va esto...

Aqui teneis el articulo!

Ok, breakpoint'06 is over.I feel like empty, I don't have more deadlines right now. I'll have to plan what to work in from now on.

My gigs
The party was great (as usual), I'll probably go there next year again. However I'll have to rethink about doing visuals for the gigs or not. I mean, it was fun, it was really fun, but at the same time, doesn't matter how much I work on that before the party, because the musicians will probably do some changes to the schedulle and will give some ideas for the visuals during the party, so I'll have to spend time working on it during the party anyway, and that means lose quite a bit of party time. In the other hand, it's a bit hard to do, mainly because 3 things:

1) They are mainly rock, that means: hard to syncronise. "Solution": FFT, which I'm not really a fan of.
2) Demobased stuff. The people will expect to see a demo or a remix of the demo as visuals. But I just don't have time to redo any of the demos,
3) So, as they expect the demos to be shown, I need videos of them, and using kkapture for this isn't the best solution, mainly because it takes ages to record the demo, and to have a proper quality of it needs a lot of space and if you would like to do "video scratching" you need a keyframe everyframe. And that will be probably 250Mb+ for demo. So, you end up just with a crappy 320x240 resolution video, so you need to add another layer on the top just to hide the poor quality.

So well, I ended up doing two gigs, one for Ultrasound (which Jeenio asked me like the last week) and another one for BASS which I had more time to work for. Anyway, I didn't have too much time and the result isn't what you can say GREAT. But I think it was much better than on their previous gigs.

xplsv demo
Regarding more scene-ish stuff. Sole released an xplsv demo using a tune i did like 3 years ago with sml and wizard for a fuzzion's 4k. They didn't used, sole liked it and then did the demo with it. Check it out.

Quality stuff
The productions do have a good level, in some categories they aren't a big deal tho (4kintro), but you should really check these ones:

deities by mfx (1st at PC Demo)
sts-02: electric kool-aid by Synesthetics (2nd at PC Demo)
lux aeterna luceat eis by Ephidrena (2nd at Amiga Demo)
meet the family by Fairlight (1st at PC 64kintro)

Scene.org Awards
Well, that has been the worst thing of the party imho. As soon as I heard that Ithaqua had to read some kind of text as a VIP guy giving the price in a suit. I was like .. what the fuck?! Do we really need to do it that "serious". Was easy to see that was going to look wanabe. The videos were great, but, I really prefered the last years prizegiving ceremony. It was more familiar and funny, steeler and melwyn knew how to keep the times so you really can't wait to hear the results. This year, the guys that were giving the results were just thinking about leaving the stage so they were not giving any time for creating any suspense. Also some of the guys forgot the lines that they had to memorize and read.

Also, they keep doing that crappy connection with the gatering in the middle of the awards which it's very dumb, mainly because there is a 2min delay and they expect to have a conversation or something. Oh.. well..

So, then it's when I think.. Do we really need all this? If I ever get nominated for some of those awards and they keep doing the ceremony like that. Don't expect me to join it. I'm sorry.

Frankfurt-main Airport sucks
During the trip we were able to confirm the legend about the trains arriving in a precise time. But at the same time we were able to see how Frankfurt-Main Artport really sucks. When we arrived on Friday, after walking throught all the airport just to get our baggage, we were stopped by the police. Everyone had to wait 10min. They didn't say why. So those 10mins were enough for us to lose our shuttle bus that was going to bring us to the partyplace. It wasn't only the police guys fault, mr. Uncle-X was also there just caring about the suomi people and not giving a shit about us, so the bus left without us, thanks dude!

But that wasn't enough. Today, when we were going back to London, we had to do something like 10 different checks before finally going inside the plane. 10 different checks that took us something like 1hour. Check the tickets, check the baggage, checking the baggage again, checking the passports, checking the tickets, checking the baggage AGAIN!, gate changed, walking back, queuing, checking the tickets to get some seats, queueing again.... Veeeery annoying. But we were able to keep relaxed (more or less) until the end, and in compensation, the guys of Lufthansa which weren't really helpful either gave us sits on the Business class (mainly because there were no others left). So atleast we were able to enjoy the service, food, and space that the Business class means.

Did I ever said that netvibes fucking rules?! I'm so used to it that I can't live without it. I got all my 2do lists there that I can check anytime anywhere.. bybye 2do.txt files lost in my HD.

The last weekend they added tabs. And again, it's awesome! Before I was starting to have quite a lot of RSS in the same page, now I can sort them by.. "world news", "software updates", "friends".. and stuff like that. And it's super easy to manage, if you want to move one box to another tab.. just do it! drag the box and drop it on the tab you want to move it. Isn't that clever?!

I'm still missing a calendar tho..

Althought you probably know at this point.. but just so you really know ;)



Our secret tool is now public. Hope the people use it properly ;)

Here you have a link for some videos which show what you will be able to do with these new Microsoft applications...

Microsoft Expression: Tour & demos

These videodemos, just confirm that Microsoft doesn't know how to d proper software demos yet, but with a little bit of imagination, you can see that they are doing powerful tools.

In case you didn't realize, these are the battles:
Graphic Designer vs Photoshop, Fireworks & Illustrator
Interactive Designer vs Flash & Director
Web Designer vs Dreamweaver

Anyway, I'm glad M$ is doing this, so they will force Adobe to work harder in their products.

The war will begin soon...

Looks like I finally got the best solution for doing a multiplatform video. It hasn't been easy at all. My target was to do, somehow, a Quicktime movie using that super cool H.264 Codec. After doing some tests I found out that, saving the demo as .avi without compressing the frames (with kkapture), then I was able to open the file with Quicktime 7 Pro and export a .mov using my desired codec. Easy!

Well, the problem comes when you save the whole demo to .avi, and the file is 4gbytes. Looks like Quicktime doesn't believe that a video file can be that big and decides to give an error. Crap! So wasn't going that easy after all..

So, to make all the history shorter, i'll just skip all the testings I did during all the (long long long long) day. The best solution I found is using kkapture to export the demo to .bmp's and .wav. You'll probably need quite a lot of space for doing this (5GB+). Then.. using Vegas you import all the .bmp's as a image sequence (when you click the first file in the folder the program may stop for a while, as it's like checking how many frames there are (in my case there were 7053)). Having the bmp's sequence (make sure you're always using the same fps) and also the .wav in vegas you only need now the codec 3ivx, which is a MPEG4 codec for VFW and Quicktime, and it's for FREE. So using this codec, you can render the video in a nice .mov which anyone will be able to open.

Yes, I know, Quicktime Pro can open an image sequence too, but in this case I didn't have the patience to wait meanwhile adding 7053 frames into Quicktime, and also, when I did the test with less frames, I didn't know how to add an audio track to the image sequence.

The result: http://xplsv.tv/motion.php?id=550

So.. that's the end of the story.. If you know a better way for doing this and ending up with a .mov using H.264. Please, let me know.

Some of you were probably thinking if I was in a "touch it" period or something.. not really, I just didn't have time to update the portfolio. Today I found sometime to do a bit of CMS to help me updating it and also I did a huge update (no this is not an April's fool joke..).

Mainly, all the added stuff are commercial website i've been doing in 2005 and 2006 at Spring Digital. And to be honest, the quality isn't great at all, but hey! great things are on the way!!

Ardanaiseig hotel brochure
Border Energy Glazing Systems
Chase Zander
dbdmedia
Douglas Westwood
Ethical Network
epico
Faith Fantastic
Financial Objects
Halo Financial
ICH
Isis
Mr.CD
Nomad
Partnerships in Care
Tennyson
techMondial

and...
ifparty'06

Enjoy! ;)

Meanwhile organizing some ifparty bits this weekend sole (which has a super new design in her site btw) and I have some small conversations about how the party was going.

Oh! wait! some background information first...
Some months ago sole started moving the ifparty mailinglist, reminding how close the party was (if it was going to be more or less the same days as usual) and that we didn't have dates yet. Then everything was starting to move a bit, and was when we were showing some ideas we had for the party, at that point we realized that we were like 2 teams in the orgo, we had some issues of what the party had to be and what didn't have to be. Sole then got disapointed and decided to don't organize the party, however she helped quite a lot with some comments. I was disapointed too, but I wanted to support the party mainly because I knew that if we were not going to organise it this year the next year we were going to have the same issues and maybe we were not going to have ifparty again. Also the main organizers of the party would understand better why sole and I said some things.

So there I was, building a website, an ID for a party again, just because I thought that a party is the first reason for the spanish sceners produce, and without a party then we lose those entries. Apart from all the time I "kind of" lost, sending email to the mailing list, and doing the design for everything I just realized meanwhile I was managing the prods released in the party how wrong I was.

This year ifparty didn't have too many productions, and half of them were from foreigners. So we were discussing about this, about why the people doesn't produce anymore. She was blaming the party, she was saying that as we didn't have time to really promote the party and also follow the people to release prods there (she had to follow a lot of people last year in order to have some more entries). Thanks to those (wrong imho) words I realized very clearly what was the real problem.

Right now doesn't really matter how many parties do you organize, there is something else that needs to be done first. When I was more active in all this, one of the main aspirations was probably appearing in the national scene charts that ceibe used to have (however I never appeared because there was no category for me).  So I don't think the party is the problem, I think we just need some national scener charts again. I have the feeling that if we got a kind of charts every 3 months, the people will have a reason to produce. So, again, i'll have to "eat my words" and work for escena.org again.

So apart from my gig at Breakpoint the next demoscener-ish thing on my to-do list is developing escena.org v2 with some ideas that may create some competition between the spanish sceners... In fact, if the "technique" works I will move it to ps and see if it does fix the pt scene too ;)

What do you guys think about?

Started the day with a good new, Madgoblin did a setup of a webcam for ifparty. Then I started watching some details of my work on there, the posters on the walls, the tshirts.. and then a bit later slack took some pictures of the tshirsts so I could see how they ended up (colours and stuff). The result wasn't, honestly, good.. One of the tshirts HAD to be black (for the atendants) and then the other one had to be dark blue for the Organization team. Well, the guy that was doing the print just got confused and instead of black used kind of green. I'm very disapointed with the green one :'(

So that was almost midday, the deadline for demos was at 21:00 (20:00 in London). I had in mind to finish up x74 and release it there. But I wasn't really inspired, I had some ideas but I wasn't feeling them. So I decided to watch Team America instead.. After watching the movie I found some inspiration and started doing some stuff to x74.. It was 18:00, 2 hours to go.. some sync points.. some greetings layers.. no, I'm not feeling that.. it was just in the deadline time when I found and old test I did with a Kahvi tune (after being invited to use any Kahvi sound by the main founder of Kahvi). The problem was that Neon2 had some recently a bug that didn't let me record a "session". Somehow I found shine with a little bit of free time and he was able to fix it in like 10min, 20min later I had a new version of the tool in my inbox o/ Ok, It records now.. great great! But doesn't show the FX on the top (glow and stuff). 10min more and I had a new version again with that fixed. Meanwhile I had to send some emails to all the people which sent some productions by email so they could download the prods and vote them..

Somehow I found myself at 22:00 uploading the demo just re-composed. Meanwhile I sent it to shine and he told me that it was crashing and that he had to leave so he wasn't able to fix that. I thought that was just a problem in his computer. So meanwhile was uploading I tried on another PC at home. Nice.. it crashes too.. Luckily, sole was around and had a good note: "May it be because the paths or something like that?". That sounds like what it can be happening.. Ok, some checks here, some checks there.. You're right.. Again, luckily, slack was having the dinner so the demoshow was quite delayed, so, because this I had time to find out the bug and how to "temporarily" fix it, then contacted with Slack like at 23:00 and after some tryes he was able to run the demo in his pc.

ARF!



DOWNLOAD ENDOF1STPERIOD

The demo it's (like also codename serotonin was) a compilation of the latest effects I was using in my vjsets out there.. I think one of the scenes was in fact reused again. But well, I modify the render too much and you probably won't realize, for the people that didn't watch any of my lives will be everything new ;)

So well, if they don't disqualify it for being sent some hours after the deadline I know it will probably win.. mainly because there is only one demo released :'( Now I still have to do the votecounter thing for the guys there.. but by now.. let's play trackmania for a sec O:)

edit: Oh!, btw! yeah.. this is the end of the 1st period ;)

I know some of you may be expecting a detailed post or something regarding my gig the last sunday with the guys of tpolm, but I'm really having a busy week.

xplsv.tv admin + ifparty ID (t-shirts, posters..) + ifparty prods + thisisnot... + spring extra stuff + attending experimental gigs + life.. it's just a lot for me..

But, atleast I'll give you the a link where you could see some of the stuff I did. The first part music was really bad (imho), and the second part, the one with techno, looks like not all of it was recorded (the visuals).

Enjoy the visuals!