ricardocabellov5.5

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!

Ok, looks like microsoft finally is taking seriously google. They said that in 6months time they were going to beat google search. Well, I don't know if they will be able to do that, but following their style of copying everything that works they have just released:

http://www.live.com

.. and hey, I have to admit that I'm quite impressed with what they did. They application is quite posh, and well done..  works more or less in firefox (atleast he is not telling me to download ie6 like http://video.msn.com does). I quite like what they did with the image results, and also I quite like the maps they got (however is not finding the address: 08028, barcelona, even sw1p1qq, london).

Also, a big mistake I've found is that using the mouse wheel button doesn't open a new tab with the site I want to check. I usually open all the results in tabs and then check the results. Very bad..

But hey! I guess it's because it's still beta (LOL!)

Meanwhile I'm looking forward to see the calendar that Google is going to release soon (I need one!).

Yes, video! The guys at Tpolm are going to include live visuals in their next online party.

And guess who is going to do some visuals.. ;)

Could you believe that something that looks like that is for FREE?
Trackmania Nations looks like Elastomania 2006 edition. This time in high quality 3D render, and multiplayer (lan, internet). The game is quite addictive, so be careful ;) The tracks sometimes are quite hard to do, and some other times are veeeery spectacular.



As you can see, you will really fly a lot, in fact, you're probably 20% of the time flying, which is quite cool.

Download it for free! (272Mb)

UPDATE: Here you have a nice video which will show you what's all this about.