ROGERS » 2D

Blowing dust

Mr Rogers — Sun, 11 May 2008 04:17:13 +0000

A smattering dust can really ruin a good scan. Watching the local film processing guy drop your neg on his putrid floor (imbecile!) can raise your blood pressure faster than you can say C41! So I've been having problems with little smatterings of dust on most of my scans. And the scanner I use doesn't have Digital ICE (it's an old Minolta - keepin' it real). After using a few of the available software-based anti-dust systems out there, I remained unconvinced. On the discussion boards, people were saying to do it by hand. For bigger bits, sure, but a billion tiny grains...? I decided it was simple to do better. I wrote (in the loosest sense) a Photoshop action which reduces dust, but doesn't remove all the grain from the photo. It is does all this with a difference matte made from the original (dusty) image, and a version that has been run through the Photoshop Dust & Scratches filter. Old school like. It aint fancy. (download after the jump)

Cameron on dimension…

Mr Rogers — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:41:53 +0000

There is a great interview in Variety with James Cameron and his perspective on 3D films (pun intended). Of course, what he says is quite convincing, and salient. I met him once. He made some convincingly salient points then too. Via Daring Fireball, via John August.

Lovely

Mr Rogers — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:04:51 +0000

It is always interesting when you take a diversion from concentrating on "visual effects" and go see what other people are doing with graphics technology. In many ways, the SIGGRAPH conference is a yearly fix of all things interesting, but you have to stop working to get there, and residing outside of the US doesn't make it any easier. The alternative time-sucking solution, is web surfing. Sometimes you come across something which really gives you a jolt. The work Robert Hodgin does is clever and beautiful:

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

He uses Processing, an open-source programming environment for graphics and audio. See their exhibition space for more examples of what can be done. Robert Hodgin has a bit of his stuff on that page too, and great explanations of how the software was used (Birds/Flocking). I've become quite interested in procedural animation of late, and have been wondering what we can do with Massive (and a bit of time) to create some visualisations. We've done a bit of stuff on films using Massive to create things other than crowds (like traffic, pedestrians, etc); so another logical step would be to use it with some input data to drive different aspects of it... hmmm... music clip anyone? With the right input data, I am sure you could make something quite special.