Slice beat juggling app

Coming soon for iPhone and iPod Touch is Slice, a circular, WAV chopping, Monome-MLR-style app for real time slicing and chopping of beats. It certainly looks interesting.

How Different Groups Spend Their Day

What great infographic in the NY Times on How Different Groups Spend Their Day. I especially love how you can click a filter in the upper right (men, women, age, race, etc.) and see the break down change. Then with a mouse-over you get a details reading on whatever point you’re zoning in on.

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New theme

Don’t worry, I’m still working (someday) on a fresh and unique face for the AV Club. For the time being, I found a lovely free theme over at Smashing Magazine that will suit for a few more weeks.

Lovely garbage

I came across these the other day behind Sam’s and really liked the colors in particular.

Square Pixel

I was asked the question the other day about square pixel format and my motion graphics workflow. Here’s the 4-1-1 on my file format workflow, and why I’ve chosen it. There may be other opinions, but over the past few years (at least in the world of SD), this is my preferred method.

Square Pixel widescreen. When creating a comp in After Effects, I choose the “Square Pixel Widescreen” preset. It gives you a frame size of 864 pixels wide by 486 pixels tall.

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Every computer monitor I use is a square pixel monitor. Video output, however, is not square. For wide screen (16:9), the pixels are actually wider than they are tall. The aspect ratio is 1.2. A computer monitor cannot resolve the non square ratios. When the final image is rendered it looks fine, but when you’re crafting the piece you have to deal with what is referred to as aliasing.

Example of aliasing

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See those jagged edges, especially along the angles of the A? That is aliasing. When rendered and shown on a TV monitor the edges will go away. But when you’re working on it, you have to contend with that visual nastiness.

After Effects does include this little switch (let the arrow direct you) that corrects for the working pixel aspect ratio by squashing everything. See, the aliasing is gone. However our text (in this case) is squished. Now this isn’t a permanent effect, it just makes the aliasing go away while you’re working on the piece. But again the image is distorted, and I just don’t work that way.

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By beginning the project in square pixel you get the best of both worlds. The lines are not aliased in your working space and you don’t have to work with distorted images.

The second step to my workflow is to render out my video from After Effects. Typically I’ll render either a high quality H.264 or a lossless uncompressed clip. Then I run it through Final Cut Pro. Even if the clip is “as-is” from After Effects I pass it through this step so that every piece I prepare has seen the same workflow.

Upon export from Final Cut I force the square pixel video (864 pixels wide by 486 pixels tall) into a non-square pixel format, which is the preferred format for video systems.

I choose the File > Export As Quicktime option:
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Make sure to use the following settings:
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Most importantly changing this option to force my square pixel composition into a non-square, video friendly format:
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That’s it. Render, and done. If you want to read further, this wiki article explains it well.

Marshall Alexander – Paper Engineer

Nice hand crafted paper creations at Marshall Alexander – Paper Engineer.

Little girls

Praise God for giving me a little girl.

Summertime fun or $15 in PVC or Nurturing the young engineer

For one of our summertime activities G and I spent some time designing a new contraption (pictured below).

We visited the local hardware store where we purchased about $15 worth of PVC pipe, tubes, and elbows. For the rest of the afternoon G spent his time creating contraptions, routing water, and experimenting with “hmm, what happens when I plug this pipe?” or “if I can this valve, the water comes out… where?”

No Wii for us on this fine summer afternoon, we’re enjoying some quality young-engineer -development with PVC.

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Make A Radish Into A Mario Mushroom

Another thing to file under “do this if I find a lot of spare time,” Make A Radish Into A Mario Mushroom.

ro + 256 + milkcrates + monks

Another nice monome performed piece. It especially like the first 2 minutes or so. Amazing what variety you can achieve with just a few samples and well placed slicing.

Makoto Yabuki, As One

I’m a huge fan of well timed, ambient works. I love this Makoto Yabuki piece. The synth is very nice, the images pleasing. And they lock so well to the audio it feels like neither element dominates for attention, they are one and the same. Maybe this is why I’ve had YouWorkForThem’s The Interpretation on play off and on over the past few weeks in my office.

AS ONE from makoto yabuki on Vimeo.