It’s almost March!
Man, busy times here. I still wrapping up the design looks for a couple of my animated concepts, and I have launched another website that I will use to track my progress in Maya.
Check out MasteringMaya.com to see where my study efforts are heading.
I have most of the initial preproduction work on The Last Girl in Texas complete. I won’t start shooting until May, but I am wanting to make sure I have everything covered.
Yeah, right. No plan survives first contact with the enemy, so I am staying very flexible and light on my feet.
Overall the production company startup is lining up very well.
I don’t have any one linch pin that can break me, so I feel pretty good about that.
I also keep finding new business outlets and ideas to help monetize the online side of things. Look for more merchandise here soon.
Ok, back to the grind stone.
So I bought a camcorder this weekend, a Sony DCR DVD108. It records to mini-dvd, which is kinda cool.
I bought it to mainly use around the house as a family camcorder, but also to practice my dv editing workflow (Premiere Pro to After Effects).
So I shot some video of Hilary when she came over to watch the game sunday. I sat down last night and edited out the stuff I didn’t want. Premiere loaded and handled the 6 minute clip easily, but AE7 just did not like that clip at all.
The computer kept bogging down as I tried to work thru the video.
After applying Magic Bullet, it took 42 minutes to render out a 640×480 18 second clip!
I came to the realization that I most likely need a new PC if I am going to be able to edit video of any great length in AE.
I also have been wanting to build a new machine that was designed around 3D as well.
My personal saying has always been that if I have a PC that can play the latest games smoothly, then that is good enough for anything else.
I am going to build up a custom rig over the next 2 months, and I will document the steps here.
First, I guess I need to outline what this machine must do.
I want to run Maya, and my other 3D apps and deal with some high poly count scenes, so it must be first and foremost a 3D juggernaut. I don’t want some $5k custom gaming rig, just something that can run my graphics applications fast.
It must also have alot of storage, for working with raw video.
So the list so far is:
Possible candidates:
CybertronPC X-Cruiser
I will have to research this model more, but for the price, it looks like a great deal. The only thing I am unclear on is the Vista Business OS installed on it.
I have been avoiding Vista like it was the plague, but maybe it’s finally time to give it a try.
