Saturday, October 16, 2010

SDHC Cards for HD Video Guide

Ostatnimi czasy postanowiłem zainwestować w sprzęt fotograficzno-filmowy i skusiłem się na wiodący model aparatów Canona z serii DSLR a mianowicie padło na Canona EOS T2i/550D.
Nie będę w tym miejscu oceniał jego możliwości, czy też rozpisywał się o parametrach technicznych. Natomiast chciałbym udzielić kilku wskazówek dotyczących doboru kart pamięci osobom, które nie miały wcześniejszej styczności z aparatami dającymi możliwość nagrywania materiału w HD i uniknąć na przyszłość problemów, które spotkały mnie. Kupując aparat w sklepie, polecono mi kartę SanDiska Ultra 4GB z opisem na opakowaniu 15MB/s class 4 cena 72 zł. Nie miałem wcześniej pojęcia, że istnieją klasy pamięci i na co się one przekładają zanim nie spróbowałem w domu nagrać testowego materiału w HD. Karta okazała się zbyt wolna (zapis) i po ok. 14 sekundach przechwytywania obrazu aparat automatycznie wyłączał nagrywanie filmu. Po kilku godzinach googlowania i przewertowaniu instrukcji obsługi aparatu okazało się iż Canon rekomenduje karty min. class 6 w celu pracy z materiałem HD. Tak więc zaryzykowałem i nabyłem na aukcji internetowej kartę A-Data Class 10 o rozmiarze 8GB za 55 zł.
Z lekko drżącymi dłońmi zaakplikowałem ją do aparatu i włączyłem nagrywanie filmów w Full HD 30 fps. Na szczęście działa pięknie i wydajnie. Na koniec dopiszę iż przeglądając fora mało kto był skłonny polecić tą kartę - bo nieznany producent, bo nie SanDisk Extrime coś tam za 200 zł. Tak więc słowem podsumowania, nie zawsze trzeba wydać ogromną sumę pieniędzy aby móc cieszyć się przyzwoitą wydajnością. Na dzień dzisiejszy mam co chciałem za rozsądną cenę. Mam nadzieję, że ten niecałkiem krótki wpis oszczędzi innym frustracji z powodu błędnych rekomendacji w sklepie w którym powinni najlepiej wiedzieć jaką pamięć polecić do danego modelu aparatu. Szybkie karty przydają się także przy seryjnym zapisie zdjęć, a przede wszystkim w formacie RAW.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Speed Up Rendering in After Effects - Tips

If you press "Caps Lock" button in rendering queue window, After Effects will not waste processor's time on refreshing preview screen every frame. The conclusion is to safe counting power during rendering. It gives good result in many cases and speed up rendering. I recommend this way of working with AE.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

CodeRetreat Wrocław 2010

I was asked for designing web site for my mate. It was for Code Retreat event in Wroclaw. It's coming soon and starts at October 23. If you are programmer and would like to participate in that project you can sing in for free. I prepared layout and cut it, also write html and css template. I drew also art for t-shirt (those two geeks in top) and it will be printed as logo of CodeRetreat event.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

EXP is UP

I'm working on intro to tv commercial I would like to share with one still frame from it. Explosive stuff. Frame straight from After Effects. Blown title was made in 3D software.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Catapults Animation

Shot from my short animation which I did as a part of master diploma project.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Nokia 2700

This time Nokia 2700 Classic. Model was made in Maya and rendered with Vray. It was my first attempt to vray engine. Model is for tv commercial and render as personal project for my own.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

LG LD550

Model of LCD TV which I did for commercial tv production. I modeled it in Maya 2011 and rendered in Bunkspeed Hypershot. I started playing with RT (real time) renderers. It's awesome stuff.Design and postproduction in photoshop. That's my personal creative and self-developing project.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

TV LCD Panasonic

One last project of LCD Panasonic TV.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

VFX Project

I'm writing my master diploma project and I did some reference to my old project which I realized with my colleague from university.
I thought it's nice to refresh it and post to blog some information about that project. I was first attempt to VFX in life-footage. Below are screens and breakdowns from production and final movie.
I was responsible for FX which I did in After Effects and 3ds Max as well I cleaned footage a bit and painted some elements in Photoshop. Further more I animated the robot in second scene and put everything together at the end.



Project was did as a semester's project in University. Everything maybe it's not so much perfect but I learnt a lot.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Audi A4 White

Another render from Maya and Mental Ray of Audi A4 B5

Monday, July 19, 2010

Audi A4

I finished my second car ever made finally. This one is Audi A4 B5 (1995-200). I did all in Maya 2011 from modeling, materials and lighting to render in Mental Ray. I would like to thank to Piotr Koczan for his help and supervising me in production of that Audi.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Speed Up Rendering in After Effects using GPU

Lastly I found good way to increase speed of rendering and preview in After Effects CS. Since After supports OpenGL and using GPU for many things it gives great opportunity to be faster and more efficient.

Here are few steps that you should know to use that feature.

Render with OpenGL

OpenGL is a set of standards for high-performance processing of 2D and 3D graphics for a wide variety of applications. For After Effects users, OpenGL provides fast, high-quality rendering for previews and final output by moving rendering from the CPU to the OpenGL hardware (GPU).

To use OpenGL in After Effects, you’ll need an OpenGL card that supports OpenGL 2.0 and has Shader support and support for NPOT (Non Power of Two) textures.

OpenGL in After Effects supports the following features:

  • Shadows, except point light shadows (Colored shadows appear gray.)
  • Lights (eight maximum)
  • Masks
  • Alpha channels
  • Track mattes
  • Intersecting layers
  • Transformations for 2D and 3D layers
  • GPU-accelerated effects, including Alpha Levels, Bevel Alpha, Box Blur, Brightness & Contrast, Channel Blur, Color Balance, Color Balance (HLS), Curves, Directional Blur, Drop Shadow, Fast Blur, Find Edges, Gaussian Blur, Hue/Saturation, Invert, Noise, Radial Blur, Ramp, Sharpen, and Tint.
  • All blending modes except Dissolve and Dancing Dissolve
  • Metal property settings for 3D layers
  • Cone feather settings for light layers
  • 2D motion blur
  • Adjustment layers
  • Anti-aliasing

Turn it on

When OpenGL does not support a feature, it simply renders without using that feature. For example, if your layers contain shadows and your OpenGL hardware does not support shadows, the output will not contain shadows.

To enable OpenGL for rendering final output, click the underlined text next to Render Settings in the Render Queue panel, and select Use OpenGL Renderer.

To enable OpenGL for rendering previews, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), and select Enable OpenGL.

To see what features your OpenGL card supports, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), and click OpenGL Info.

To modify the amount of texture memory, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), click OpenGL Info, and enter a value for Texture Memory of no more than 80% of the installed video RAM (VRAM) on your video card.

Summarizing

In my case I have real time preview and rendering time was 3 times more faster than when using CPU. If you have opportunity to use GPU do this.

Friday, May 28, 2010

Bosch Clasixx 6

Another model did for advertisement need. I used photometric mr Sky Portal lights.