I just posted my new demo reel on here a few days ago. It was long overdue. Looking back at my old one, it was mostly filled with random tests and tutorial-like content. I’m glad that my reel now is mostly stuff I’m proud of, and I hope new and interesting work continues to come my way. The one I posted on here is actually the second cut I did. My first one used an Aphex Twin track for the music, but I think it just ended up feeling too frantic with that music in there. So I ended up recutting it to what it is now, and I think it just feels better.

I’m currently looking at apartments since I’ll be moving yet again at the end of March. My roommate is going to be moving back to San Antonio, and since most of my work is coming from Austin, I’m going to be moving there. I’ve kind of teamed up with Dustin Scott now that he has gone the freelance route. He’s really helped me out and I hope that we can continue to work together. Once I get my living situation (as well as my insurance) figured out, I might rent an office with him.

Well, that’s about all I have for now. Check out my new reel and post a comment here if you feel like it, I’d appreciate it.

Well, it’s been over a month since my last blog post. I apologize. January has been a busy month. It started out with a trip to California for the National Championship game between Texas and Alabama. The game didn’t turn out as I had hoped, and it was really heartbreaking to see Colt McCoy knocked out of the game so early, but watching Garrett Gilbert grow up before my very eyes was one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen. To be thrown into that environment as a freshman after only playing in garbage time and then leading your team to within 3 points of the #1 team in the country? That’s crazy. The future is bright for Longhorn football.

I’ve been working pretty hard for the past couple of weeks and am taking a couple days off now. I definitely needed it. There were many late nights and I was exhausted. Hopefully I’ll get motivated to update my reel finally and post some of the new work I’ve done.

And then last Friday was Conan’s last night as the host of The Tonight Show. I’ve been a Conan fan for many years and loved him on Late Night, so I was happy for him when he announced he was moving to The Tonight Show. It was his dream job. But then it got taken away from him after just 7 months. Pretty unfair if you ask me, but I’m sure he’ll be back on TV soon enough. And his farewell speech that last night was one of best speeches I’ve heard in a while. And here’s a little collection of some of my favorite Conan related things that have been posted on the internet lately…

Happy Festivus!

Enjoy all the traditions of Festivus! The Festivus Pole, the Airing of Grievances, Feats of Strength, and Festivus Miracles! To learn more about the wonderful holiday of Festivus, check out this article on Wikipedia, and watch the Seinfeld episode.

http://techland.com/2009/12/16/the-best-review-of-phantom-menace-ive-ever-seen/

I saw this a few days ago and it’s quite possibly the best review of The Phantom Menace ever! It’s 70 minutes long all together, but it’s worth it. While the creator of these is doing it in a humorous manner, the points he brings up are some of the best I’ve ever heard. It accurately describes why The Phantom Menace just flat out isn’t a very good movie. So if you have 70 minutes to waste, definitely check this out.

If you have any experience with compressing videos, you probably know the h264 codec. What a lot of people don’t know about is a very good alternative encoder, x264.

A problem that the h264 encoder suffers from is the dreaded gamma shift. It seems to affect people on Macs who compress videos that are then viewed on PCs. x264 seems to not have this problem, or at least not as much of one. I don’t know too much about the specifics of the technology, but from my own personal experience, the x264 encoder seems to always yield better results.

The good thing is you don’t have to download anything special to view videos encoded with x264. As long as you can view h264 videos, you can view x264 encoded videos.

Now, you may be wondering where to get this encoder and how to encode videos with it. It’s simple! Go to http://www003.upp.so-net.ne.jp/mycometg3/ and download the x264Encoder. I suggest you bookmark that page because the encoder is updated quite often. Once you download the DMG, open it and you’ll see a file called “x264Encoder.component.” Copy that file into your Quicktime folder (Macintosh HD > Library > Quicktime), and that’s it! If you have Quicktime Pro, just open up the movie and choose File > Export > Movie to Quicktime and click the Options button.

Next, click the Settings button under the Video checkbox, and choose “x264Encoder” from the drop-down list. You can mess around with the other settings (Frame Rate, Data Rate, Keyframes, Quality, Multi-Pass) just like you would with the h264 encoder…

…but there’s even more advanced settings if you click on the Options button at the bottom that I would only recommend you touch if you do further research. Luckily when you download the DMG from the site above, it comes with a number of documents that explain what each option does, but it’s still a bit cryptic to me, so I usually just leave all that alone.

If you don’t want to use Quicktime Pro, I know the encoder also works with Compressor. I’m not sure what other programs it works with.

For more information about the x264 codec, check out the following sites:

• http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html
• http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/cmg_blogs/story/brightness_issues_with_h264_quicktime_movies/

I present to you the latest and greatest Christmas Hit, “It’s Christmas!” Having a hard time waking up? Having a bad day? Just watch this and your day will become instantly better. I think the walking scenes are the best.

So I’m working on a job where I need to have a fireplace light a room. And everyone knows the light from a fire is not a constant thing, so I needed to figure out a way to have it flicker. After messing around with a number of different ways of going about this, I found a post online talking about using a Noise node in Xpresso to drive the intensity of a light. Here’s what the setup looks like right now. It may change, but it seems to be working pretty well right now. I know this isn’t that complex of an Xpresso setup or anything, but I just thought I’d post it since I haven’t had a blog post in a little while.

While I was working on making a butterfly at work today, I used a Figure primitive as a quick stand-in for the body. I think I’ve stumbled upon the next great superhero. Behold, Butterfly Man!

And since I’m posting screenshots, here’s a look at what I was doing last night. Gotta love Lloyd Alvarez’s BG Renderer script for After Effects. It’s a great time saver and rarely ever gives me any problems. In fact, I think some renders actually go faster using BG Renderer than rendering inside After Effects.

And finally, even though this isn’t my photo, I think it’s pretty cool. Mark Paterson, who is working on the new show Archer (from the same people that made Sealab 2021 and Frisky Dingo), posted this photo on his twitter account. I guess you have to do what you have to do to get work done!

Here’s the theme song at Shiny Object for the week, possibly the month…