Binocular
10. Stereopsis: the difference between the views of the left and right eye.
11. Convergence: the angle from our eyes to the object viewed, as reported by our eye muscles (for objects closer than ~10m).

master

• picture:  1920×1080 @ 12fps, 23.976fps, or 24fps.
• sound:   48KHz 24-bit, stereo or discrete 5.1
• codecs:  PNG Quicktime or PNG image sequence; uncompressed AIFF or WAV files.

submaster

• picture:  1920×1080 @ 23.976fps or 24fps.
• sound:   48KHz 16-bit, stereo or discrete 5.1
• codecs:  Apple ProRes, Avid DNxHD, or PhotoJPEG Quicktime video; PCM audio.

distribution

• picture:  1280×720 or 1920×1080@ 23.976fps or 24fps.
• sound:   48KHz 16-bit, stereo or discrete 5.1.
• codecs:  H.264 MP4 video, AAC or PCM audio.

• How many computers does this run on?
• What are their specs (RAM, CPU, storage, graphics card, etc.)?
• Do they need to communicate?
• What types of network connections do they have (WiFi, gigabit ethernet, etc.)?
• Do they need any peripherals (mouse, keyboard, Wiimote, Kinect, etc.)?
• What types of peripheral connections do they have (USB, Firewire, Bluetooth, etc.)?

2. Media

• What’s your storage medium (hard drive, SSD, optical disc, etc.)?
• What’s your backup strategy (RAID, Time Machine, disk image, spare drive or optical disc, etc.)?
• Will there be an attendant present in case the computers crash?

3. Video

• How is the video being presented (projector, LCD, CRT, LED wall, etc.)?
• Is there live video input?
• Does it need to be recorded?
• What kind of cameras are you using (webcam, industrial, DV, DSLR, etc.)?
• Do they have a usable “live view” mode?
• How are they connected to the computer (Firewire, USB, analog, etc.)?
• Do they have manual focus/iris/white balance?

4. Audio

• How is the sound being presented (built-in speakers, external amplifier, stereo, 5.1, etc.)?
• Is there live sound input?
• Does it need to be recorded?
• What kind of microphones are you using (shotgun, contact, cardioid, lavalier, etc.)?
• How are they connected to the computer (Firewire, USB, analog)?
• Do they have manual gain control?

5. Sensors

• What other types of live input do you need (light, temperature, vibration, tilt, acceleration, etc.)?
• How is the data being presented?
• Does it need to be recorded?
• Can you find commercial products that fit your budget, or will you need to make your own sensors?
• How are they connected to the computer (Arduino, MakingThings, serial port, etc.)?
• What external hardware controls do you need (on/off switch, gain, threshold, status lights, etc.)?

2. Stop-motion: Photographing a single object and moving it while the camera is stopped. Can be done with paper cut-outs, characters with poseable armatures, or even cooperative human actors (“pixilation,” which with this spelling has nothing to do with computers, meaning “possession by evil spirits”). Quickly adopted in the 1900s for visual effects in early silent films.

3. Replacement: Replacing the object being photographed with a different object while the camera is stopped. “Classical animation” is replacement animation using pencil drawings on paper or ink on plastic cels; this technique dominated animated feature production until the late 1980s. Less common variations use photo collage or sculpture. First came into wide use with “lightning artist” vaudeville acts in the 1910s, where audiences would watch an animated film being made.

4. Rotoscoping: Using live action as a frame-by-frame reference for animation. Traditionally done by projecting film footage and tracing it, an established technique by the 1940s. “Motion capture” is a modern variant of rotoscoping, in which the analysis of movement is done with a computer instead of by hand.

5. Computer graphics: Breaking an image down into mathematical elements and manipulating the values of those elements. Usually done by representing an image as a grid of colored dots (“pixels”). Widely adopted by the 1990s; the most common form of animation in use today.

2. Use version numbers.
Save a new copy of your file each time you make a major change to it, adding a version number to the end of its name. This is called “versioning.” Not only can you find the most recent version at a glance this way, but you also create a simple timeline of the file’s evolution, with every major change available for inspection. (For more complex projects, you could come up with more elaborate naming schemes, or turn to automated version control software like Version Cue.)

3. Avoid duplicate filenames.
If you replace a file with a new file that has the same name, nobody but you may be aware that it’s been changed. Duplicate filenames may sometimes be necessary, but there’s always some potential for confusion. Even though you fixed a given problem with an old version, for example, someone else might be operating on the assumption that it’s still there.

4. Don’t delete old files.
Space permitting, you should archive every version of your file. Even after the project’s done, keeping old versions around can be a great help in case something goes wrong in the future. You can comb back through your files in reverse order and pinpoint where the problem first occurred.

Your average digital still camera, for instance, automatically compresses the images it shoots. Without compression, you would need to flip about 150 million switches on your memory card to save a six-megapixel photo. But the camera feeds numbers representing the image’s grid of colored dots through a series of equations, and comes up with a way to save your photograph using perhaps only 20 or 25 million switches. That means the final file takes up less space on your memory card–and if the math is clever enough, your eye might not be able to see any difference between it and the original.

If you’re interested, Wikipedia has more about this process. But for a useful everyday analogy, just look at a page of sheet music:

See the repeat signs–those heavy vertical black lines with pairs of dots?

Before printing, when music was all copied by hand, composers invented a number of special instructions to save the copyists time. The repeat sign is one of these. The composer figures out which parts of the piece repeat themselves, and replaces them with a repeat sign that takes up much less space on the page. Here, a piece of music taking up two pages is reduced to one. If all the repeat signs were taken out, it would look something like this:

And that’s pretty much how the simplest kinds of compression work–millions, billions, and trillions of times over.

However, fair use covers only a limited set of uses for copyrighted works; public domain material can be used for any purpose. To see what works have passed into the public domain, try a summary of the rules in table or flowchart form.

As I understand it, here are the basic rules on what’s in the public domain [this is not legal advice]:

1. All works published up to and including 1922 are free to use. Just confirm the publication date.

2. Some works published from 1923 up to and including 1963 are free to use; the renewal records for books only are available here. During these dates, works were protected for 56 years, but you had to file a renewal after 28 years, which many people forgot to do. So up through the 1950s, a lot of material regularly passed into the public domain. If the work does not turn up in the search, that’s good–it means no renewal was filed, so you’re probably OK.

3. Very few works published from 1964 up to and including 1988 are free to use; the records are available here. The Library of Congress maintains complete online records for everything published from 1978 to the present. You can also search for works published from 1964 up to and including 1977, but be aware that the online records for those are incomplete. (Only renewals from those years are listed; you only have a record if someone still filed their 28-year renewal, even though the law had changed and they were no longer required to do so.)

4. No works published from 1989 onward are safe to use; with repeated term extensions, they may never become public domain. If you can’t make a case for fair use, you’ll always need permission from the rights holder. The rights holder might charge an expensive license fee, deny you permission, or just refuse to speak to you; an unscrupulous rights holder might also lie about what rights they actually own.

5. If you can’t find a clear answer, or for any important project, it may be worth contacting the publisher or paying for a Library of Congress card catalog search. This costs a shocking USD $165, but you do get an official-looking letter of confirmation if the work is in the public domain. By the way, this can be useful protection if your use of the work is going to end up on broadcast TV or something similar.

In all cases, when you run into obstacles, remember to check whether your use of copyrighted material might conceivably be covered by fair use rules. While the U.S. has some of the world’s strictest copyright laws, it also has among the world’s strongest fair use protections.

Unfortunately, even in cases where you’re technically in the right, distributors, broadcasters, ISPs, and content aggregators will often become frightened of legal trouble and refuse to touch your work. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides legal advice for artists and defends people wrongly accused of infringement.

• 1. Concept Art
  Everything that will be modeled is drawn first.
• 2. Storyboards
  Shots are planned out.
• 3. Animatic
  Shots are timed. At this point the picture is locked.
• 4. Modeling
  Front, back, and side views are drawn and placed on 2d cards.
• 5. Textures
  Textures should be at least double the final image resolution. That means 4K textures for an HD film, and more for closeups.
• 6. Background Painting
  Use as many 2D backgrounds as practical, moved on cards to preserve parallax motion. For a consistent look, you can build backgrounds in 3D, choose camera angles, and render out still images. You can also build simple 3D scenes for reference, hand-paint details on the reference image, and then project the result back onto the original 3D geometry.
  
• 7. Choreography
  Figure out your rigging requirements. Try shooting live-action reference footage.
• 8. Rigging
  Use bones for the jaw and blend shapes for other facial expressions. Use jiggle and cloth deformers, but sparingly; try to sculpt as much detail as possible into the model.
• 9. Lighting
  Rely as much as possible on three-point lighting with simple, clean white light, and color-correct afterwards in compositing.
• 10. Depth of Field
  Identify which shots will need depth-of-field effects. Unless you have to match live-action footage, use simple blur effects in your compositing program instead of true 3D depth-of-field effects in your animation program. They render faster and make little difference for most shots.
• 11. Render
  For extra flexibility, render out multiple takes with different lighting setups or special effects. If that takes too much time, render the character animation cleanly and experiment with effects on a 2D background plate.
• 12. Composite
  Try to give yourself as many options as possible in this final stage. Color-correction and other fine tuning is often much faster and easier in 2D.

This graphic compares acquisition resolution, the best image you can acquire through a camera (in other words, the quality of your input). 35mm film, benefiting from about 175 years’ worth of improvements in chemical photography, comes out the clear winner:

However, the gap between video and film narrows considerably when it comes to storage resolution, the best image you can extract from your storage medium (the quality of your output). That’s because the perceived quality of an image is influenced more by acquisition resolution than by storage resolution.

Consider the extreme ends of our scale–an image shot on a 35mm film camera and then transferred to VHS tape will, subjectively, look far better than an image shot on a VHS camera and recorded straight to VHS tape, even though the actual storage resolution is in each case the same.

And when you consider that an image stored on analog film must be copied several times before it’s incorporated into a finished work, with accompanying generation loss, you can argue that a lower-resolution but lossless digital storage medium can still hold a final product of comparable subjective quality.

In other words, the current limitations of video are mostly the fault of the video cameras, not the video formats themselves. As a result, animators have a handy way to “cheat.” If you acquire your images with an ordinary multi-megapixel digital still camera, or render them straight from software, you can output to HD video and achieve a result that compares favorably with 35mm film.

1. The story starts with Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), who suggested in 1843 that a programmable calculating machine could be built out of a grid of switches, rather than a mess of clockwork gears.

2. A switch has the advantage of being very simple. Unlike a gear, it has only has two positions, “on” and “off.” When you’re trying to design something as complex as a computer, this simplicity is important.

3. A hundred years later, the idea finally caught on. A modern computer’s memory is, basically, a giant sheet of graph paper, a grid consisting of billions of tiny switches, each with two positions.

4. Each switch in the grid is called a “bit.” The bits are grouped in banks of eight, and each bank is called a “byte.” Megabytes and gigabytes are frequently-used units of measurement these days, so it’s important to realize that you’re counting actual, physical objects.

5. Here’s an image in 1-bit color. Each pixel here is drawn by flipping a single switch. There are only two options, on or off, so there are only two possible colors for each dot on the screen.

6. Now, here’s the same image in 4-bit color. Four switches are flipped for each pixel, giving us 16 possible positions. With 16 colors to choose from, we quickly see a remarkable improvement.

7. Let’s try it again in 8-bit color. Now we have eight switches flipped for each pixel, giving us 256 possible colors. The individual pixels are starting to blend together well, but you can still pick some out in areas of fine detail–look closely at the posters on the right-hand side of the frame.

8. Finally, we end up at the current standard, 24-bit color. With 24 switches, we have a healthy 16,777,216 possible positions, enough color choices to create a seamless image.