http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:34:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Just as optical disks replaced the floppy, flash memory cards might be bringing the DVD era to a close. Part of this is the fault of hardware manufacturers, who’ve spent years unable to agree on a single DVD standard. While a recordable CD is a recordable CD, blank ... http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/please-use-dvd-r/ Here’s an easy tip to improve Flash’s basic drawing tool, the paintbrush: dial down its automatic smoothing feature. This makes each stroke more faithful to your original drawn line, avoiding the stereotypical “Flash look.” A potential drawback here is that less smoothing means more complex vector shapes, which make ... http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/improve-the-flash-paintbrush/ The legal uses of copyrighted material in the U.S. are explained in American University’s excellent Best Practices in Fair Use brochure. Fair use covers only a limit set of uses for copyrighted works,but public domain material can be used for any purpose. To see what works have passed ... http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/dealing-with-us-copyright/ Tomek Baginski’s Twelve Steps Animator Tomek Baginski gave a talk on planning a 3D animated short film at the 2007 Ottawa Animation Festival. I transcribed this from my notes. 1. Concept Art Everything that will be modeled is drawn first. 2. Storyboards Shots are planned out. 3. Animatic Shots are timed. ... http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/planning-a-3d-project/ The Wikipedia entry Simulating the PXL2000 offers a video processing recipe that will reproduce the signature effect of the PXL-2000 audio-cassette-based camera: 1. Scale your footage to fit a 540 x 405 composition at 15 frames per second. (This is exactly 75% of a full 720 x 540 NTSC frame.) 2. Reduce ... http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/fake-pxl2000-effect/ A decade ago, Apple and Microsoft had just begun to offer DV video capture over Firewire as a built-in OS feature. The quality of their early DV codecs was awful, so smaller companies stepped in to provide better ones. The Canopus codec was, arguably, the best of the ... http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/read-canopus-dv-files/ Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 is the first version of Premiere to be released for Mac since 6.5 in 2002. It’s got an odd problem, though. Unlike previous Mac versions of Premiere–or any other Adobe product that I can think of, actually–it refuses to import Windows Premiere projects from ... http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/premiere-projects-on-a-mac/ If you’re getting odd hardware errors with a Mac laptop, try the old voodoo trick of a power manager reset before you assume it has a mechanical fault. For instance, recently I started getting “Error Code 0×8002006E” when I tried to burn a DVD. This code is supposed ... http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/power-manager-reset/ Sending correctly-formatted HTML email can be a more complicated process than you might think. But the free, cross-platform Thunderbird email client is a decent solution. Step 1. Click the Write button to compose a new message: Step 2. Click in the body of the email. Step 3. Go to ... http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/html-email-in-thunderbird/ If you need to transcribe speech in an audio file, there’s a nifty feature in the free version of Apple’s Quicktime Player that can help. Step 1. Choose Show A/V Controls from the Window menu, or press Command-K: Step 2. Adjust the Playback Speed slider: You can use this to slow ... http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/easier-speech-transcription/