I have a few more images to retouch from my recent Medium Format excursion, then I will start uploading those too.

(Press play to watch the youtube video, or view on the site if you are in an RSS reader).
And this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7IGE58IPgo which they won’t allow embedding.

Then, an update. I have been trying to get into Blender, and I have found what I feel is a really good resource, http://www.gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html. I have used 3D apps for probably 13 years give or take, and have used pretty much all of the commercially available ones at some point. If I remember right, I downloaded 3d Studio MAX off of a BBS, and started with that one, and use R2 for a while. Then while I was in college I switched to Lightwave, and dabbled with Maya 4 a bit. After college I got a job where I was using Maya 6, Cinema4d 7 & 8, and Pro-E along with Nugraf. Over the years I had dabbled with Poser and Bryce, and a few other one off applications. Eventually I used Maya 7 and 8 extensively, and have even taught classes in Maya and Lightwave, so I feel confident that I understand 3d applications. And, I am fairly comfortable with my ability to sit down at pretty much any of them, and get things done if I need to. Blender is the outlier though. When I sit down in front of Blender it all goes out the window. The conventions are so far outside of the realm of every other 3d application that its just impossible to use. But, I am making a concerted effort, because I really want to start using it. For one thing, I am using Linux full time at home now, and while I could use Maya on Linux, I am also using Shake and AE for compositing, and Premiere Pro for editing. In the Blender world, I can do all of this inside the single application, which is a killer feature that I am looking forward to. At work, I am currently utilising many applications for the pipeline for some of my products, and while its not a big deal, I definitely miss the 64 bit OS and applications while I am at work.
One application that I think Linux is sorely missing is a professional video editor. There are a handful of crappy editing apps, and a smaller number of decent home editor apps, similar to iMovie on OS X, but there is really not a polished professional video editing application that I have found. There is Cinelerra, but its not polished enough for me to want to sit in front of it all day, and the installation of it is almost worth skipping Linux if that’s what its going to take. I have used Avid, Premiere, and Final Cut Pro since the late nineties, and I admit they are all good. I understand why Final Cut is taking so many editing jobs away from Avid. And I understand why so many Avid editors won’t try using anything else. If someone would port one of those apps to Linux, they could easily grab 100% of the market-share for video editing on linux. And if they sold it as a bundled hardware-software-support package, they could be very profitable. I just don’t understand why they don’t do it. I understand in the Final Cut world, because they would be cannibalising their hardware sales, which isn’t going to happen. Anyway, tangent aside, I know the video editor in Blender isn’t going to be the greatest in the world, but it appears to handle the basics pretty well, and be more akin to After Effects for video work. I have to admit, I have had problems with editors before, specifically once where I was using a Media100 with a Vincent card, and I had to get it done, so I just exported clips, and did all my editing in AE.

On a different tangent, I went to see 9 last night, and I enjoyed it. I thought it was a good story, however I felt there was a fatal flaw in it. If you intend to watch it, you may want to stop reading now, and come back later. While not being a spoiler, I will explain, based on the types of knowledge enumerated above, I found it very difficult to watch as a movie. The movie has been described as stitch-punk, a textile based variant on steam-punk, and the main characters are made of fabric. While this is a beautiful vision, which I think borrowed a bit from The Brothers Quay, the main character’s texture felt unnatural to me. Every facial emotion that the character had was difficult, because the texture map didn’t seem to have enough detail, so as the brow would furrow, the end result would be noticeable distortion of the pattern. It just didn’t feel like cloth moving so much as an image map being distorted, and I didn’t notice this with any of the other characters, so I can only blame it on the decision to use a coarse weave for the main character. Oh, and the enforcer appeared to visually be based off of James Earl Jones so much that I wonder why they didn’t get him to do the voice for him.

And, just to end it off well….

*Update: I was moving a second folder from a different drive inside my MythServer to the same USB2.0 disk on my laptop, and I realized speeds up to 13.6MB/s, which means that the problem earlier might have been in the drive setup rather than the network. I got the higher speed from a SATA-150 drive and MP3 files, mostly around 4-5MB each. I was getting the slower speeds on a PATA drive, pulling across files between 650MB and 1.4GB. This leads me to believe that I do not have DMA correctly enabled, but I will wait to look into it until I am setting up the Arrays, as the card is in the mail, and I have the drives for the first half of the card.