Well, it’s been a while since I posted. Again. I’ve been busy with work, wedding plans, and University State. Not a good excuse, since a post doesn’t take that long to write, but there isn’t much new to report.

I spent Sunday night reading up on some interesting information on frame rate encoding in MPEG-2 files on DVDs. Commercial DVDs that are transferred from film (film = 24 fps) can be encoded into the DVD MPEG at 24 fps, with extra flags encoded in to instruct the DVD player to correctly and easily convert the video to the US television standard, NTSC (NTSC = 30 fps). And the 24 fps MPEG gets encoded with progressive frames rather than interlaced, which further improves the quality (as long as the source was originally 24 fps). For those of you technically inclined, check out these links:

http://www.dvdfile.com/news/special_report/production_a_z/3_2_pulldown.htm
http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_4/dvd-benchmark-part-5-progressive-10-2000.html
http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/support/productinfo/24p.pdf

On a different topic, check out the amazing CGI work at the end of this 30 second clip. I wonder how much the special effects company got paid!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YozMDzOAGxk

Finally, production on University State is moving along, although my work has been slower than I expected. The combination of my recently busy schedule and the learning curve for animating in LightWave have limited my output so far to one complete scene, plus the storyboard and initial animating of a second. Not bad, but hopefully the speed will pick up as I get better.