robcat2075

I have also noticed it takes a long time for A:M reports to come up, although it does surface if I wait.

Are we actually on the new server now? Or is that still to happen? About a week ago i noticed that it was suddenly taking a lot longer to connect to the A:M forum than it used to.

Roger, are you still having display problems? Better or worse?

If, by chance, there should be some sort of tie leaving more than 10 entries vying to be counted in the top 10 I will hold a drawing with me as the official name-out-of-a-hat-puller-outer to resolve that.

Some weird-looking stretch frames from "Rabbit Transit" (1946)

In addition to the Hash gift certificates for the top three entries in the Sci-Fi image contest, the top ten entrants will be receiving the a DVD of Mark Largent's all-A:M-made "The Wobbling Dead," an animated puppet parody of the AMC series "The Walking Dead." Now you have no reason not to dust off that sci-fi entry you didn't quite get finished, polish it up and jump into the fray. Contest deadline July 6 Don't be a lazy zombie! If you wake up on July 7 and find out only 9 people entered you're going to kick yourself!

Ka-Voom!

hmmm... if the pen only works with new software that would be big problem. Here is a review of the Thinkpad Yoga that ha a wacom pen. 3.5 pounds, that's getting heavy again. Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga review: a good (if slightly heavy) Ultrabook for business users

I'm sure any mention or non-mention of Wacom technology was negotiated in the licensing before hand so i'd be surprised if anyone was surprised. The "penabled" tablets were always entry-level Wacom stuff. Positionand pressure but no tilt or rotation like the high-end Wacom products have. Probably not intruding on the serious-artist Wacom market. But I'm curious now to see how this N-trig thing performs. If it has a battery in it it must be a tiny one.

I wonder how there could NOT be parallax? There's got to be some thickness of glass between the display and the pen. No? If it really has no latency that will be better than my Cintiq or any I've tried.

Here's David Pogue's video review... Smart, Versatile Surface Pro 3 Can Do It All — Maybe Even Lift the Windows 8 Curse

Heu , Will... here' what I'm wondering... Can you now make a basic shape in A:M, take it to ZBrush and add a bunch of surface detail, then somehow export a map from Zbrush that can go back on the basic shape in A:M and act as a displacement map to make it look like the denser, more complicated shape you sculpted in ZBrush?

Mark, you're right! You've made two CG movies that people actually pay to see. That is way beyond hipster.

I'm looking forward to seeing it, although I'm going to hold off until I've seen the first season of The Walking Dead that you've said will be key.

It is on the high side in price. It's never going to be a hipster thing like an iPad. If we are comparing it to an iPad it's about 25% to 50% more expensive than an iPad with a similar amount of RAM A 128GB iPad is $799 A 128GB Surface Pro 3 is $999 Both are more expensive than I would pay for such a thing but there are many people for whom the difference between this and a cheaper machine is an insignificant amount of money if this fills their functionality needs better. Endgadget has links to numerous, cautiously positive, reviews on the bottom of its page http://www.engadget.com/products/microsoft/surface/pro/3/

To me, it looks like a cool thing. I don't have a need for an iPad but when I travel I like the idea of a very light something that runs real Windows programs. I have an old XP tablet that weighs twice as much as that Surface Pro does with probably 1/8th the computing power and battery life and yet it is useful when I travel and fulfills my travel computing needs. So I look at the Surface Pro that can do every thing my current tablet does and do it better... to me that's a valid product. I probably won't buy one, i don't travel enough for it to be a major need, but i can imagine people for whom this fills the gap between iPad and desktop just right.

A review of the Surface Pro 3 I didn't even know there was a 3 yet.

Thanks, David, that loaded. If i take that PRJ set to 1 fps and make keyframes at 0 second, 1 second, and 1.5 seconds ( I have to manually enter 00:01:0.5 in the time counter to get that half-frame time) I get this in the file: So even when the PRJ is set to 1 fps, A:M still writes the keyframe times based on 30ths of a second.

a crowd simulator!.. that is something I've had in the back of my mind but have never embarked on yet. I will be curious to see what you make of that. lessee... I'm sure there's some sort of Pythagorean hypotenuse formula that would let you calculate the distance between any two points.

There was a time when the fps rate was never saved in any file. The fps that A:M used was whatever was set in the Options panel and you needed to deduce what the correct setting was for whatever work you had loaded. Sometime after we started TWO A:M was changed to write the fps setting in the PRJ. I forget how got everyone to use 24fps for TWO since we were mostly saving chors and not PRJs.

I tried copying and pasting your text and saving as a .PRJ but I get "invalid project file" when I try to load it in A:M. I'm not sure what it's missing.

I believe that documentation info is wrong. If I set a PRJ to 30 fps and create keyframes at 0 seconds, 1 second and 1:15 ( 1.5 seconds) A:M will write this in the file: If I start over and set a PRJ to 24 fps and make key frames at 0 seconds, 1 second and 1:12 (1.5 seconds again in the new PRJ) A:M will write this in the file: So whether you have the PRJ set to 24 or 30, A:M will always write the times in the file as a clock that counts in 30ths of a second (plus ticks if necessary). One and a half seconds will always be represented as 1 second and 15/30ths no matter what fps the PRJ is set to. If you are in a 24 fps PRJ A:M will be clever enough to draw that keyframe at one second and 12 frames. I can't create a case where A:M writes the values any other way. If you can that would be something to look at.

I take it back! A:M is not writing time in files as a floating point second value (what I should have said instead of seconds and a decimal). A:M is storing times as seconds plus 30ths of a second plus ticks If I make some keyframes in a 30fps PRJ I get this. I've bolded the time values If I just change that PRJ to 24 fps they still have their format of seconds-plus-30ths If i snap those keyframes to 24fps positions then they get times in seconds-plus-30ths of a second-plus ticks (after the period I thought was a decimal) The periods looked like a decimal to me but it is really just a separator between the 30ths and the ticks.

No request has been made to change it to 270000. It seems like a big can of worms to open in pursuit of a feature we will rarely ever need. AFAIK, 135000 ticks per second has been the A:M way for a long long time. I'm not sure I'd call it a "codec", I'd just call it the unit of time that A:M works with. Paradoxically, the time in A:M files seems to be stored as seconds with a decimal if needed but not a very long decimal. There must be some internal code to fix the error introduced by the short decimal when the file is read in. Mistake on my part. See correction below.

I think "drop frame number" would have been a better name.