Hubukai

Here's my thoughts all on video editing and hardware requirements. You're definitely correct about video editing on your hardware. Most of the high-power single core processors and all of the new dual core processors should not have too much trouble editing video. We're now getting into the realm of editing HD video where the power requirements for I a personal computer are a lot higher to get the same speed in editing results. This is due to the fact that high definition video frames are approximately 4 times the size of your standard video frame. If you have a high powered computer. Let's say an Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or above with 2 GB of RAM you should be in fairly decent shape. I would recommend a dual core processor for video editing. Either an Intel or AMD 2.0 GHz dual core processor or better. The Intel dual core processors are definitely leading the pack when it comes to powerful processing nowadays. If you do very little video editing and then raid is not necessary. Most of the hard drives nowadays are SATA drives or SATA2 drives with eight meg or 16 meg cache. I personally prefer Seagate hard drives over all others because bare-bones Seagate hard drives have a five year warranty and I have had the least amount of issues or problems with Seagate drives. Will talk about raid 0 here for performance purposes. Raid 1 would be when you nearer to drives together for reliability purposes. This is something you do on a server and probably would not want to do on your home machine. If you do a substantial amount of video editing or are a high power user then getting to hard drives and putting them in a raid 0 configuration will definitely make you a happy power user. There are several benefits to having a raid0 set up. One is boot time. Your boot time will be roughly 30% faster or even up to 50% faster with a raid set up than it would be with a non-raid set up. Application start time would also definitely be improved with a raid zero set up. You'll find that if you raid and a minimum of two drives together your applications will launch quite a bit faster then just running off a standard single drive. When you do a lot of video editing on a computer that does not have raid you'll find that jumping through the video clips "scrubbing" and viewing the video is a bit slower and you frequently have to wait for your computer to catch up to what you are editing. When you begin to edit high-definition video the slowdown is more drastic because the frame sizes are so huge and the amount of data coming off of your hard drive is quite a bit more. As an example standard video DVD creation where your video size is about 720 x 480 has a maximum bit rate of 8 Mb per second. That's a decent amount of data for high quality standard video. You can get very good video quality by lowering the rate per second but usually if you are rendering something out you want to get the highest possible quality you can. In my opinion for home computer the easiest option is to purchase a motherboard with a raid already on the motherboard. Having a dedicated raid card would probably give you more performance but for home computer I don't think it is worth the extra cost. If you do full-time video editing or you're running a server, a dedicated raid card is a must buy for a hobbyist or even a power user, animation master user or someone who likes to do video editing for fun, raid on the motherboard will do just fine. As a side note, using software-based raid which is something you can do within Windows XP probably isn't a good idea. If you're going to do anything with raid make sure it's hardware control such as raid on the motherboard. Now moving onto high-definition video, your video resolution size or frame size is 1280 x 720 or 1920 x 1080. Most video looks extremely good at HDV quality, 1280 x 720. When doing some testing with animation master on a fairly powerful computer, such as a Intel dual core 6700 or dual core Pentium extreme edition I've found that the best resolution to render out to to get the best possible video with an acceptable render time is HDV or 1280 x 720. I have attempted to render out to 1920 by 1080 but it just takes far too long to render such high quality unless you have a larger render farm with a lot of powerful computers. Here is a sample of standard video frames HDV video frames and HDTV video frames at each resolution so you can get an idea of the size difference between all of them. Taking a look at these different video frames you also see how all rendering out in animation to standard NTSC video would take a lot less time than rendering out to HDV or HDTV resolution. If you're working on a special project and you want it to look great now and in the future I would recommend rendering out to HDV or 1280 by 720. You can always download size the video once the frames are rendered out but upscaling the frames is generally something you don't want to do because you will lose quality. Hardware specifications: there's been much discussion on which hardware is better, which processors are better and what kind of hard drives are better and so on. Everyone has good and bad experiences with different kinds of hardware but in my experience you want to purchase hardware that will be extremely stable, run as cool as possible and overall be very reliable for the next three to five years. We'll just talk about building a box, not necessarily keyboard mouse or monitor as those things can be chosen at any other time. I used to be in favor of AMD processors but in my experience over the past year, Intel processors have performed far and above what AMD is currently putting out now. The new Intel core duo processors are coming down in price and also perform better than most AMD processors for rendering and video editing. At this point you definitely want to have a multicore processor. Your options are dual core processors or quad core processors. While a quad core processor may seem like a very high priced item I think you'll find that now that prices are coming down they are affordable and will be more of a benefit with multithreaded applications such as rendering and if video editing. We won't get into the discussion now of how many applications are built for both multicore processors. Some people will say it's not worth the price because a lot of applications currently don't support multithreading and but in my opinion if you're going to build a system to render on build the best you can at the time. To give you a short and sweet hardware list and also price, here's what I would spec out.(generally) We'll go with pricing from newegg.com since they are one of the big players on the market. $319.99 Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe 2.66GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor - Retail $199.99 Intel BLKD975XBX2KR LGA 775 Intel 975X ATX Intel Motherboard - OEM $129.00 CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Retail $35.99 LITE-ON Black 20X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL 20X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA DVD Burner with LightScribe - OEM $129.99 Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail $69.99 Rosewill RP550V2-D-SL 550W SLI Ready ATX12V v2.01 Power Supply - Retail $84.99 Seagate SV35 7200.2 ST3320620SV 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $84.99 Seagate SV35 7200.2 ST3320620SV 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $149.99 VGA 512-P2-N757-TR GeForce 8600GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail $1,204 Total So the above is a general hardware list and that would allow you to assemble a killer system for a reasonable amount of money that will let you crank out renderings in animation master, work on editing video and even work very well with high definition video editing. Video editing software: personally I use pinnacle studio 11 for editing on the PC but if I have to choose I prefer to use simple IMovie 08 on the Mac. Since were talking about the PC world here I think that pinnacle studio 11 is your best bet for video editing software on the PC. It'll run you about $100 and has just about everything you need and will also allow you to work with HD video. I do recommend having QuickTime Pro on your system as well. I use QuickTime Pro on the PC to assemble all the TGA's that I render out from animation master and then I export them as a MOV file using H264 codec to produce a high quality, small file size video that I can put on the Internet for people to download and watch. QuickTime Pro is only 29 bucks from Apple and worth it! Other software you may want to consider is using or getting DivX. To fix is fairly easy to use as well and it's pretty inexpensive. Pinnacle studio 11 software is owned by avid systems which are the big boys in the video editing world. You can find online that avid makes a free version of their editing software for you to play with and learn. All of the above is spewed out from my brain from many years of working on the web as a web developer, producing videos for the Web, DVD and also everything I've learned from working on projects in animation master. You can obviously substitute different pieces of hardware in the list above but I just wanted to put up a good general computer set up to give you an idea of price. Obviously you can go up and down from that an increase or decrease your performance. When people tell me that they want to build a PC, my first question is, "how much do you want to spend?". That usually dictates what kind of hardware to get. I hope this helps not only the mid Atlantic animation master user group members but the other members of the animation master forum. Hubukai

Hi all, Wait a minute, another mid Atlantic animation master user group meeting already? Yes it's true December 1, 2007 is the next scheduled meeting for the animation master users group. Location has yet to be determined but the date has been set. December 1 is Saturday so everyone has plenty of time to get organized, get some stuff rendered, animated and get some tutorials made for the next meeting. Unfortunately it will probably be chilly out and it won't be a deck party but I'm sure we'll all have some holiday renderings to show and tell. This is a general message for anyone interested in meeting up with us from the New Jersey, Philadelphia and Delaware areas. Check back here for more information on the meeting location. Most probably Don and I will finalize that and post it here. Don't let those rendering skills get rusty! Start firing up all of your engines and start cranking out some cool animations for the December 1, 2007 MAAM meeting.

I am going to start a new thread for the next meeting scheduled Deceber 1st.

Photos from the Animation Master Users Group meeting: Rich, Vern, Don, John, Mack. We had a great time, Hotdogs, AM, Food! Oh My. Next Meeting scheduled for December 1st, 2007 [url="http://picasaweb.google.com/hubukai/20070818_Animation_Master_Meeting/photo#5100748141503819010"][img=http://lh3.google.com/hubukai/Rsl_aOcRrQI/AAAAAAAAG_s/bEanDnyp-d8/s144/P1030515.JPG][/url] It was a great meeting.

Reminder. Meeting Saturday... any time after 11 am. Good News: we'll all be here... ill provide hot dogs, chips, COFFFFFEEEEE, sme other snakies... Bad News: No Beer.. :-( sorry, BYOBAM is ok if you like... if we are stull hungry, $4.99 pizza specials right down the street. Good-er News. Stuff to show... :- ) Link to map, houes number and phone number on first page of this thread. Starting time 11 amis on... noon is actual start time but a little earlier is fine.

i can give you some video editing and encoding lessons. it is up to you if you want to bring anything. a bog-o chips, pretzles... or just your self... it isint necessary... ill have dogs, chips , salsa... COFFFEEE, soda... and stuff. :- )

Hi guys, I'm glad everyone is going to be able to make it to this meeting. With luck we might be given a chance to sample some of Mrs. Hubickey use great baking talents. This extra week may actually give me enough time to get some final design elements finished for the dark skull productions poster. Unfortunately I myself have taken on one or two new Web clients which will put a hindrance on some of my animation master project time but you know me, I always squeeze time in somewhere. Mechadelphia, any new animations? Just as information for all, burn your animation projects, animations or whatever files you have or need to DVD or bring them on a USB stick or bring them all on top and will get them connected to the television for viewing during the meeting. Vern, I'm interested to hear about all the new work you've got. If anybody has any questions or thoughts, e-mail them around and post them here. Looking forward to the meeting! Will also schedule our winter meeting during this meeting. I've always felt that a late November or early December animation master meeting should be a must because the holiday spirit and animation master rendering go hand-in-hand.

Rich, I am thinking you can do your cloth tutorial? and show us some great 3D painter stuff? Mechadelphia... I am REALLY wondering whats been up your AM sleeve... i check your site every once and a while... :- )

HI Rich I will send you info via email for train. I chatted with Don briefly last night about the date move and he is looking in to it with Mrs. it WOULD be great to have All there. I also reccomend we scheduleout WINTER meeting ( late november) during this meeting ... a main date and an alternate. for me, if i put somethig in the calender, the date is Locked it !!

Hi guys, According to the schedule, by some amazing, unbelievable feat of madness, the following weekend of the 18th is actually opened for a animation master meeting. I would definitely leave it up to the group if they wanted to push the meeting back one week. Rich, Don, Mechadelphia, what say you all? Personally actually pushing the meeting off one more week would be good for me because it would allow me to actually get a few extra animation master things done. I don't want to miss out on getting Mechadelphia over here because he hasn't been able to be at a lot of the past meetings and we definitely want to see the things that he has been working on. Anyway please let me know what you all think. I'll also be e-mailing you this post so we can get an answer to this quickly. I definitely need to get an answer to this somewhat quickly so my wife does not kill me. I'll talk to you guys soon,

Hmmm, Wait a minuite... i like the idea of Verns Family Picnic MAAM infiltration scheme... Brovo Company... Left, Alpha Company... Flank them.... Wigs, CHECK, Menonite reading materials, CHECK... Flask with Scotch ... CHECK... CHECK Rodger, Over, 10-4... Don, Rich, Cover me... im going in... if you dont hear from me, Call the President!!! ~~~ Although Vern will not be with us, I still believe the meeting should go on in Honor of our Fallen Commrad Verndrovinich! We shall eat hot dogs in his honor... The coffee will flow like rivers of gold!

this may meen that i have to dring twice the amount of coffee I normally do. If you Miss this one, we will then have to SCHEDULE on approx. 2 months from now so you dont miss out...

Okay guys, I you all just calm down now. Let's use our ninja like skills to focus on the projects at hand. Animation master, rendering, computers and computer art. Don't make me switch out the coffee with decaf coffee. I'll do it, I really will! With luck between now and next weekend I will have a final image to show to all. You may have seen it before but will try to keep something as a surprise. It would be good if all of us have at least something to show that its new from the last meeting, whether it be an idea, new rendering, new type of art or something of that nature. It's been awhile since we've all had Mechadelphia join us and I can't wait to see what he's been working on. Please don't forget to burn all of your content, animation master project files or general video files to CD or DVD or bring on a USB stick or even bring your laptop computer and will get that information plugged into the television somehow. Has anyone heard from Zach? Earth to Zach? Looking forward to seeing everyone this Saturday. Arrived anytime from 11 a.m. on. Here is a link to the house on Google maps. Click Here. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&...c=addr&om=1 Talk to you all soon. [ Don't worry Vern, I was only kidding about the coffee ] :-)

Hi guys, This is awesome. Mechadelphia, Vern, Rich... now all we need to do is get Don Davis and this death Star will be fully operational. I expect all of you to bombard Don Davis with e-mails requiring him to also attend this meeting. Vern, I will get special coffee just for you. Full Beans freshly ground from the coffee fields of Columbia with the highest quality caffeine content available! Rich, 300 on HD DVD. Enough said. Mechadelphia, it will be great to see you again. Kind of like someone on the "Lost" island that made it back to civilization. Don? Where's Don? Don are you out there! Don, come in, over! Eagle one to base, come in are you out there. Your presence is needed. This is probably one of the more exciting weekends of us are for me getting everyone back together, cooking hotdogs, spilling chips all of the floor and showing some good animation work on the big screen. Here is a link to Google map directions to my house. click here http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&...c=addr&om=1 phone number: 610-436-6124 I say we start the meeting anywhere between 11 a.m. and 12 noon. If that works for everyone that's fine if you need to come earlier earlier that is fine as well. In the spirit of the mid Atlantic animation master meeting room I will most likely have some beer in the downstairs fridge. I've notified the local police that we are having a meeting so if there is any smoke, fire, explosions were scantily clad women running out of the house with articles of close missing, they have been paid off to ignore any calls regarding these things. Can't wait to see you all.

Dear MAAM Members and others close to Philadelphia, MAAM Meeting - August 11, 2007 ???? Please read below. It has been way to long since our last meeting and I am hopeing we can get a meeting together so I am emailing you all to see if there is interest in gettign together NEXT WEEKEND!!! and my house August 11, 2007. It has been far to long since we have gotten together and if your interested please post here and also email me as well. It is still summer, I have TONS of hot dogs, Buns, the grill is still working so if you are not on vacation, get your butts over for a MAAM Meeting. Email me, post here... Let me know if you are up for a MAAM Meeting - August 11, 2007 If you can come i will send you directions.

thats a good idea... Let the trash talk begin...

The Dark Skull Productions team, Rich Jackson and John Hubickey have been working on the "TekNu" Project Sentinel character over the past couple of days and we want to share a high quality rendering. This character will be one of the bad guys in the upcoming "TekNu" mini sci-fi movie project. { warning, image 1.6 meg. 3900 x 3900 px } The Sentinel is approximately 10' to 12' tall, menacing, fast, and will do as commanded. Driven by the Core computer of the mechanical planet, the Sentinel is the robotic workhorse and will perform tasks such as moving heavy equipment, sentry duty and even destroying or killing anything or person the central computer finds a threat to the TekNu planet. New improvements to the model are improved hinge joints for better flexibility and animation, new claw like feet for stability and a new laser eye that is capable of low power scanning capabilities or powerful alloy cutting high megawatt output. In essence, the Sentinel is a slave robot capable of killing without remorse. Enjoy.

Hi MAAMers. I will have to come up with a new date for the MAAM Meeting.. .unfortunatly Family stuff has gotten in the way of the meeting on June 30th. Anyone want to suggest some dates? probibly July. right now i have July7th open... Anybody, Anybody?

I am out here! I am, really. Thanks for posting these photos Rich. We have been working on this project and moving towards a final product.. I am hoping to have our final render for the first scene out within 2-3 months. Stupid life keeps getting in the way for me but I am always keeping my feet in the AM pool of rendering. I have to say, having a local user group helps. Without the user group, I would have never met Rich Jackson. here is an additional prop. A general energy container.... you know, just one of those things sitting over there in the corner of the futuristic room just pulsing away for no reason. The cool thing about our work is that it is a team effort. This energy container was modeled by me over my Lunch hour at work. I like to call it the 1 hour modeling project. basically start with nothing... you got an hour to finish a prop... at the end of the hour, whats done is done. Here is the container before i gave it to RJ for texturing. Here is the container AFTER Rich textured it. Brilliant! I gotta tell ya, team work is the key!

Hi everybody, Here are the links to the final versions of our dark skull production logo animation: choose which one you would like to download. Recommend right-click save as: Dark Skull Production logo animation 1280 x 720 -- QuickTime -H.264 Dark Skull Production logo animation 640 x 360 -- QuickTime -H.264 Dark Skull Production logo animation 1280 x 720 -- DivX Dark Skull Production logo animation 640 x 368 -- DivX Originally at the end of the logo animation we had the wings move to a standard position and then just stop and it looks somewhat unnatural actually. Rich and I talked about it and he did a few more changes to add the twitching to the wings so that the entire logo animation has some kind of wing movement. The one thing I like about the wing movement we currently have is it goes with the look and feel that we want to portray. Right now during the entire logo movie the wings flap in and move similar to the way a black crow that just got shot by a shotgun would kind of flat and shake as it was dying on the side of the road. Now I know that sounds a little bit morbid, but the overall mentality at dark skull productions has a dark movie feel to it. The feeling we're trying to get across would be, creepy, dark, spooky, scary, cool and so forth. Another reason were going to leave the rendering the way it is is just because of render time. Rendering anything at 1280 x 720 could be a complicated task for your average computer. Just as a note this entire animation was 450 frames and each frame took approximately 30 minutes to render. That comes out to a total of 225 hours of render time just to produce this animation. The thing that slowed it down the most was the volumetric lighting. We did not want to give up the volumetric lighting so we let it render. We had several Intel dual core machines running two copies of animation master to try and get the frames finished as quickly as possible. Unfortunately the multicore, multithreaded version of animation master ( revision 14 ) isn't perfected yet so we couldn't run it through the new version. It just made more sense to run two copies of animation master on each dual core computer and let it run its course. Two different computers running two different animation master's gives us for frames every half an hour. This is into bed to let run while we are are either sleeping or at our day jobs. It's One of the main goals at dark skull productions is to produce a high-quality film using animation master rendered at 1280 x 720. We considered running the animations at the highest high definition resolution but we were looking at more than an hour per frame and until the multicore version of animation master is ready for prime time and Intel makes even higher numbered multicore processors are going to stick to the 1280 x 720 resolution.

Hi everybody, Thanks for replying. I'm putting in a link to my house and West Chester PA so anyone interested in coming to the meeting can get an idea of distance they would have to travel to get here. Right now I've put down June 30 in my personal calendar as a day to hold onto. It seems like a pretty good date since it's also close to Vern's birthday. If anybody has an issue with June 30 please let me know. We can still change the date is something more suitable to get the maximum amount of animation master users to the meeting. Vern, I'm not sure if Apple can ship in the new eight core Mac Pro that I ordered for you and get it here in time for your birthday but if it doesen't get here in time I'm sure the 50 inch plasma TV that we ordered for your birthday will keep you entertained until it gets here. :-) Here is a link to my house: I'll keep checking the forums to see if there is anyone interested. If you have any specific questions please send me a message through the forums. Let's try to get all the veteran MAAM users to recruit some new blood and bring them to the meeting! I think will probably need help eating burgers and hot dogs! Hope to see you there.

Hi all of you Mid Atlantic Animation Master users out there. I wanted to post to potential dates for a summer meeting for the mid Atlantic animation master users group [ MAAM ] and also offer my house/deck for the meeting. The dates I currently have available are Saturday June 23, 2007 or Saturday, June 30, 2007. Saturday, June 23 happens to be the weekend right after the wizard world comic book convention so June 23 may be a good weekend to get together to go over animation master work, tutorials and some new and exciting things from dark skull productions. Since this will be a beginning of the summer user group party I will be firing up the grill and cooking burgers and dogs. We'd love to see some new animation master users from the tri-state area so if anyone is interested please send me an e-mail or a message through the forum. These two dates or not set in stone as of right now but just a suggested date and if I get some feedback if anyone prefers a specific date please let me know. What could be better then cheeseburgers, hot dogs and some frosty beverages sitting on the deck with our wireless laptops going over the latest and greatest animation master goodness. I hope to hear from you all soon. John Hubickey

Don, Great meeting. Thanks for hosting. I thank you from the bottom of my bottom for the chillie. My wife didnt appreciate it as much as i did though. :- ) It was inspiriational as always. OMG, there is Rich Jackson! That guy i talk to all the time and never see. Here is a photo of the MAAM group... going on 4 YEARS NOW!!!! Woo Hoo!!!! http://picasaweb.google.com/hubukai/20070401MAAMMeeting

Yes, this is going to be a great meeting. Dark Skull Productions is really picking up speed. Rich Jackson has been doing some awesome texturing. Ill try to render out a NEW show real for this meeting of latest renders and animations. Team DSP is taking the AM community by storm. There is no stopping this out of control train of talent and genius!

Yes, I am there. That day is definitely good for me and I'll be there with bells on! well maybe not bells on but I'll be there. With luck, will there be a pot of chili? I have already informed my wife that if that's the case I may be somewhat explosive when I get home. I think will even have some new stuff to show from dark skull productions.