DAC1138

For the gaming community blender3d has become a big option now. In the blender chat, we get a lot of people coming in using it to make games. Actually, that's a large percentage of blender users. They use it strictly for game graphics. Blender has a wide range of output formats, so no matter what the game engine uses for it's main model format, most likely blender supports it.

EVen if you can't afford the full Adobe premiere or final cut pro, and Avid Free DV isn't easy enough for you, i'd highly recommend Adobe Premiere Elements. It's a stripped down version of premiere, without all the pro effects and pro stuff. By pro stuff, I mean the stuff the average editor or home user won't need. It is well worth the $100, even $70 is you shop around. It is the best bargain for cheap/affordable video editors around.Jahshaka is getting up there though. I'm still awaiting the 3.0 release, where they've totally revamped the interface and started over from new code. The 2.0 jahshaka had a promising Non-linear editing environment, but it needed work. I hear 3.0 is much improved. Now if only we could all see this 3.0 in action, i could give you another recommendation to consider. But until then, adobe premier for the win!

I like norton ghost. It can save an exact image of your hard drive. Not just the backup files. That way, if anything gets messed up, rather than installing your OS again, and then extracting your backed up files, you can now just make an image of your hard drive, and then if anything goes wrong just restore that image and everything was the way it was when you backed up. Everything down to your OS. You don't even need an operating system to run it, you can run ghost from a live cd and make a backup and restore straight from there. You can backup images to multiple CD/DVD media or even to an external hard drive.

Yes. ROtoscoping frame for frame isnt really necessary nowadays. Now you can just do the first and last frame, and then adjust as needed in between. I do this all the time with After Effects when I'm using a layer mask and blanking stuff out. It also works with lightsabers (which is quite cliche now).

I hosted a few videos on my website. I just put them in .wmv format for Windows Media Player. I chose that format and player for a few reaons. The biggest one being that WMP is installed on windows machines by default, so a vast majority of my target audience is using windows machines and already has it installed. So that rules out the need for 3rd party downloads, which complicates things. Makes the choice a lot easier.It all depends on your target audience. If your target is for the non tech-savvy crowd, go with the choice I did, or even choose youtube. If yours is more for the person that knows what he or she is doing, go with quicktime, as you can get some great video with minimal compression.I'd go with youtube personally. Everyone knows about it, but the video quality sucks. You can embed video directly to your site while youtube hosts it. That's a big advantage; youtube hosts the video. That will save on a lot of bandwidth and storage costs.

Try Audacity. It's no Adobe Audition (which is what I also use) but it is a great tool which I also use sometimes on my system for smaller audio projects. It's completely free and is under constant development.

Yes, don't settle for anything less than Vista Ultimate. I talked to a CAD designer recently after his upgrade to vista. Apparently the new version of AutoCAD he's demoing doesnt work with Vista Home Basic. It requires him to be running Vista Ultimate. So now I'm guessing Microsoft has a new scheme to make people upgrade by making the more professional apps only work under Vista Ultimate. Bad business move.A smart business move, though, was their move of Outlook from the student and teacher edition of MS office to the small business edition. Student & Teacher edition was for exactly what the title stated. Only it was cheaper. The catch being you must show your student or teacher ID before purchasing. Most businesses just got around this and bought student and teacher, didn't show any ID, and got away with a $300 discount. Now all the business people are mad because 1) they can't return their products to the store (Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, etc...) because the return policy won't allow returns on software, games, or music. 2) They not only can't return their copy, but have to pay an additional $300 for the small business edition. Love ya Microsoft!

Linspire used to be a lot like windows. It still is. But I think PCLinuxOS and Xandros look and feel much more like MS Windows than any other linux distro. They mimmick everything from the start menu, to my computer, all the way to the control panel. It's pretty natsy. I don't like it when linux distros end up mocking windows like that. I like windows, I like linux, I just don't think the two mix well together. I think linux should stay linux and windows should stay windows.

I just do personal things. Movies I make with my friends and my group. That's it. I'm not a fan of this viral video bandwagon. If everyone starts doing it, pretty soon no one will be interested.

This is one thing I don't understand. Youtube and google video compress your videos and automatically shrink them down to a 640x480 resolution. What I'm lost about is why do people spend $2000 for High Def cameras when their main distribution source is youtube? Just a standard Canon zr500 camera would produce great videos for youtube or google video. Why record HD video that looks amazing when it's going to get compressed to look crappy anyway?Anyway, enough rambling. I usually compress my videos to 640x480 when distributing over the web. But whenever possibly, like if I'm hosting my own video, I like to keep it 720x480, or sometimes I'll even shrink it to be balf that (360x240). The smaller size saves the cost of bandwidth. And if you embed video from youtube into your website, that's even more cost effective.

I can speak from experience that Borland's (free) compiler is really good. I think it's version 5.5 that's free. they go up to 6.5 last i used. But it is a really nice interface to code in. I started on the DOS turbo C compiler as well, and then moved up to borland's 5.5 on windows.

My point with the hardware requirements is that people dont want to use their operating system; they want to use their applications on top of their operating system. When you have 800mhz and 512 Mb ram, and then you're trying to run an office suite on top of that, maybe have a few spreadsheets open, vista can be bogged down quite a bit. Sure, I've seen people run Windows XP on a 200Mhz processor and 128 MB ram. I even installed XP myself on a 266 Mhz machine and 128 Mb ram. Did it run? Yes. Did it run ad an acceptable speed? If you like waiting 20 minutes for a web page stored on your hard drive to load, sure. Make sure you keep a few magazines handy. And my conclusion was not 'it looks the same=about same code'. There was an article a long while back that I'll see if I can dig up about Mircosoft trying to speed up the development process by just copying and pasting old code from XP into the new (at the time it was called Longhorn) operating system. My example again would be the device manager. Why would you recode something completely so it looks and operates the same? It's just stupid. Yeah, they might have cleaned up the code and fixed a few bugs here and there, but it's not completely from scratch. I'll say that most of vista's new stuff is new, and probably coded from scratch, but not all of it. I've been booting and rebooting vista computers for the past week, and they are slow. For brand new top-of-the-line machines with vista, you'd think it's abnormal for an operating system (running on 1.5 Gb ram and a dual core processor) to take more than 2 minutes to get to a useable desktop. I spend a lot of time with older machines running XP that boot faster than that running on slower hardware. Since I have first hand experience with both machines and have put both of them to the test, I can say all this with confidence.

When you install OneCare, all other antivirus applications cease to install or even work at all. When we installed OneCare on a machine, we tried to get spysweeper onboard. No luck. So we tried Norton. No luck. So we tried McAfee. No luck. "What the heck," we thought. We wondered if they could just be incompatible with vista, and not interfearance from the OneCare. So we went to another vista machine and tried installing. It worked like a charm.I don't know what Microsoft's problem is. I'm beginning to not like them as much anymore. Their coders can't code anything properly, and their business practices are as bad as Sony. Haven't they learned from past lawsuites that when you are anti competitive you cannot get away with it? They just aren't learning. But I guess if they can get away with it for even 6 months, they will try.

I was just wondering what 3D animation software you people use, and why? I've been hopping around from 3dsMax to maya, then to lightwave, I messed around with bryce3d for a while. A few years back I learned about blender3D, and evern since the interface overhaul I've been using it ever since. It covers everything I need it to. So what do you guys use and why? Any specific thing you like about that package? I know with blender, I love how the keyboard is the main user interface. Not the mouse using graphical menus. The interface and its size. It's not bloated and bogged down like most other applications.And best of all, blender is free. I know maya and 3dsmax have a hefty price tag. I know most professionals look at software and think, "free? Then it can't be that good."

From my experience with the final release of vista....no, it's not any good. The hardware specs are way too high for what it does. Look at linux and OS X. Both run on peanut system specs. Vista? You need a NASA supercomputer to run it. From what I've been reading about it from microsoft's training, it's supposed to boot faster and be more user oriented. By faster, I mean it's supposed to not boot up programs you never use on startup. It's not supposed devote all your memory into one application rather than spreading it out so your system doesnt choke. It's supposed to be able to predict what you want to do based on your most used programs, and open them up faster as it buffers it into idle memory. It's "supposed to." It doesnt do a good job of any of that. It's "supposed to" be based off of totally new code written from scratch. But by digging your nails a little deeper into the desktop, it's not. It looks like a beefed up XP desktop. Microsoft has made a lot of promises for vista and has yet to fulfill them.Let me rant on about the 3D side of things. My friends and I were worried about vista's making use of graphics memory for that aero interface. We run some complex 3D animation software which makes use of the same memory aero would be using. Oh boy, did the **** hit the fan when we tried to model something. Even though there were no windows being accessed, our programs slugged down to a near halt. It was trying to do everything off of the normal system memory rather than graphics memory, which it had been designed to do. Since vista isn't much better at memory management, it had two conflicting apps trying to access the same video memory. What a mess.The boot times? Yeah, those are pretty bad as well. With all this supposid speed increase due to the lack of programs being on the startup list, vista sure does boot very slowly. What's even more surprising, even with the souped up hardware requirements vista needs, every machine boots terribly slow. For needing all that RAM and CPU speed, Vista sure doesnt do a good job of managing it all.All ranting aside, I do like vista's new start menu. :-)