The Morevna Project

Yes! Finally! Praise God! My first real article has been accepted to BlenderNation (BlenderNation is the central news site for Blender, the free open source 3D content creation suite.[1])

Read the article now!

I am so glad and highly appreciative that my article as been accepted. I have been endeavoring to get an article submitted for some time now, and had somewhat given up hope (for a time) that I would ever get something submitted. But Bart (Bart Veldhuizen, BlenderNation’s primary contributor and founder) has been cleaning out the backup of article suggestions that the Blender open source community has been sending in. A recent addition to BlenderNation has been the “Rapid Fire” articles, shooting off multiple, short article suggestions and links. A wonderful idea!

So, I am very thankful for Bart accepting my article! And I am also thankful to Zelgadis (Head of the Morevna Project) for leading the open source community of Synfig in an endeavor to create this open source animé film and for letting me know my article had been submitted (I hadn’t found out yet!) Also many thanks to the Morevna Project open source community contributors and all the open source developers, artists, and enthusiasts of many kinds spanning the globe.

See the Morevna Project official website
See the project wiki

God bless and best wishes,
-b

Testing Blender VSE with HD proxy

Hey everyone!

Testing Blender’s VSE (Video Sequence Editor) for my editing needs.  So far it’s working well, once God helped me figure out how to get the audio and video the same length.  (Clue: import the audio and video separately, then make a meta strip to keep them together if you want to.)

Testing Blender VSE with HD proxy

(Watching the video real-time with a 25% proxy is great!  Unlike using Premiere Pro 1.0, playing the video back on Blender’s preview window is fast enough and sweet for viewing!)

Interlacing is bad, so I may use VirtualDub for that.  Depends.

If I can get good results from Blender, I may go with it for now and keep the JVC Everio GZ-HD7, instead of downsizing my camcorder.

Hopefully BlenderAVC will continue to be developed so I can import my video directly (without worrying about conversion.)

I hope this all works out!  Thanks to all who recommended using Blender for editing my video.  I should have tried it again earlier – then again, what’s wrong with now?  “The road goes ever one” as Bilbo sings, and it’s the journey that brings memories and experience.

Best wishes, peace out,

-b

Now

Well, the camcorder has arrived!  Praise God!

It is a JVC Everio GZ-HD7, and I tested it out this evening by recording a message given by Dr. Narendra Singh, and also interviewing him personally afterwards.  I recorded some additional footage of people’s conversations with Dr. Singh, etc., but I will most likely not be posting that.  I hope to post both the message and the interview online sometime soon.  (I recorded them in SP, though sometime in the future I may do most of my filming in FullHD.)  Oh, and Dr. Singh said I did a good job, and that he would be praying for me.  😉  Praise God for that!

Praise God!

I hope to start doing some film making, inteviews, and more, but I can’t forget to do my other duties in life, or forget my talents.

Well, I guess that’s all for now!  Going to be trying out my camera in nature, filming Green Bank, working on film pre-production, and brainstorming film ideas!

God bless,

Thanks for listening! (and I always appreciate your prayers.)

-b

P.S. Dr. Narendra Singh believes he will die as a martyr (for Jesus Christ.)  May God protect him till his time comes, and may many more come to Jesus before, and after, that time.

Leap

It’s ordered!  Praise the Lord.

Leap.  Yes, this was a leap.  A leap of expectation, uneasiness, hardware, and more.  I hope it all works out!  Leap!  I wonder… leap!  Well, my last cameras I’ve used are the Canon PowerShot A510 and the Quasar VM-L450, so this new camcorder is a great leap indeed!

This evening (or shall I say, morning) I finally ordered my camcorder, an Everio GZ-HD7.  Quite expensive if you’ve never actually bought your own camcorder before.  (Boy, that was anti-climatic.) ;D  Before I bought it I did some final research into the proprietary file format it puts your video files into, .TOD (HD video) and .MOD (SD video.)  I primarily researched the .tod issue and found out about the .mod one along the way.  You can read up on it here: Struggling with TOD at The Digital Video Information Network, and some solutions: JVC Workflow and Squared 5’s MPEG Streamclip.

As I have no personal experience with the camera and the .tod issues yet I cannot recommend anything beyond what I have read, but I may post on this later.  Basically you can use the software that comes with the Everio GZ-HD7 and save-as the video, or rename it to .m2t, or something… boy, I need to read up on it already!

Anyhow, I better start making some films now that I will have the first step in the equipement.  ;D  I may get Sony Vegas MovieStudio soon, to handle the HD.  (I don’t think Adobe Premiere Pro 1.0 does HD.)

So, perhaps this is the end of the tunnel, (or just starting?)

Thanks for listening,

God bless,

-b

P.S. Hope to be making films soon… I may be starting a graphic design company as well, so, we’ll see how all that goes.  But may I not forget my roots.  Thank you one and all!   Thank you John Calloway (http://johncalloway.wordpress.com/) for the help in camera research, and Andrew Duncan for insight into the digital video world!  Thank you all my other friends, supporters, comrades in the arts, and brothers and sisters in Christ… may we all find the path.  God bless, your friend, b