The hard part is over; now the hard part begins
Posted by Trixter on April 5, 2008
Just got finished with my talk at Block Party and I think it went well. It ended exactly when I wanted it to end (55 minutes after the hour, giving the next guys a few minutes to get set up (Circuit Bending, currently in progress, demonstrating very wrong yet very funny things with a Speak and Spell).
Already NOTACON/Block Party is turning out to be one of the best and most unique experiences I have ever had. The highlight of the event was having Jeri E. sitting next to The Fat Man, collaborating on their compo entries. YES THAT’S RIGHT I SAID COMPO ENTRIES. We are in for an old-fashioned, old-school beating… an enjoyable one, but still a beating :-)
A personal high was meeting The Fat Man and talking about the industry (thank you MobyGames!) and also meeting Virt and having him fast-track something in MONOTONE. There very few people I idolize more in the computer music industry than those two. Speaking of which, both of their talks went really well, even though Fat had to deal with some soundsystem drop-outs and Virt had to deal with a young child in the audience who was, ah, very vocal about the presentation and how it should be run.
IC has done a great job, once again, of converting the democoder lounge into a place of scene spirit, with mood lighting and a running videotrack and soundtrack of all things scene. Speaking of which, there are nearly double the people in the lounge this year (it’s full) which is a great sign. You can go in and see people working on music in trackers, custom demotools of their own design, Visual Studio, even old stuff like Quickbasic and Turbo Pascal.
Six hours until the compo…
Oldskooler Ramblings 
Jeremy said
How did Virt’s song turn out? Will be get a chance to hear it?
Trixter said
It turned out great and got a big laugh. You’ll definitely hear it when MONOTONE has a beta release.
spinsane said
Great post. Just got home myself a little while ago, and after riding the demoparty high towards asciiland, it’s time to get to bed.
Your talk was great, Wendy and I both enjoyed it. I’ve been working with video a bit lately, and the added experience with avisynth, etc really helped me digest your talk on a personal level. And my wife, a complete novice to all this stuff, loved it as well! In particular she mentioned the pacing and “flow” from one subject to the next as strong points. The visual examples of course helped all of us I’m sure. Good job!
I second your opinions about Fat Man and Virt’s speeches and BP08 in general. It was a fantastic time.
And I came away with all the scene related schwag I’ve been eyeing for some time, all for a very reasonable price.
Awesome!
Trixter said
Thanks so much for the kind words! It means a lot to me.
If you need some avisynth scripts to do some particular irritating stuff (like convert one framerate to another without it looking like ass) let me know. Here’s the one I used for PAL->NTSC for MC2 (assumes you have “mvbob”, if you have trouble finding it let me know)
import(“d:\program files\avisynth 2.5\plugins\mvbob\mvbob.avs”)
AVISource(“\assets\mc2\pal\mentalhangover.avi”)
ConvertToYUY2(matrix=”PC.601″,interlaced=true) # converts using a colorspace that doesn’t crush/expand anything
AssumeTFF
mvbob # converts 25i to 50p
ConvertMCfps # uses motion vectors to create additional in-between frames to go from 50p to 60p
Lanczos4Resize(720, 480) # resizes 720×576 PAL to NTSC res
ConvertToRGB(matrix=”PC.601″,interlaced=true)
AssumeFrameBased
SeparateFields() # Turn 60p into 30i (this line and next)
SelectEvery(4, 0, 3) # 4,1,2 is for odd field first; 4,0,3 is for even field first
weave
Inspired Chaos said
Thanks Jim! What a (stream of expletives) great party!