L&L

I've been trying to save money using Acorns.
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Paribus is an automatic price-protection thing that links to your Amazon account.

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The main geocaching site seems to be Geocaching.com.

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Have you got your tickets to Ed McNamee's Lisa and Leonardo yet? They're selling like hotcakes. They've even added additional shows because it's selling so well.

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One day I'm going to get to Just Beclaws for lunch.

Aspectical Ratios

I always get myself turned around when trying to calculate percentages. Let me start from the beginning -- Adobe Premiere Pro does not have a letterbox plugin. This is irksome to me.

Vashi Visuals has some .png files to download with all the different aspect ratios at all sorts of resolutions. 

At first I thought that there were only 4K images in that download, which is cool but we shoot in 3840, so the image has to be ensmallened slightly. How much? Luckily there are calculators on the web for that.  The answer is 96%, which is how much I scaled the image to by eye, but it was nice to check the math.

That said, there are "ultra HD" .png files, I just didn't see them because they're at the end of the list and I can't read.

Remember Jarl's Premiere Presets? That's where they are.

Scenic Things

Sprayed MDF on timber formers.

I kinda dig that hatch.

I need a medical bay. It has to look like a set on a multi-million dollar picture. Luckily we can make it small so we don't need to spend that much money.

The thing about using wood on spaceships is that it tends to look like wood in closeups. Fiberboard, which can be slick on one side, can avoid that "wood" look.

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Homewyse has a Cost To Frame a Wall Calculator. Obviously the shapes we tend to look for are more expensive but to get an idea of the cost of just the framing it's an interesting calculator. The cost is between $2.50 and $5.00 a square foot.

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JCFabLab is a sort of workshare fabrication shop. $135/month to join.

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Medium density fiberboard.

And don't forget styrene plastic sheets as a material that doesn't read as wood.

(I simply cannot make one of those widgets from Amazon to work with Blogger anymore.)

Noise Reduction in Production

So check it out, Cedar actually makes a portable and simple DNS. It's interesting because it means that a dialog mixer in the field might very well use it because Production is incapable of shutting the hell up for takes.

This is a quick and dirty solution for cleaner-sounding takes, but it ain't cheap -- it's $4000. And cleaning up with single-ended noise reduction while recording is not the "right" way to do it. But two things about that -- 1 it's likely that you'll have separated tracks of each microphone being recorded pre-noise reduction anyway and 2 so many productions go through post so quickly that the production sound person really is the last time a sound pro will touch the audio so you may as well make it sound like the finished product.

More Medical Bays

The upholstery on the Nostromo is really nice. What's it made of? Is that just vacuformed plastic? What I really don't get is how the seams don't show. Maybe there's weatherstripping involved?

Cantilevered platforms are out of our budget range. But the light and the sort of surgery/dentist tools above Kane are very nice aren't they? Making this room circular must have taken quite an effort.

This is a CG model from the Interwebs. It's much too detailed to be made as vacuformed panels.

The alien medical bay from another angle. Are those speakers on the wall above the lighting instrument in the photograph?

Ash's station here is not as super-duper expensive as (say) the bridge. But I like the sort of s-shape of the vertical pieces. What I fail to comprehend is how the seams work because it's like the whole thing is molded out of one piece. It's quite lovely actually.

Here's the medical bay from a video-game of Alien.

I tried simplifying the above CG image to see if it was something we could have vacuformed. It was prohibitively expensive.

So I'm pretty sure this is Leeloo or... wait, no. The medical bay in Prometheus.

I don't know. Production drawing for Alien maybe?

The state actually gives you a pretty decent apartment when you come out of hypersleep. Maybe it's because you have a cat? I do love how inconvenient the corner thing Ripley is leaning against is.

Details everywhere.

Looking at this again, this is actually one of the cheapest looking sets in Alien. It's not that it doesn't look nice, it's just not super-expensive (for Alien).

So. Reshoots and stuff. Which means the word "greeble" is all over the place in my vocabulary. Also, it seems like the cheapest small monitor is really a Kindle Fire 7". Because using VLC media player you can play .mp4 movies on a loop on the Fire (also you can "lock" the display so you can design your graphics for, and use it, sideways.)

This is a closeup of the newspaper in Blade Runner.

I've been looking at pictures of ISS recently. Mostly dorking out about Suni Williams. The station is filled with plain-old laptop computers. And from what I can see there's basically no in-wall wiring. Everything's exposed.

I believe this is in the Russian part of the station. Although the display is in English. I do so love the super-simplicity of the readout.

Inside the cupola of the ISS. There is more duct tape in use there than you'd think you'd want to have on a space station.

This is the inside of a garbage truck. It's actually a right-hand-drive truck, or rather it has both left and right hand steering wheels but you're looking at it from the "working" position.

Carbon Copy Trailer

Here's the latest version of the Carbon Copy trailer.

Carbon Copy Trailer from Andrew Bellware on Vimeo.

My three things today

Issues with monitoring with the GH4. Basically you switch from .mov to AVCHD recording and back again if it's not outputting video via HDMI.
Apple's Time Machine can get cranky about disk permissions. Just. Because.
Panasonic's VLOG-L is very interesting. I don't know why Panasonic is so weird about releasing it. It's a $99 upgrade but it's frequently "out of stock". I mean it's a flippin' serial number for a software upgrade and it's... "out of stock". Nobody knows why.

There are some complications using VLOG-L. One is that it doesn't really work in 8-bit as nicely as you'd like. And that's what the GH4 records internally. 

Diatomaceous Earth The Porcupine's Dream Part I

Yes, this is a new version of The Porcupine's Dream. A slightly better video. A slightly better mix.

The Porcupine's Dream (Part I)

Tyrannosaurus Mouse and our recording of The Porcupine's Dream.
This is actually the last take we did. The slate stopped working and the cameras ended up being... er... not in sync. But this slower version of the song is my favorite.
I'm very happy with my guitar sound. Ethan's bass sound is the best bass sound I've ever personally recorded. I especially dig Greg's slide guitar. Lou is playing an electronic kit with Native Instruments Studio Drummer sounds. The Studio Drummer kit mixes so easily. The hi hats are so smooth and the kick just sounds great without any work.

I've been cheating in a variety of ways. The compressors are mostly (emulated) LA2A's but I'm also putting many or most channels through (emulated) Pultec EQ's using that trick of boosting and attenuating the same frequencies. To me it makes the low end more... well more, but without being muddy.
Most of the channels are hitting multiple compressors before they even get to the master buss. At the master buss I have three limiters: a Samplitude "Ammunition" M/S compressor/limiter, and two Fairchild (emulation) stereo limiters set very very lightly -- one being stereo and the other being in M/S mode.
Oh, and another limiter on the master buss is the Samplitude "advanced dynamics" mostly lifting up the bottom part of the dynamics which is function that's almost impossible to explain but which I've discovered recently and sounds freaking noice.

Rut

I've been trying to practice regularly. But I've been practicing bass. And not for any particular reason, either. Just that I got it into my head I wanted to play the Jethro Tull Bouree for some reason. It's remarkably tricky to play.
I'm in that rut one gets into where it's like dangit, I'm just not getting any better. I'm sort of frozen in this place. Maybe bass is just really really hard? Playing notes evenly on the dang thing seems so much harder than guitar. Of course I've played guitar for 35 years so maybe I'm just used to it. I don't know.

But the things I am good at on guitar I'm so not good at on bass. Dynamics are out the window. The control of tone is, in many ways literally, heavy-handed as my right hand just goes places not entirely with my consent.
It seems that many Tool songs are played in a dropped-D tuning. I've never felt comfortable in alternate tunings. But intellectually I don't think I'm that comfortable in regular tunings so what difference does it make?
Well no, changing the tuning on a guitar kinda means you really need to do a new setup on the neck. And you may need to re-think your string gauge. I had thought that the heavy strings Ethan makes me get might do better for very low-tuned guitars but actually I think I'd have to go for much heavier strings to tune the guitar lower (I'm experimenting on the Blattocaster).
I'm getting a special Tyrannosaurus Mouse headstock decal for that guitar. Ethan spent a goodly many hour cutting that custom bone nut but at this point in my life I'd like a compensated nut. That's what I tell all the girls at least.
Furthermore:
The Timebender and the TC Electronic D-Two are the only guitar effects that let you tap in a pattern for delays.
I have become frustrated with the Abbey Road 60's kick drum. So I'm trying the regular session drummer kit and I find it so much easier to mix.

Hedonic Treadmill

Diatomaceous Earth. This is a mix from our last recording (March 4th, 2016). Lou Clark on drums, Ethan Rosenblatt on bass guitar, Greg Bartus and me (Andrew Bellware) on guitars.

Hedonic Treadmill was just an end-of-the-night jam. Could it be shorter? Probably. Will it be? I... I don't know.

I could make a guess about what we're all playing through. Greg through his preamp rack and then into... hmm... Maybe the ART tube preamp? Probably. Ethan is certainly going direct into the ART tube preamp (the other channel). I'm going through a Kemper profiler amp and then into a Lindell mic preamp. Lou is playing sounds from the Abbey Road late 60's kit.
The bass is going through a GK amp simulator. And everybody's getting hit with noise reduction and a wide variety of compression.

Blind Testing

I kind of dig the Chapman YouTube channel. They do quite a bit of blind testing of guitars and amps and they get to some interesting conclusions. Here we learn that the sound of different gauge strings is not so much as the feel of them.



Other things we've learned is that the Squire Classic Vibe Telecaster is arguably better than its Fender equivalent.

And Ringo Starr is left-handed, but plays a right-handed kit. This. This explains so much about the incredible style of The Beatles. I can't even begin to say. And the 23 best cats in kick drums.

Mac Rogers Is The Man

Genius playwright Mac Rogers is all over The New York Times.

Mac also wrote the screenplay for our movie Angry Planet.

The part I seriously have to disagree with is this statement:

Mr. Rogers probably wouldn’t be much use if the robot hordes were to pounce.

I know Mac Rogers.  I met Mac Rogers when I was a subspace communication specialist (T-3) and he was a Marine door gunner on a landing boat on LV-426. Let me tell you something. If there's one guy you want standing by your side with a pulse rifle when the robot hordes are about to pounce, it's Mac Rogers.