The Word From On High

So, the word from the mountaintop, writ large upon some stone tablets is:

Make Disaster Films

Disaster kitty says "make disaster movies".

That's the word from on high. Disaster pictures.

Project Management

Do you know what's really exciting? Project management.
Trello isn't working for me. Basecamp doesn't allow for dependencies.

This picture from Android Insurrection amuses me greatly. That's David Ian Lee and Jeff Wills.

I'm also putting together information about where we might move. Nobody will come to Jersey City. It doesn't matter if it's actually easier for them to get to than other places. But frankly, for Rebecca and Maduka, Williamsburg and Greenpoint actually are closer for them.
Wix has a free space in Union Square. A free open-space office?
Greenpoint Coworking is $350/month.
Work At The Yard has private offices for $400/month
Missionfifty is in Hoboken. So except for the fact that not one of my editors will ever come there, it seems cool (they also have about zero information on their own website so I was looking here.)
Submerse.me has space in midtown.
Projective Space is worth visiting. They're in Soho.
Imrey Culbert also rents space.

Reports from the West

The word from the front lines is that AFM was better this year than last. Of course, last year made for a low bar. ;-)

Just because it's kind of cool, dig Ironbound Studios in Newark, NJ.

WordWiki

Earthkiller gang.

Now I'm exploring the world of WordPress to solve my Interweb Woes (via Allan Mackey -- see comment on post below).

Wordpress Wiki -- a Wiki for Wordpress. What I mean is a Wiki which works on Wordpress.
Ndizi project management. So far I haven't found a Wordpress plugin which supports Gantt charts and dependencies though. Still looking.

Posting Bunnies

Well, right now pandoramachine.com is was down. Smeh. It apparently has something to do with hsaccess files. I tried to get PHProjekt to work by installing it through Fantastico. But there are issues with PHProjekt and "magic quotes".

The tech person at IVHosting wrote back that

you can adjust php settings through your own php.ini file, you need to create the file in public_html directory or subfolder of public_html - where you want the settings adjusted.
Example: to change register_globals value you need to create php.ini file with the following line: register_globals = on

But before I could even deal with that I managed to plop and skunk the whole site.

Tech support said that I have an htaccess file in my root directory that says

php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off
php_value magic_quotes_gpc Off
which is BAD and giving 500 errors.

So I fixed that. But when I logged onto Fantastico in order to put dotProject onto my server, Fantastico told me I should update Tiki Wiki. So I, er, did. And that, of course, broke our Wiki.

In the meantime we should start to have dotProject on our server.

Oh, and look. The wiki fixed itself.

I don't want to do any more of this kind of work ever again. See? This is why I post bunnies.

Gabi's Video

Our own Gabriella Willenz directed this beautiful music video.

I'm really digging the amber and emerald color palate.

Parental Blogeration

Right this minute my parents have a blog, although nobody has posted to it yet. I'm kind of expecting the blog to be mostly restaurant reviews, although it may get filled up with cats.
Because there is infinite demand for cats on the Internet.

177 MacDougal Street

Vanishing New York on the closing of Theatresource notes that the agency representing the property says that the theater could be converted into residential.
I'm not entirely familiar with New York City zoning laws. Although I'm kinda under the impression that the theater's two floors cannot be converted into residential. There is an odd piece of the third floor (which we've already been kicked out of) which is residential but I believe it cannot be subdivided and therefore can only be rented to whomever is using the 3rd floor as his residence.
The Washington Square Park Blog has more on the sale of the property.

There's a walkthrough video of the properties which include Monk's and (what I presume to be) what was Love and even that place that was many pizzarias until it because a back-office kitchen.


The realtor has posted a bunch of information which includes the C of O for the property.

They've also published the revenues and expenses. The highlighted portion implies that the Theatresource part of the property will be converted to residential as the "best and highest use". At least that's what I infer from it, not being expert at these things.

If this is true, then the Board of Theatresource has essentially locked any future theater company from taking over the space by making a deal with the landlord to hand the building over empty.

Earthkiller Machine

I'm neither an Apple nor a Microsoft partisan. Nor do I advocate Intel over ATI. Heck, I don't get spittin' mad over Neve versus SSL. Wait, what blog am I writing?
Anyway, as I sit and wait on renders, I think more upon having a simply earth-killing computer machine.
Macs have traditionally offered us the advantage of interoperability of their files with labs and other studios. But I'm deeply afraid of Apple's ability to be total buttheads and trashing professional support.

The dual hex-core from Apple is $5649 while the dual hex-core from Dell is, oddly, $5420. The big difference between the Apple and the Dell is the video card. But the "Apple tax" isn't terribly high on the very expensive machines.
But I have no way to compare video cards to one another because video cards are a dark science of occult which burns the souls of all ye who dare approach.
The other strange thing is that the Dell actually comes with no real operating system. FreeDOS is what it has. I don't know what that's all about.
An Apple dual quad-core is $4149. So it's .73 the price of the hex-core and (theoretically) .66 the number of cores. Right? Who knows? My math is fuzzy.

These Apple machines are both spec'ed with the better video card that Apple has.

Dell's dual hex-core with 12GB of RAM.

The last two facts here are that Apple makes a (generally) stable machine. And the 24 months 0% financing is like... well it depends on what you think of interest. A couple hundred bucks? A thousand bucks?
Who knows?

Netbook

People. Asking about netbook computers. I am answering their questions.

$250 is a pretty good price for a lil' computer to surf the Web and check email on. You can even write scripts on it.
But what if you, for whatever deranged reason, need to run OSX? There's a compatibility chart for that. In my experience it's a big ol' pain in the tuchus to get OSX to run on a Windows netbook, but I have been able to do it. And if you're running (say) Qlab, then you gotta do what you gotta do.
Anyway, here are some computers highly rated for running OSX:
A used HP Mini 1000 will set you back less than $200.

Same thing with a used Dell Mini 10.

And that's my report on computers you can throw in your backpack.
Here's a 1TB USB portable hard drive.


Note to people like my parents: you'll have to click through to the blog to actually see what I'm talking about.
Note to people who aren't my parents: we don't actually talk you see, we just blog at one another.

Charred Pancakes and No Pants

Country Pancake House. There's one in Florida. There's one in Ridgewood NJ.  I'm not sayin'. I'm just sayin'.
+++++
Our own Michael Chmiel is raising money for his short, "Charred".
+++++

On Facebook they all ask "When isn't it 'no pants day' in the Pandora Machine?"

Is there any good reason that it's almost 90 degrees in my studio? Well, if by "good reason" you mean "excuse to not wear pants" then I guess the answer is yes.

Cats, Tracks, and Hacks

VooCAT is a motion-tracking package which works with Blender. I haven't tried it. It's only a hundred Euros.
The "non-commercial" version is Voodoo Camera Tracker. But to use it with a modern version of Blender you need this import script (the instructions for installing are here).
My goal with the above paragraph was to bore you until you cried. Did it work?

Do you find that sometimes you want to paste onto a specific track in Final Cut Pro? And FCP doesn't want you to do it the way you do? Here's how to tell FCP what track to paste into.
+++++
Allan Mackey reminded us (in the comments below) about Trello. So I'm working in Trello to schedule. I'll tell you how that goes.

Cats, Frogs, Mitch Gross

I find this cat way too amusing.
Somebody remind me that I have to get to the theater by noon tomorrow because the caterer from the art opening left her bag and she needs to pick it up.
The Frogman cracks me up.
Mitch Gross doesn't get nearly as much Internet "wow" as he deserves for his Abel Cine videos. He cuts right through the malarkey and offers technical details in his off-handed way that are frequently pretty unique. After all the Internet yelling this week about Red/Canon cameras it's nice to see somebody actually operate a light.
One thing Mitch didn't go into any detail about but that Remote Phosphor light seems to have a very even spread, not so much of a hot spot in the middle of it. Sure, you can say that for twelve hundred bucks it better be nice but hey -- at least it is.

My Three Pandora Machineries

Firstly.
So we doubled the amount of RAM in our Mac. It was, for some reason, only 4GB and that kind of sucked. I bought two more 2GB sticks and put them in.
For a while the computer was reading 10GB of RAM but that there were ECC errors on one of the old sticks. Then the computer decided it only has 8GB of RAM with no errors. Which is what I thought it would do. Still. Weird. But it renders a LOT faster now.
Firstwise Part II.
Then I quadrupled the amount of vRAM by installing a new video card.
That project has gone more weirdly. I do not, nor can I, understand video cards, what they do, and how they work. In the fantasy world of computers that my little mind lives in: one video card for each of two monitors should be better and faster. Right? That's how it works. Right?
Anyway, of the three video outputs on the new video card, only one is DVI. The other two are the tiny proprietary connector which costs another $100 I don't want to spend.
I have the old ATI Radeon HD 2600 the computer came with in slot three
I have the new fancier ATI Radeon HD 5700 in slot one
Right away everything seemed to work. But Final Cut Pro will not absolutely will not no way no how use the right-hand monitor (from the 2600) as a "Digital Cinema Display". FCP will gladly use both monitors otherwise though.
So I've set up a custom set of windows where the "Canvas" window is in the right-hand monitor. Which is essentially how we used to work with the "Digital Cinema Display" anyway.
And yeah, the "Digital Cinema Display" will work on the primary (center) monitor -- but when you do that you have no tools or anything because the display takes up the whole screen. This is, apparently, a known issue. But maybe I don't care about it because this seems like a perfectly reasonable way to work.

Editing in Final Cut Pro. That's Virginia Logan on the left/center and Jeff Wills on the right.

Groove to the sickly orange glow of the incandescent lights in my studio.

Thing number two.
I tried Manymoon for project management. It doesn't have task dependencies. I wanted to set up project management so that we could schedule, say, the mixing of an act to be dependent on it being edited first. But Manymoon doesn't work that way. So I'll be doing something... else.

Lastwise.
I'm considering formatting the camera drive for Dragon Girl using ExFAT. The advantage to exFAT is that both (modern) PC's and (modern) Macs can read and write to it using large file sizes. I'll tell you (you'll probably hear me screaming) how that goes.