NEW ASTRALIS VIDEO UNDERWAY

Last night Dan Dobson and I spent a few hours capturing gameplay footage from the latest build of Astralis.  The game is looking better than ever and we managed to pull about an hour of footage into 55 files, more than enough to get me started. Dan will be on hand to do any extra videos I need and send them to me using Dropbox.

The files themselves are huge so I'm going to use a trick that Alec (Astralis art director) taught me, which is to have a highly compressed version of the video loaded into Final Cut for when I am editing and building the video. The compressed version will be much smaller and easier to manage, reducing CPU strain and render times. Once the video is finished I find the source file for the videos on the hard drive and overwrite the compressed videos with the uncompressed videos (importantly, using the same final name). Final Cut then assembles the video using the full quality files.

The final render will be the only one that takes a little time. The hundreds of renders I will be doing before that will all be many magnitudes quicker. A simple trick, but one I never learned until now.

But first I need to compress all the full-quality videos. Once this is done I'll be ready to go!

Let's squish those files!

NEW LOOK

New look courtesy of the one-and-only Steve over at stevethone.com.

Steve is a professional graphic designer with eight years experience and is the mastermind behind the new visual theme across my blog, Twitter and Facebook pages. Steve, it's been an absolute pleasure working with you to get this new design up.

I commend this great man to you all without reservation.

HELLO WORLD

Well, a very long time after this "small easy project" started, I finally have a first draft of "Where's My Milk You Bastard".

It's terrible at the moment. It needs lots of fixes and to have the running time chopped down by a sizeable fraction, but it finally actually resembles a short film. A little bit of polish and maybe I'll finally share it with the world.

Now the first short narrative is out there it's time to start thinking about the next one! Possibly some dark drug infused nightmare of a short film, a collaboration with a brilliant mind. Say no more, for now.

Coming up - lots of work on a new video for Astralis! We've got some really good footage incoming and the game is looking it's best. Watch this space!