this is unrelated, but hilarious

done with central

Opening night has come and gone.
It didnt crash!
also I made some prety cool friends and contacts up here, but I am going to be glad to see this place go. as much as it was fun when i was working on the show. the two weeks i stayed up here between the 1st tech day and the actual tech week were prety borring. I had a chance to observe tech of the other shows, but for the most part i was just working on the photoshop stuff and missing Holly. If I could have don things diffrently well, I would have booked a flight back to LB and returned once i needed to be back. then I could have at least not been stuck in an giant crepy lonley house. and I could have seen Holly at least once before i had to be back.and but hopefully this will spawn some new work for me back in LA, and perhaps in new york after i graduate.

Ah well hindsight is always 20/20 I did a good job, and after i get a week in mtl I will be back in LB and driving up to see the Love of my life.  Just hope shes managed to survive up there after not seeing me for a month.

we fixed it!

so after making the images much smaller (the advice finaly came from tech support) we ran the show through three times and no crashes!

then we tried to crash it and it wouldnt!
so as a reminder the projected image doesn't have to be as big as i thought it would. we can work fine with smaller images, and they still come out at a very good resolution.
also my picture is still in the show.
heres me as a dead body

 

also This is the phot at its original size, so now you get an idea of how big the image really needs to be. I think with a Hippotizer you could use much higher rez images to get a much cleaner crisper image, but in all these photos clean and crisp is not what we were looking for, and not somthing Isadora could handle

anyhow tomorrow night is opening night

hope it doesn't crash tomorrow

Preview tonight

The preview was tonight. It was going smoothly, that is until it crashed at the same spot, well not eaxctly the same spot, but we have discovered two problems, and the way we are fixing them is by preloading the images in the previous cue so the pictures dont jump as much on the shorter fades, but the crashing problem is still a mystery.

Tomorrow we have some time before they change over for the other operas, and we will see if our plan works to fix everything.
Hopefully all goes well. if not, well i think some images might get cut. which kind of sucks because I worked very hard on them.
this is what our server looks like now

The envelope generators are what preload the Image to avoid the jerkyness.
Still looks like a circut board, which i think is cool, i used to play with those do it yourself circuit boards when i was a kid. brings back memories

In other news, got a chance to text Holly she still loves me!, but well i cant really talk to her until next week, when i am back in mtl, and shes worried shes going to get fired if she gets caught texting me

the mountains

Still no word from the guys at isadora.
But other than the crashes the rest of the show is looking awesome. I am really proud of all the work I have done so far.

Also went for a hike up the mountains today. here's some photos

stupid technology

so we still haven't managed to have a run without Isadora crashing, it seems to be the same file every time, and tomorrow we don't have time to work during the day. everything else seems to have progressed nicely, its all looking good so far, but I am super worried about the whole crashing thing.

I think If i make the images even smaller it shouldn't be a problem. I sent the bug report in to the Isadora guys and hopefully they will get back to me by tomorrow.

Holly was online tonight, but instead of talking to me she decided to go in to town with the rest of her friends. she said she would come back online but she never did.
Normally in this kind of situation i would think somethings up, but i am sure she still loves me and nothing bad is happening. besides just yesterday she sent me a text saying she loved me and misses me.
but still, not cool. now i wont be able to talk to her for another week.

4th of July

nice day, got to sleep in.
worked on some of the photos making them smaller to see if that will help with the problem..
then Fireworks

its the little things

Still having the same problems with the crashing.
also no matter how hard we try I cant get rid of the little bright line in the center of the screen. If only we had gone with one projector instead of 2, ah well I will know for next time.

I cant wait to actulay see the show, I have only seen it from the monitor up in the projections loft, but it looks cool, 7 deadly sins i think is going to be very cool.

day off tomorrow. hope i get a chance to speak to Holly, I really miss her, and I haven't received a letter or spoken to her in what feels like for ever, I wonder if shes getting my letters.

The wonders of Isadora / the problem with Isadora

So i have been working with Isadora  for a little over 2 months now, and i can honestly say i have fallen in love with her. for those of you who don't want to bother with the link Isadora is a media control device that is very cheap, and extremely versatile. In fact it is so versatile every show that is created in Isadora is going to be different. and anyone who uses Iss has to basically build their media playback device from scratch.

This all makes perfect sense I swear

And to make maters awesome the creator of this program is always willing to help out anyone who is using it.
In fact he made a custom component to the server just for a problem i was experiencing.
to me thats one of the biggest selling points of this software. (seriously Mark Coniglio If I ever meet you in person I owe you a beer or two)
The other big plus is the program offers the user a huge amount of creativity in just the creation of the player. everything can be customized, and if the programmer doesnt find the right "actor" to do what he needs he can create it.
that is if he knows how to program...
so that brings me to the problems with Isadora
now keep in mind i have only been using Iss for a few months and that was with a specific goal in mind.
so everything i say has a bit of a production bias to it.
so the goal was to trigger cues in Isadora via an ETC Ion. seems simple enough, the Ion can trigger cues via midi dmx or artnet.
Isadora can receive information via Midi and network connections...  the Ion can send signals via midi. simple?
no
Isadora communicates in midi notes the Ion does not
so we upgrade to dmx to usb, simple, the mac using isadora does not like the dmx to usb system we got...
so were does that leave us, well  that leaves us in a rough spot. now the solution we ended up with is having it run by an operator.
now i know many other people have managed to make isadora run via control console, (another thing that makes isadora awesome is the other users often share ideas and custom bits they have made)
but we could not, so in that respect it didn't do exactly what I wanted it to. Granted if i had a bit more time and a bit more programming experience i could have created something to make the communication happen, but I did not, so I had to work with what i had.

so the downside to Isadora is it has some difficulty communicating with control consoles. but this is a problem that is known to the creator and I am sure we will see this feature in the future.

as it stands Isadora is giving me flexibility to experiment and be creative with projections, and it is an amazing pice of software for the price tag.

Happy Canada day

Happy canada day everyone

I'm in tech. :(

and things aren't going as well as they should. Isadora has been crashing alot lately and we are trying everything within our power to fix it, but the tech support has not gotten back to us yet.
Isadora is a bit of a pain, because its entirly user created, so if you are still kind of new to the whole program (only had it for the past 5 months) it can be quite difficult. also there is a bit of a learning curve.
I cant wait to see how good i am with it by next year though.

In other news I haven't heard from Holly in almost a week, this is kind of sad, I hope nothing is wrong.