Every time Adobe releases a new version of their Creative Suite thousands of us lust after the expensive upgrade until we get it and promptly use none of the new features. One of the new feature sets in Photoshop CS3 is frame by frame animation, quite similar to what was previously offered in ImageReady but much more integrated and powerful.

I have been looking for a good way to animate a series of jpegs into a movie since January. Running through the images of our Disney vacation in Lightroom or Bridge always looks like a stop motion film and I wanted to actually turn them into a stop motion video. Enter PS CS3’s new features:

1. Export my jpegs at a reasonable size.
2. Import the jpegs into an image stack in PS (File menu >> Scripts >> Import images to stack
3. In the animation palette select ‘Convert Layers to Frames’
4. Also in the animation palette select ‘Reverse Frame Order’
5. Select all frames and choose delay (I went with 0.1s)
6. File >> Export >> Render Video . .

I ran 479 jpegs through this process and then re-encoded the resulting quicktime movie in Flash Video Converter (there are free apps that will do this - ffmpegx on mac, and several ffmpeg gui’s for linux and windows), and spit out a 6mb flv file that streams fine.

http://drennonfamily.com/blog/?itemid=49

I ran across this lego tribute to Eddie Izzard’s “Death Star Canteen” bit. Eddie Izzard is by far my favorite comedian and whoever put this stop motion lego together did a great job, it’s hilarious.

1. Laura Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

2. Take Your Mama Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

3. Three Imaginary Boys The Cure Three Imaginary Boys

4. Just Radiohead The Bends

5. Nemesis Shriekback Oil & Gold

You can learn a lot about someone from the top 5 most played in their iTunes (or Amarok . . .), or hopefully not in my case. But probably . . .

1. I Can’t Decide Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

2. Spider Pig Hans Zimmer The Simpsons Movie OST

3. She’s My Man Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

4. Take Your Mama Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

5. Rocks Toshiro Matsuda Naruto OST

and what am I listening to as I write this? #4 to tell the truth . . .

If you haven’t heard ‘em, hit up Amazon’s mp3 store for Scissor Sisters (or iTunes). Brilliant.

stitch

Systematic Disorder is finally up. An unnecessary outlet for all the things that wouldn’t make sense anywhere else.

Wordpress (WP) (the backbone of this site) is something new for me to play with. I cut my teeth on NucleusCMS which I still believe to be amazing, but as the world turns I find new and much easier programs to work with. I’ve had to learn CSS now and php is next on the list. Between the two WP can be customized to any end imaginable, not to mention the 1300+ plug-ins that have been developed. This should be fun!

Besides championing FOSS (google it) and railing against Apple’s poor quality control, this will serve as an outlet for random photography, economic analysis, musical critique, and apparently conjoined sentence fragments displaying numerous grammatical errors.

” If you just cut your clothes and change your hair
But I won’t fuss and moan bout what you wear”  - Jake Shears