TRAVEL - high over greenland somewhere

Ok, just a quick post because i can...

WICKED LINK - dance boy, dance!

i need to post this for you guys...

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=593402085&n=2

take care

O2PC - the beginning...

As i wrote earlier, i have decided to take this trusty old SGI O2 (kindly donated by duckling post production www.duckling.dk) and turn it into a pc... Just wanted to show you my progress. I've taken her apart, which initially was quite difficult untill something magic happened and it just fell apart. I'm planning to use the old motherboard 'tray' for the new motherboard that i am still awaiting. It should ship from germany on the 30th or something like that.
Untill now i have the dual core intel processor, 2 gigs of ram, and 2 sata drives . I have an nvidia7900 on order that should be here any day now!
All i need to find now is:

• powersupply... a quite one! silence is very important here, as it's for home :)
• cpu fan... i'm reluctant to order one before i see how big the 7900 is. this too should be quite
• a dvd drive.. maybe blueray or hd-dvd?

I'll keep uploading

VFX - the needs for METHODS

Ok, first real post here.

When I am not working hard on visual effects, and trying desperately to have a social life, I spend my time studying for an Msc in Software Engineering, online at Liverpool university. This is really great, and i'm learning loads. At the moment we have been looking at CASE tools. Computer Aided Software Engineering tools. These are great tools that do everything from planning, to bidding, to designing, and monitoring projects. Is it just me, or would a tool like that be more than great for the vfx industry.

Very often when discussing how projects should be run and started etc, you have two discussions, rolled into one. What is it we need to do, and how do we do it. By having a system that lets us use standard methods for planning and bidding and tracking projects, we can split up the two. This in turn means that when we discuss what it is we want (or the client wants) done, we have a pretty good idea how it will be solved, and when we are done with that, we know exactly what needs to be done, and have a good idea how to start it.
I had this talk with my dad today. He used to work at a large company supplying system solutions for banks, governments etc. According to him, it was vital for running a project that you do a few things:

1. Assign difficulty levels to jobs. It's probably more generic in systems development than in visual effects, but it should be possible to figure out a way to implement it. Say you have three difficulty levels which you assign to every task. That way you can quickly see which resources you will need.
2. Have standard measures. This on again is hard to generalize, but the way he put it, you count how many screens, how many databases and what else you will need. Now based on experience, you have an idea that designing one screen (this is software dev still) takes 6 hours and is an easy job to do....
3. This means you need one junior technician, for 6 hours to do that one task. Do this on the whole job and you will have an estimate of the time and resources needed.
4. Now for the interesting part, you need to track your progress. Every job assigned is logged, and the person it is assigned to will report how much time it took. If it was not done within the given time, the person should estimate how much time extra is needed.
5. Take this data from all the tasks and resources, and you can pretty accurately see what progress you are making, and analyze new estimates. If all the 6 hour junior tasks take 7 hours, and you have 200 of those, that means you will need to find 200 more man hours, or change the method. This estimate can be calculated at all times, which is the brilliant part of it.

Now, to implement this into a vfx production pipeline is something completely different, and not something that would be easy in any way, but it might be worth it.

just a thought.

First Post...

Allrighty... first post... blank canvas...

In this blog i will cover what's going on in my little world. To some degree anyway. There are alot of things happening in the world of pete at the moment and some of them are not set in stone yet, so i cant tell you the whole story yet. but the things i will start by telling you all about during the coming time are....

• O2PC ... I'm refitting a good ol' SGI O2 with a dual core pc motherboard, an nvidia 7900 graphics card, and a couple of harddrives. It'll probably be the fastest O2 ever :)
• My thoughts on working in the Visual Effects industry. Alot of this is sparked by my recent enrollment to get a masters degree in computer science, software engineering. I'm learning alot of things that can be easily be transformed to be used in the vfx industry
• Things I come up with... i have a tendency to come up with odd projects...
• Travelling... I like to travel... and sometimes i actually get to travel which is nice, since i like it...
• Movie thoughts... i watch alot of movies...

but for now...back to work