Settling...

I decided to go ahead an release my two latest Bits of Blender. YouTube is still not accepting FLVs since last week so I rendered these video in a variety of different formats and sizes, trying to get the quality as close to the FLVs as I could. They look okay, but I'm a bit frustrated with YouTube that I have to settle. FLV as the raw format seems to be the nicest quality for screen capture work displayed on YouTube.

I've got threads going in both the Adobe and YouTube forums on the issue, but so far no luck. You'd think Adobe would be a little put out as export to YouTube is one of the selling points of Premiere Elements 4. They certainly have more clout than I.

Being Cool

I can't seem to get into my YouTube account this evening. Hopefully they are working on the problem I posted about yesterday. When I try to access my account, I get two messages:

"This functionality is not available right now. Please try again later."
and

"We are currently performing site maintenance. Be cool - we'll be back 100% in a bit."

Broadcast Yourself... but not with FLV

Richard and I have uploaded 29 Bits of Blender. This weekend we did two more and tried to upload them. Using the same preset I've use for all of them, I found that YouTube was giving me an error "Failed (unable to convert video file)". After some trial and error, I found out it was the FLV format that YouTube is choking on. This is the format Adobe Premiere Elements 4 uses to upload to YouTube and what we've used for all our previous Bits. Why it stopped working, I've no clue. But YouTube will not accept a FLV today whether from Premiere or through the browser(I tried it both ways). I exported a WMV from Premiere and then uploaded through the browser and that worked, but is lower quality. I exported a MOV using H.264 at best quality it also worked, but it too was lower quality. I hope YouTube fixes this problem in short order.

Bit o' the Game Engine

Richard and I have launched our 18th Bit for Bits of Blender. This one is a whirlwind introduction to Logic Bricks and the game engine. I've begun teaching him about the game engine as a prepare a course for CartoonSmart.com. He couldn't resist having us show a little on it.

One thing I noticed in the video is that the velocity for one of the objects is faster than the framerate of the capture software. The software was capturing at 15fps, the game engine was running at 60fps, and I'm not sure what the YouTube encoder does to the fps.

Blender Game Engine

As I begin work on my next CartoonSmart.com tutorial, I decided to give my boy (and co-host of Bits of Blender) a first taste of the Blender Game Engine. Even starting with the very basics, he had a blast. Making something from scratch move, applying physics, knocking things down, what fun!

One of the things that is unique about Blender as a 3d modeling/animating/rendering package is that it also includes a game engine. In fact, if you ever accidentally hit the "P" key, you've experienced the game engine. Even more interesting is that there are two ways to program Blender games that work nicely in concert. One way, is visual using what Blender calls "Logic Bricks". The other way is textural, using the Python programming language. Blender has Python built in and even includes a text editor! Funny how I seem to get more excited over that than the game engine, but really I'm excited about both.

The nice thing about the game engine is that it is useful for gaming but can also be useful for animation. How? Blender allows you to record what happens while the game engine is running. It records it onto the IPO curves of the objects.

I've said it before... Blender is deeeeeeeep. There is so much it has in it. And it is stable. And addictive... ;-)

More Bits of Blender

After getting Premiere Elements working again, I added three more Bits of Blender. I also wanted to say "thanks" to Jay Shaffer for coming up with the music intro to BoB!

Bits of Blender launched

I just launched a new YouTube series called Bits of Blender. It is a series of short tips on using Blender. I hope it will be useful as a video reference. It is a little more casual than my CartoonSmart videos and I'm doing them with my boy (who is a 9-year-old Blenderhead). They are short and too the point, I hope to create them on a regular basis to help with documenting Blender's features. Blender's got a bit of a learning curve, so I hope this helps. These videos are like a reference book and my CartoonSmart videos are more like a big tutorial, where you learn as you work on a project. Sometimes you only want/need a snippet of info.