PixelConduit

Found this nice "little" software called PixelConduit that can do live video feed manipulation and compositing. It uses node-based workflow and can also work with stereo inputs, multi-display output, queing, staging and a lot of other stuff. Unfortunately it seems that it is for Mac only... Pricing for full version is 119$ which is really cheap for what it can do.

Homepage: http://lacquer.fi/pixelconduit.html

Lots of reading

Last week I finally received my new books that I ordered through Krisostomus bookshop. The books are:

Rotoscoping: Techniques and tools for the Aspiring Artist

Rotoscoping tips-tricks and general workflow handbook by Benjamin Bratt. How to roto more efficiently and get consistent high quality results.

VES Handbook of Visual Effects

Book by Jeff Okun and Susan Zwerman, covers all visual effects aspects and is intended to be kind of a "bible" that describes current industry standards and practices.

Visual Effects Producer: Understanding the Art and Business of Visual Effects

By Charles Finance and Suzan Swerman. About the management side of visual effects from planning to execution.

All three seem to be really good and insightful books, I hope that I get some time to write my own little reviews for all three of them.

Backburner render manager and Blender

I started wondering, how to get Blender renders to Autodesk Backburner render manager and it turned out to be quite easy. Backburner is the free render manager-server-monitor system that comes with 3DS Max, Maya and other Autodesk projects and can also accept any other command line executable input. Autodesk products can submit jobs directly from the program, other software need a plugin or one can submit jobs through command line tool called cmdjob.exe.

So how to do it with Blender

Basically it is very easy. Submit command looks something like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\Backburner\cmdjob.exe" -jobName "submitBlenderJob" -manager localhost -priority 50 -numTasks 1 "C:\Program Files\Blender\blender-2.66a-windows64\blender.exe" -b "C:\projekt\stseen.blend" -a

It breaks down into four parts:

cmdjob.exe <cmdjob parameters> <program executable> <program parameters>

Program parameters are the usual command line rendering arguments that can be found in Blender wiki or for other programs (AfterEffects for example) in their help documents.

cmdjob argumens can be found here:
http://download.autodesk.com/us/systemdocs/pdf/backburner2011_user_guide.pdf

some info about tasklists and dividing up jobs:
http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/16/ENU/3ds-Max-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-F23992DB-19BD-423A-A97C-5CC157328E63.htm,topicNumber=d30e554791

Blender command line arguments:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Doc/Command_Line_Arguments

Backburner 2012 installer:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=17888178&linkID=9241178

At the moment I use Backburner for scheduling AfterEffects and Blender jobs and it seems to work fine. You can also add e-mail notifications about success and errors which can be very handy.