Studio Artist Software Opens New Dimensions for Second Life Photography and Machinima Making

Studio Artist is an amazing software program that can generate a vast range of paint, vector and image processing effects on stills, video files and even live video streams. The image below shows detail of an original and auto-rotoscoped frame from the video I posted yesterday.

The Macintosh-only software can create effects unlike any other program I've run across, including resolution-independent simulations of painting styles, time-based processing and multiple key-frame effects chains.

I'll share more of its features over the coming months as I apply them in Second Life projects. For now, here's a pretty detailed review of the software from Mac Animation Pro.



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My first shot at rotoscoping video created in Second Life

For best viewing, download the 1280 X 720 Quicktime file here by right-clicking and saving to your hard drive.

More Games Our Brains Play

Here's another video from Ted Talks related to the mental construction of reality. This one is a lecture by Philosopher Philosopher Dan Dennett. It starts off a bit slow, but eventually presents some compelling evidence that "not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us."

Why Seeing Shouldn't Be Believing

Yesterday's images crudely demonstrated how just a little resolution enhancement can ruin one's enjoyment of erotica. Magnification can break down our typical experience of a virtual world by revealing the underlying absence of detail and complexity. Magnification can cut through our normal perception of the physical world by revealing almost infinite levels of detail and complexity.

This fun video by neuroscientist Al Seckel demonstrates some of the ways the mind interprets and misinterprets visual imagery.

Q. What Does Hi-Def Video Teach About Porn and Second Life?

A. Too much detail can ruin a fantasy.

And the HD Hosting Winner is Blip.tv

The last post linked to versions of an HD test video uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo. Video hosting services don't stream your original video, but re-encode to fit their particular display formats. So quality can vary quite bit depending upon the specifications of the original video you upload and the particular way a service renders into their final format.

Vimeo produced the best image of the two services I tried yesterday and was the least picky about image format. Today, I uploaded to blip.tv, and in my opinion it's the all around best choice. The image quality is as good as Vimeo, plus it's the only option that supports embeddable HD video (although I don't have the width available here for the full resolution.)

My First HD Video: Persona

I put a very short video together to test YouTube's new HD capability. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to export a format that works well. The video either doesn't register as HD or the encoding is very choppy.

YouTube HD is working now and can be viewed here. The settings that finally worked were:

• .mp4
• H.264
• 5000 kps data rate
• 30 fps
  
• optimized for streaming
• 1466 byte maximum packet size

The embedded Vimeo clip below is low res. Here's the link to the vimeo HD version.


Persona from Botgirl Questi on Vimeo.