Bassam Kurdali - pumprock.net

2016-03-10T02:00:15Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers , Christopher Allan Webber

So, I was going through old shelves and found notebook with what appears to be old storyboards! check em out: https://urchn.org/post/something-old They're all for an old Blender animation called Chicken Chair, which you can view at the post in glorious html5 video :)

LibrePlanet Session Schedule is up

2016-02-19T20:58:26Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

https://libreplanet.org/2016/program/

I'm on there with a talk about blender and python! If you have a laptop and you're planning to come, install blender on it ( http://blender.org ) But it should be followable if you don't.

Jessica Tallon , Christopher Allan Webber like this.

Christopher Allan Webber shared this.

Aiko

2016-02-09T05:06:03Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

My friend Evan is making a sort of samurai fantasy animation - really beautiful design and visuals: https://vimeo.com/154551506

Not a free culture/free software thing, but nice looking nonetheless

Org Nodes!

2016-02-06T19:34:01Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

Super geeky post up on urchn.org:

https://urchn.org/post/planning-in-blenderorgnodes

All about hijacking Blender's Node Editor to use as a project planning tool. Wait long enough and Blender will be able to send/recieve mail too - it's just a matter of time :)

Alex Jordan , Christopher Allan Webber like this.

timburbank , Christopher Allan Webber shared this.

OMG, Blemacs!

Or, you know... E...nder! xD

JanKusanagi at 2016-02-08T05:32:37Z

Christopher Allan Webber , Bassam Kurdali like this.

2016-01-29T21:11:45Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers , Christopher Allan Webber

Unboxing Fruitcake in the drome! Thanks Chris!

Christopher Allan Webber likes this.

Christopher Allan Webber shared this.

photography by tim burbank ([email protected])

Bassam Kurdali at 2016-01-29T21:20:52Z

Christopher Allan Webber , timburbank like this.

Updates on Wires for Empathy

2016-01-27T21:34:19Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

We made a few updates about the status of our open movie, wires for empathy:

A grab-bag of renders and updates here: https://urchn.org/post/wires-for-empathy-an-overview-of-current-progress

A fun explanation of procedural cracking (algorithm, images, and code): https://urchn.org/post/moar-cracks

Tyng-Ruey Chuang , Charles ☕ Stanhope , Christopher Allan Webber , Dana and 1 others like this.

Adonay Felipe Nogueira , Christopher Allan Webber , Dana , Mike Linksvayer shared this.

Looking good =)

JanKusanagi at 2016-01-28T01:06:20Z

Bassam Kurdali likes this.

Interview with yours truly on renderstreet

2015-02-19T20:38:06Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

So the folks at renderstreet (a commercial renderfarm that supports blender) do some interviews from time to time on their blog. They ask me some questions about FLOSS, Blender, Movies, etc. Might be fun reading if you like to geek out about this stuff as I do :) http://blog.render.st/bassam-kurdali-i-see-open-source-as-a-movement-for-social-good/

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) , mnd , Mike Linksvayer , Jason Self and 1 others like this.

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) , Mike Linksvayer , Christopher Allan Webber shared this.

Wonderful interview, with wonderful choices of words!

Christopher Allan Webber at 2015-02-19T20:57:25Z

thanks

animeguard at 2015-05-29T02:21:41Z

Wow, totally agree. Bassam speaks in poetry.

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2015-11-09T14:46:15Z

Random ideas about Free Software Video transcoding

2015-01-06T18:05:28Z via Pumpa To: Public CC: Followers

So, after doing the User Liberation video for the Free Software Foundation campaign, I did a longish postmortem that you can read here. There's a little section in it about (video) compression that got me thinking: There's roughly two types of transcoding you can easily do in free software, from a user perspective:

Command line stanzas, either using ffmpeg directly, or something like mencoder or gstreamer
A user centric tool like Transmageddon or handbrake, that offers necessarily limited options and media type choices, based on presets for specific devices or outputs
(I said roughly) built in (also usually preset based) encoding options in bigger programs like kdenlive, Pitivi, Blender, that usually expose a few under-the-hood knobs.

Ignoring bugs, this works OKish - but it is non-ideal for my specific use-case, lets say: animator / filmmaker who needs to do 'professional' mastering, produce multiple output types and sizes/ target media, and is not an expert on arcane options in video codecs.

Command line gives you the ability to massively shoot yourself in the foot. we mainly end up cribbing ffmpeg stanzas off each other or the 'net - and these tend to break from time to time, as either the requirements change or ffmpeg does. In general, this tends to give videos that play on your own machine fine, but might break on different OS's / devices.
Tools like transmageddon or handbrake may or may not have options you need, and feel fairly rigid: if you mess with the preset (Assuming you can) you might break the output. I still get non-working on all platforms video (especially using h264) but less so, and I can't work with my 'real' masters: image sequences and audio tracks - I have to start from a video, encoded losslessly - this means I have to do a pre-encoding to a lossless format before I can actually encode the video.
Output from Blender is often quite limited, Pitivi is better, but I do get into the 'not enough feedback' issue: I don't really know what a knob does unless I output the video, and even then, sometimes it is a mystery what it did.

So what might be cool ideas / experiments?

GUI tool for professionals: assume one needs to produce the video but doesn't really understand too much about codec options
Multiple targets per video: add multiple output formats/ devices/ resolutions to each 'master', which implies:
Ability to scale and crop per-target
Work with multiple input streams, including image sequences, audio and subtitle tracks
Constraints not just presets (per target) This one is a bit weirder, but what if you didn't just lock down all options, but limited them depending on the target device - for each target, expose only those knobs that would vary quality but not create an unplayable file. Optionally, one could add filesize/ bandwidth/ CPU horsepower to the constraints as well as the target device/OS
Live preview: encoding is usually happening at a reasonable frame rate, anywhere from 1 to 20 frames per second. It should be possible to display (selectable with a timeline scrubber) a frame of the video and live change the result of tweaking the available knobs (in the ranges specified by the constraints
Easily save settings for an encode as a new batch for future videos

Christopher Allan Webber , Benjamin Cook , olm-e , mray and 1 others like this.

Christopher Allan Webber , JanKusanagi shared this.

Show all 6 replies

From your description the first thing I thought about was DVD::Rip. But it's not any more friendly to use than just ffmpeg from the command line.

Cyber Killer at 2015-01-07T04:32:07Z

Yes - actually from a pure technical standpoint, the libraries and tools used for video encoding are great - it is more about interface and allowing control without expecting the user to know what each underlying setting does.

Three are tools that do this for consumers, and are very limited (as they should be) but there's not really a good one for filmmakers/animators yet. Handbrake is quite good, but it is strange that it only does h264 output... am I wrong about that?

Bassam Kurdali at 2015-01-07T20:45:20Z

HandBrake version 0.10.0 added support for VP8, but only when put into a Matroska container so it's not really "WebM" compliant but could be made so by re-muxing it after encoding. (I use command line tools like FFmpeg for all of my audio and video encoding needs because I find the GUI ones way too limiting. And I go compile the latest versions of libraries FFmpeg will use such as libvpx so as to get all of the latest wonders that's being adding. But yes, I know that not everyone wants to do that.) ;)

Jason Self at 2015-01-07T20:52:35Z

Handbrake is really handy (hehe) when you want to share with people on 'other platforms' and want to know that your video will actually work for them. I'm guessing it isn't too hard to add profiles to it, so it might be a good swiss army knife too...

Bassam Kurdali at 2015-02-19T20:36:02Z

2014-11-10T19:40:05Z via pumprock.net Web CC: Public

Bassam Kurdali [email protected]