Objects At Rest

explorations in audio and moving imagery

Category: Equipment & Supplies

  • Backup!

    World backup day is March 31st. Even though I’m writing this in July the topic seems relevant at any time and the sooner the better if you are not backing up already.

    Stopmotion, or most animation productions for that matter, are very time consuming endeavors. Even though stopmotion productions involve real puppets and sets, a huge portion of the project assets live in the digital realm. A backup plan to maintain and restore hundreds of hours worth of footage and other production content is critical. I have been exploring backup scenarios and recently used gliffy to diagram a plan. I have also been exploring crashplan as an additional backup component during active productions where new footage and files are being created regularly.

    Here is my gliffy backup plan diagram.

    backup-plan-diagram-2013

    The plan contains redundancy to cover failures that might occur at various levels such as device, location and time. I also added the Vimeo example as a form of backup since it allows for the publishing of high definition content (although in a compressed form). There are other network attached storage solutions, external drives and RAID solutions that I may explore further. For example, something like drobo looks like it could take the place of individual USB drives in my diagram.

  • Modular Support Rig for Puppets

    I viewed a work in progress video by Justin Rasch and Shel Wagner Rasch recently. The support rig is still visible, which is fascinating to see. What appears to be a free weight is being used for the base. I had previously been drilling holes in the floor of my sets to hold wire support rigs for my puppet animations. The free weight idea is better because it offers stability PLUS mobility, flexibility of use, and freedom of placement on the set.

    I took a trip to the used sports equipment store and got a couple of 3 pound weights. The example in the Rasch video shows the armature wire secured to the weight. That pretty much guarantees stability. However, I wanted to explore something modular to help speed up repairs if the rig wire breaks during filming. I went to the home improvement store’s plumbing section and explored a bit. I found sections of plastic threaded pipe with associated threaded caps. I uploaded 5 pictures to flickr that I took while building.

    Armature support rig

    The experiment seems to have worked. There is nothing really permanent except the twisted rig wire epoxied into one cap. If the rig wire fails I just replace the cap (which means I can have spare wire-caps ready). If the height of the rig needs to be adjusted, I can add longer or shorter sections of pipe since they come in different lengths.

    I won’t know for certain how these modular supports work until I put them to use in a future project. Many thanks to the Rasch’s for posting their work in progress which inspired this quick project.

  • Story Cubes

    I made some story cubes over the weekend as a creative project.

    story cubes

    Story cubes seem to be used for brainstorming stories or narrative content. You roll them out and based on the icons that are showing formulate some kind of story. Since they are physical blocks it adds a tactile quality to the activity which is nice.

    Searching further on the web resulted in screen shots of the illustrations on story cubes. I found a set for purchase called Rory’s Story Cubes which unfortunately appeared to be sold out. So, I went to Michael’s and got 1 inch wood blocks and a small basswood box to make my own set of cubes.

    The cubes on the web seem to be in groups of nine. But the box at Michael’s would hold sixteen blocks. So I made nine blocks and then added six more blocks with generic shapes and colors. I suppose the extra cubes could come in handy for added brainstorming. I was planning on painting the cubes white and using a marker to draw the icons but decided to use my wood burning tool and just stained the wood.

    It was a fun creative diversion from animation and perhaps it will help when generating ideas for future projects.

    Sources:

  • Camera Dolly 2008

    Recently I read some information about camera rigs and the concepts found in model railroad designs inspired me. So, I browsed the “orange” home improvement store and found some items to build a dolly over the weekend.

    All photos are on the Flickr site (click the photo to see them). You can probably get the idea from the pics without further description but post a comment if you have any particular questions and I can upate the info.

    photo

    Pros: It seems to work pretty good.

    Cons: The tripod mount is too unstable and results in camera shake. Putting the rig on a firm stand should do the trick.

    A test video is coming soon.

  • UPDATE PART 2 – Philips Webcam vs Zigview S2

    Breaking news! Nellybob has posted a complete solution on Stopmotionanimation.com for using the Philips with a DSLR camera. He has addressed the specific issues I had with the webcam and attaching it to the camera and it looks really good. The only issues that remain for me at this are specific PC config problems for the cam. I may be doing a second look at the Philips once I resolve my PC/USB issues. Thank you Nellybob!

    —-ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS—-

    There have been some posts at the stopmotionanimation.com forum about the new Philips SPC900NC webcam. The specs looked good for use as a video assist so I got my hands on one and did some quick tests. Here are some side by side shots of the Philips and the Zigview (click on the pics for the full resolution version which shows the size and quality of what I’m seeing on my monitor in my screen cap software).

    pic

    pic

    The shot is lit with incandescent bulbs, one 60 watt and one 20 watt fill with a desk light on the other side of the room. The Philips pics are darker (to me it looks more natural and similar to what I’m seeing through the Nikon viewfinder) but keep in mind that I did not adjust the image settings very much. I could boost the brightness and contrast on the Philips if needed. The Zigview, as far as I know, doesn’t offer these subtle controls outside of the on screen menus.

    I’ve had white colors blowing out the picture in the Zig when animating so the Philips would work better in those situations. To me they are both about the same quality…blurry…but the Philips costs hundreds less and with the option to go 30fps or greater the picture appears smoother. The Zig has noise in the image like a cloud of mosquitoes compared to the Philips. Also, I have to plug the Zigview up to the electrical outlet since the battery life isn’t long but the Philips is USB powered which means less cords and electricity.

    I used the digital zoom to get the Philips image to fill the screen but the Zigview is running at the default. Considering the zoom and the small size of the viewfinder the Philips is doing a pretty good job. I’ll need to test it some more.

    UPDATE

    I did some testing with the Philips in my animation workflow and ran into some problems.

    • The Philips knocked out my ability to run my external USB sound card
    • The USB capture from my Nikon and the Philips USB didn’t get along well — it slowed my system down to a stop
    • My screen grab software started becoming unresponsive
    • My Zigview runs without any problems and all other systems are unaffected by the Zigview.

    I suspect most of the problems are related more to my system than to the Philips but I’ll be sticking with the Zigview for the time being since I need to finish my animation instead of troubleshooting PC configurations.