Friday, June 22, 2007

Let there be light!!!


Here it is - the Lowel Pro-Light. It's something I've had my eye on for some time and tonight I just decided to go ahead and splurge. The linketty-link will take you to B&H Photo, where I purchased this sweet little piece of lighting bliss. It's fully focusable, from a flood to a spotlight, accepts barndoors and gels (purchased separately) and takes various bulbs with a wide range of wattage. Plus it can be converted (quite easily) to work with batteries or mounted to a camera's hotshoe. Quite a versatile little device, if you ask me! Of course, it hasn't arrived yet, so I can't tell you if it actually does what I need it to! Oh, and the price for the light with bulb plus barndoors, a spare 200 watt bulb, and a nifty Tota-Clamp and packet of 8 Gel-Jaws only set me back a cool $220! Not a bad purchase, pro-lightingwise! And now at last I get to have a super-cool pro-looking light with freakin' BARNDOORS hanging from my grid! Maybe THAT will jumpstart me back into some sense of motivation!

Many thanks to all my various webfriends who've kept me company (as much as I've allowed them to) and tried to keep my flagging spirits aloft - especially Kelly Mazurowski, one of my first animation buds who recently contacted me with a shot in the arm in the form of a super-inspiring talk about animating and his job over at Shadow Machine Films. Also, I've drawn a lot of comfort from reading all the blogs you fine people are running - you know who you are!

Friday, June 08, 2007

Friends with Framethief once again!!!

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Just wanted to pop in and say that I've at least solved my Framethief woes. No other framegrabber for the Mac works nearly as well, as far as I'm concerned. Not sure what will happen when everything is all Intel Macs, and Framethief doesn't work anymore. Guess I need to keep this raggedy old computer just as a relic that runs Framethief!

Aywho, the way it got fixed was simple as pie. Somebody had mentioned either here on at the message board that they had a similar problem and fixed it by downloading the latest version of Quicktime. Well, I already had the latest, so that wasn't an option. But a few days ago I got the old System Update popup window saying there was a new version, so I DL'ed it and immediately checked. Voila! Instant connection!

So pretty soon I'll be doing some animation tests and blowing off the dust of ages, mauybe post a few things to the Puppet Exercises section over at StopMoSjorts - hey, it looks like everybody is having a lot of fun in there!

But I'm still having some computer issues, so I'm not back to full strength. It has been nice though to experience 'real time life' for a while! I'm getting the basement all cleaned up, and when that herculean task is complete, I build myself an animation table - then it's back to it! But for now this is just an extra post to spread the news about Framethief. Anybody else who might be experiencing similar problems, just get on the new QT.