Demo Reel Editing, Nick's Game

In between changes to Nick's game, I will continue editing the demo reel. The audio track will be completed, and pacing will be improved through cutting and the addition of transitions where appropriate.

Update 1: The first round of editing is complete. Editing will resume after the current reel is reviewed, if it is thought necessary. Attempts have been made to bring Nick's game to a neighboring computer, but there are complications with the Kinect software ( drivers are installed, but there remains a lack of input, or interpretation of said input by Nick's game) which are impeding progress.

Update 2: Peer review of the demo reel compilation is in progress. Voiced-over PowerPoint will be removed and replaced with single-slide text introductions. The resulting demo reel will strike a healthy balance between technically impressive and visually interesting.

Motion Capture, Nick's Game

Today Nathan will be the subject of motion capture research. Joe Kider will demonstrate proper practice which will be used in future testing. Biometric data such as heart rate and body temperature will be collected and analyzed in order to aid the development of realistic modeling practices. Later it is expected that I will continue with the familiarization, preparation and eventual utilization of Nick's game. Further updates will enumerate the specific actions taken in order to ready his game for objective and subjective testing.

Update 1: The GUI for the "Level 4" control scheme (which uses hips and leaning forward or back for aiming, as opposed to moving one's right arm) is not showing, and I am currently looking through the relevant sections to find what I can change to make it visible.

Update 2: Observation of Level 4's control scheme shows that while it is effective if used properly, its learning curve is a tad steep. The recommended improvements should be carried out, though it is encouraging to see improvement of game playablility after only a few sessions.

Demo Reel #2, Nick's Senior Project

The focus of today's work will be the reel's audio track; this will include the addition of music to silent sections as well as editing of voiced sections. Steps will be taken to ensure that those who contributed their final projects to the demo reel will be credited; text revealing the creator of each work will be added where necessary.

Update 1: Equalization of existing audio is complete, addition of music accompaniment in progress.

Update 2: Met up with Nick and practiced using the Kinect control schemes to play his game. Testing will begin after the controlling gestures are improved, and the users are more familiar with these gestures.

Demo Reel #2 Prep

The first order of business for today was to determine which file types Camtasia Studio likes; eventually all video media was converted into .wmv or .mov files. Afterwards the Camtasia project's presentation timeline was manually populated by me to include all pictures and final demo videos. Later updates will keep track of minor audio-editing progress (some editing progress was lost due to scrapping the earlier Camtasia project that did not have a more homogeneous set of video file types, meaning only .mov and .wmv for video file types) as well as video editing.

Update 1: Some video clips have been sped up and/or cut; the same goes for their respective audio tracks. Transitions have been added in between each segment when possible; the speeding up and cutting cancels out the time added by the transitions (3 seconds per fading transition). Equalization of the overall audio is a work in progress.

Demo Reel #2 Start

Today I started collating the various pictures and videos that will become the second demo reel. Through the use of Camtasia and Photoshop I will combine photos into single slides and then present them to music, alongside the final project videos.

Update 1:
Many of these videos have voice-overs set to music already; however, their levels are different and need equalizing. Similarly, certain audio tracks will be edited in order to minimize annoying white noise. In addition, several videos of varying formats cause error messages to be returned by Camtasia upon attempted importing of these videos. Attempts to download a file converter and then convert the offending files without quality loss will be performed tomorrow.

Update 2:
As of this update, all compatible videos have been imported and added to the Camtasia project timeline.

First Weeks

One of the first tasks I undertook was the setup of the front monitors' looping video playlist. Given a lightly edited demo-reel without audio, I finished up the editing and added music tracks. This demo reel was then added into a playlist with another video, the playlist being automatically started up by a small .bat file.

After this editing and minor coding were concluded, I began exploring the Python language through a script associated with delegating work to the render garden's servers. Eventually we narrowed the error down to a single line: when describing the arguments in a call to os.spawnv, an error message, explaining that no such file or directory was found, appeared.