Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 -- Had some hard drive troubles (Seagate's firmware bug, that their online serial number check told me I wasn't subject to), and while I found an easy DIY fix, I had to wait a while for my USB-to-TTL adapter to show up. In the meantime, I spruced up SimpleSlugUpscale, so everybody make sure to grab version 0.9.

Big changes internally, but only a few new parameters for you to play with. There are sample images available on the script's page that should give you a sense of what the new release is capable of. Happy scaling!


Monday, May 10th, 2010 -- What began as an effort to ever so slightly increase the types of input SimpleSlug would accept turned into a major overhaul of the script's design. SimpleSlugUpscale 0.8 allows any size input, with any pixel aspect ratio, progressive or interlaced, to be scaled up or down to any other size and pixel aspect. It's a rather enormous update, so please read the documentation for more info, there are too many changes to list here.


Thursday, April 8th, 2010 -- Big thanks to Gavino and 2Bdecided of the Doom9 forums for pointing out and explaining a major, rather embarrassing mistake I made with regard to the interlaced outputs of SimpleSlug. Seems I took field order into account but ignored the field alignment, which is just as important.

Also, at the suggestion of Gavino, I added support for anamorphic DV input (use widein=true to work with such clips), and with his help was able to fix my resizer syntax to work with all resizers, including Bicubic.

The script has been updated to 0.7h as a result.


Monday, April 5th, 2010 -- New version, major changes! Full list in the usual place. Updated the tutorial to remove that business about using LoadPlugin for all the necessary software; rather pointless, deleting those lines makes the script cleaner and the tutorial shorter.


Thursday, April 1st, 2010 -- Just a quick, sneaky, underhanded swap of the latest SSU with another version. Syntactically identical, I only wanted to break up some lines to improve legibility, and it wasn't worth a new version. The whole thing's barely a page wide now, should be easier to understand.

Thursday, April 1st, 2010 -- An April Fool's Day release for SimpleSlug 0.6! Who'd have thought? Rearranged some script, allowing users to enter custom arguments for TempGauss deinterlacing. Gives that extra bit of customization for more advanced users while letting everyone else get away with ignoring how things work under the hood. Enjoy!


Sunday, March 21st, 2010 -- The first day of Spring comes with another update! This was just going to be a maintenance release until I decided I should let people change the resizer they use for scaling their footage. Sometimes you want a Blackman, sometimes a Spline16, sometimes just a Point. Now you can choose whichever you prefer for a given clip. There were a few other tiny changes, too, but nothing major, though I've updated dvupscale.avs, from the tutorial, to Import the SimpleSlug script along with the other plugins. It doesn't affect the script's functionality, it's just one of those little inconsistencies I felt compelled to fix.

Saturday, March 13th, 2010 -- I wonder how long it'll be before I have to add a time of day to my update headings.

Prompted by mj.cj's request for control over the vertical cropping, I updated version 0.4 (to 0.4b) to make the croptop parameter visible to users of the function. The description page has been updated with details, but usage is very simple. Pass an integer in as the value of croptop and that's where the top of your 16:9 crop frame will start, allowing you to reframe your footage vertically. Maximum value is the height of your original image divided by four; beyond that and your 16:9 frame ends up below the bottom of the input clip, leading to a big, ugly clamp, which you likely don't want.

I had considered letting people pass custom crop arguments into the function well before I finished even v0.1, but decided against it for aspect ratio reasons. Custom aspect ratios would lead to either a nigh-endless list of output formats, or the need for some way to generate those automatically, as well. The script was going to be complex enough as it was, and as per the name I wanted to keep it simple, both in use and in maintenance.

As is usual for me, however, I was making it all more complicated than it needed to be. Once I broke the old cropargs variable into croptop and cropheight, to be calculated separately, it became trivial to expose one or both of them to users. Changing cropheight is only going to lead to output aspect ratio problems, I'm afraid, so that one's hardwired into the script, but setting croptop wherever you want, within a given range of values, is now possible. As I explain in the description, odd values are no problem, as the crop and the generation of the output interlacing are only performed after the deinterlacing of the input footage. No field order issues at all.


Friday, March 12th, 2010 -- One of these days I'll finish this script. For the time being I've uploaded version 0.4, with some major changes. The big one is the correction of the crop dimensions I'd been using; not very noticeable unless you're looking for it, but the aspect ratio of the pictures produced by the script should be much more accurate now. Fingers crossed.

I've also streamlined the script a bit more, made it easier to read, and got rid of that repeated Blur operator I mentioned last time in favor of a GaussResize, which let me combine resizing and blur in one neat operation. The other changes are detailed on the SimpleSlug page, take a look if you want the details. While on that page, those who so desire can now get previous versions of the script, all the way at the bottom; I don't recommend using them, but if you're curious about the changes I've been making, feel free to take a look.


Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 -- I'm on a roll here with the updates. SimpleSlug 0.3 is released, getting rid of all that VariableBlur and FFTW3 nonsense I had previously employed for the blurred background of the "boxbg" modes. Useful tools when you need them, but not really necessary for our purposes. I finally figured out a simpler way to achieve similar output with Avisynth's base filters. A repeated Blur operator and some careful resizing did the trick, and though the resulting blur isn't as pronounced, I'd say that's a good thing; I may have gone overboard earlier.

The point is that the script is a bit lighter weight now, without as many plugins for people to worry about, and the tutorial has two fewer steps for people to slog through. In my informal tests, the 1080 output options seem to run about a frame per second faster than they did with VariableBlur, but worst case scenario the speed is identical. I'd say all of that warrants a new version.


Thursday, March 4th, 2010 -- Version 0.2 of SimpleSlug is up; thanks to Per Magne Handegård for reminding me to add 1440x1080 output modes. I renamed the existing 1080 modes while I was at it, to clarify that they're square pixel formats. See the script's page for the full list of new options.


Monday, March 1st, 2010 -- Another year come and gone without so much as a New Year's update? unconscionable! Luckily I may be able to make up for it.

After some time fiddling with plugins, scripts, and every conceivable combination of settings, I've come up with a technique useful for HD upconversion from DV source material. Strictly speaking, this happened months and months ago, but I've only just gotten around to putting together a tutorial describing the process. With it comes a custom Avisynth script that eases the pain of figuring out the nitty gritty details of cropping, scaling and pillarboxing.

If that's something you want to see, check out the tutorial: SD to HD with Avisynth Those of you already well versed in Avisynth can just go right to the script's page and try it for yourselves: SimpleSlugUpscale

Here's hoping someone it proves useful to someone!


Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 -- DV Info Net just added a bunch of "crew member" badges that those of us who follow the site can use to spread the word, so I stuck one over there on the left. The three of you who visit my site on a regular basis (I'm kidding, of course; I have no repeat visitors) will now be permanently reminded of the best video site on the internet. Take a look some time if you need advice about video production, and be sure to join the forums.

Bam! Word spread.


Monday, October 26th, 2009 -- Hot damn! Couldn't afford the hosting package I had with my last provider, but I was able to find a replacement in the form of BounceWeb, and I just finished getting this place back in business. The DNS change propagated in about thirty minutes, which was a pleasant surprise; all in all the whole thing was over in a matter of hours, with only a few minutes spent researching mp4 MIME types (turns out the key here was adding video/mp4v-es with an extension of mp4 to get the files to download properly). The site's back online, and I'm paying less than I was before, so I'm happy.

While I'm in an updatey kind of mood, I've got some Velvia 100 slide scans up over at Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/itendswithtens/tags/velvia/

I plan to upload them here, as well, but I'm saving that for a redesign of the photo section, which is a little disorganized now. None of that's happening tonight, though, it's too late. Keep an eye out, I'll get around to it sooner or later.


Sunday, September 20th, 2009 -- Over five months for this one, not bad. I'll see if I can hit six or seven next time.

DV Challenge 17 is up and running, "make a trailer for a feature film". It's been on for a little while now, actually. This is the second weekend of a month long contest and I've yet to get started. Got my idea all worked out, kinda sorta, but I haven't written or shot anything yet, so it's looking like another last minute disaster. Wish me luck.

The short I was gearing up to make in the update below turned out to be a real piece of something, feel free to learn more about it over on the Movies page.

Quick note, check the Twitter link over on the left if you're interested in hearing me spit out sub-hundred and forty character messages about exactly what degree of jack squat I'm involved in day to day.

I guess this page is just going to get longer and longer until I figure out a way to archive old news items. I threw in a few hyphens to make it a bit easier to read, but beyond that don't expect anything. Most full on blog software is too much hassle for such a simple site with updates this infrequent. Over two years of this nonsense fits on less than two pages. Besides, it's nice being able to decide whether or not I want you seeing everything I've ever said here.

I'll be rejiggering the layout of the movie page sometime soon; it's getting a little cluttered, plus I have more detail and so much more behind the scenes material than would have fit in the message board threads where the films were first discussed that I need something a bit cleaner. The movies aren't all that great, but there's more than likely a lesson or two to be gained from all my nitwit mistakes, so keep your eyes peeled, you might learn something. Challenge 17 being what it is, of course, may put that off 'til late October, maybe even November.

I'm sure you're heartbroken.

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Sunday, April 5th, 2009 -- Looks like it worked! I'm up and running on X7 Hosting now, and there were no problems with the switch. Here's hoping it stays that way.

Fun stuff, DVC 16 just started up, and I actually have an idea I like. Something I really like, it turns out, and I put it together within only four days of the theme announcement (though this time it's a prop requirement, not a theme). That's a personal record. Goes to show why I never get anything done for the usual ten day contests.

Watch this space, because in early May you might have something worthwhile to watch.

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Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 -- Gasp and surprise, two updates in the same week? One day apart? Could you have imagined such a world? I did some more Googling and testing, and figured out how to get this page to work in all the browsers I have access to. It worked before in everything but IE6 (and if I fixed it there it would go screwy in Safari, Opera and Chrome), which my site stats tell me a lot of people are using, so I looked into it. After much consternation I'm happy to report that a completely valid, pure CSS approach made itself evident (had to get rid of an overflow : auto and accomplish my design with padding instead), and though I had to get rid of the border around the site content, it was probably stupid anyway, so no big deal.

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Monday, March 9th, 2009 -- Took a few days longer than I'd planned, but the gallery is up! Hit the photography section to see what's up.

As usual, I spent hours over engineering the page, only to find this photo gallery sample, demonstrating just how stupid I can be. Using display : inline inside of a paragraph tag for the photo page made the whole thing work the way I wanted it to in every browser I've yet tried. Amazing how complicated you can make this stuff when you don't know what you're doing.

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Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 -- Just over a month since the last bit of news; I'm getting better at this.

Just a quick layout update, I finally got around to figuring out CSS floats, and redesigned this place to work the way I'd always wanted it to. If everything goes according to plan, all this crap should resize along with your browser window. All you web designer types can keep screwing around with PHP, Javascript, AJAX, Ruby on Rails and whatever the hell else you're into these days, I'm content with my little victory.

The damn pages even validated when I ran them through the parsers over on W3.org! I'm not one to put those goofy stickers all over the site, it just made me happy to find out I'm apparently adhering to some sort of standard. I have priceless, invaluable content here, you know? Got to make sure it's accessible by as many people as possible, lest they be deprived of my genius.

Also working on a little photo gallery, give me a few days.

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Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 -- I'm Flicking now. Got a few pictures up, go take a look unless you want to hurt my delicate feelings.

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Sunday, September 14th, 2008 -- Back in business! After some IP address confusion with the shared server my site's on, a few changed passwords I hadn't heard about, and a gripping, edge-of-your-seat FTP file permissions drama, this place is up and running as it's supposed to. That is to say, nothing's happened as far as any of you are concerned, and I have no interesting news. Except, of course, that the Youtube links on the Movies page were broken (reuploaded the videos, never updated this site) and have been replaced. This time, I've joined the twenty-first century and embedded them in the page (view them on Youtube if you want the high quality versions).

Anyway, the server issues--or "The Troubles", as I've taken to calling them--were quite trying, and I'm happy to report that the staff at CI Host/Hosting Support were nothing but help. Thanks to Ryan, John, Daniel, Alex, Josh, Chris, Ian, and Bill for spending so much time on all this.

Took an awful lot of work to get some dipstick's worthless homepage back online, and I can't imagine they get paid enough to put up with the likes of me all day.

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Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 -- Ow. Had a garage sale this past weekend, got to sit outside in the sun all day. Wee! Really, it's good for my skin, to get burnt to a crisp every now and again. My face and arms still hurt. Skin cancer, here I come!

In less life threatening news, I've been playing Audiosurf since it was released on Steam, and have only just done something worth showing anyone. Check me out playing "Come On" by Andy Hunter.

This, it seems, is my life. Jealous?

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Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 -- Listen up, you miserable bums! I'm on YouTube. Yeah, I spell it with the capital T. Deal with it. Now go check out my stupid movies.

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Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 -- So there was a friggin' tornado in Brooklyn today. An EF 2, or some nonsense. Whatever, I just have some stuff to show off. Do your standard right click and save here, the files are pretty big ('specially that last video). Left 'em full quality so's you could get the full effect.

We noticed some heavy rain on the LIE on the way in. Harmless enough, and it looked pretty damned cool rainin' sideways.

Eventually, after reaching a dead stop, and heading back up the on ramp to the service road, we reached the root of the problem. I think the owner might need new upholstery.

Of course, some people had no trouble at all, and just rolled right on through.

You like that? It's like the links are right there, in the middle of the sentence! Obnoxious, I know, I'll stop now. There are more pictures and a bit more video, but nothing really worth uploading. There was also a video of the ride in, with all sorts of rain and oddly silent lightning, but at five and a half minutes and over seventy megabytes, I don't think anyone'd be interested. Let me know if you really want it, I can always stick it up for a while.