Experimenting with Time Lapse

Only two days left until my last final for the semester, so what do I do? Not study! I SHOULD be studying, but then the entire Northeast coast got slammed with a snowstorm. The snow looked really cool outside my window, which meant... photography experiment time!

Recently I've been experimenting with Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro. More on that later. I also recently got Nikon Camera Control Pro 2, which is Nikon's tool for remote controlling their DSLRs from computers, which means I can now remote trigger my Nikon D60 over USB from my MacBook Pro. Awesomeness. Time for some snowstorm time lapse experimenting. :)

So on Friday night/Saturday morning, I pointed my D60 out the window and set Camera Control to take a picture every 40 seconds for 5 hours starting from 5 AM. Unfortunately, I forgot the charge the battery to the camera died 80 minutes into the experiment. Also, apparently the movement of the camera's internal mirror is enough to cause the camera to shift a bit if not stabilized. As a result, the video is really short and not very stable. It's not particularly good, but it's a start:

Download in 1080p MP4.

This time lapse experiment also served a secondary purpose- to test out the planned workflow that we're going to try using with the upcoming Omjii Show. I composited all of the video in Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro and then used Apple Color to color grade the video. If you're wondering why I'm using Apple Color but am using Premiere Pro instead of Final Cut Pro, it's because I tend to favor things that plug into Adobe's Creative Suite workflow but Adobe doesn't have a color grader, whereas Apple has a really nice one.

Later in the afternoon, I decided to give the time lapse another shot. This time i remembered to charge the battery and stabilize the camera. The result:

Download in 1080p MP4.

The problem with attempting time-lapses with a DSLR is that the length of the time you can cover is limited by your battery, unless you have an extended battery or something. Another attempt, this time from Sunday:

Download in 1080p MP4.

I'm still working on getting the technique down, but I'll post improved attempts and a detailed run-through of the process once I figure out how to stabilize better, among other things.

Omjii Blog Engine Preview

So I've been mentioning an "Omjii Blog System" for a long while now. In fact, the existence of an Omjii Blog System should be obvious if you're reading this right now. This blog is, after all, is sitting on Omjii.com. That's because this blog is actually the test bed for Omjii Blog System stuff.

So what is the Omjii Blog System? It's simple- a blogging engine derived from the Omjii Comic Engine running the main site. The Omjii Comic Engine that Jason and I wrote about a year ago started as a photo blogging engine that morphed itself into a webcomic engine once Chris, Jason, and I decided to start posting our doodles online. At some point, we realized that the Omjii Comic Engine very much resembled a blogging engine underneath- which makes sense, since a. the engine started life as a photo blogging tool and b. a webcomic is, in fact, a blog. So we started to experiment with extending the Omjii Comic Engine into a full blogging tool. Why? Why not?

Our goal isn't to face off against Wordpress or Moveable Type or Blogger or whatever. The point of writing the Omjii Blog Engine is purely academic- writing a content management system is a good exercise for coders. The nice side effect of this exercise, however, is that we might just end up with a nice, simple, useable little tool. Sweet. For now, two experimental blogs are running on the engine: this blog, and Emma Ricciardi's Emma Blog. In addition, Ana Kim's The WAHH! Blog forwards through Omjii to Blogger and will eventually be hosted here.

So! What does this engine entail for Omjii.com? Well, we'll be offering Omjii Blogs to people soon as the Omjii Blog Engine approaches completion. It ain't Wordpress, but the cool thing about the Omjii Blog Engine is that we will constantly be tinkering with it and adding cool new things to the bag of tricks it can do.

The introduction of Omjii Blogs is naturally going to mean some revisions to the main site design. Here's some concept doodles of what it's going to look like:

The first doodle shows two headers. The top header is the standard Omjii header that flies over the main site. The second header, however, is new. When you go from the main comic site to, say, the Emma Blog, the header of the site will magically change into the second, blog oriented header.

The second doodle shows an updated design for the second, blog oriented header.

Finally, the updated new main header is actually completed and ready to go live. We're just waiting on a few things before releasing it into the wild. It looks like this:

So those are some cool new things to expect in the coming weeks!

Pictures!

Okay, I promised a blog update (actually, updateS) today, but I stayed out way longer than I anticipated. I did get some really cool photos though... I'll post some of the bigger panoramas I took for now.