Show Notes: Episode 73

  • Anatomy of a VFX Shot.
    Alex Lindsay
    Founder, Pixel Corps

    You see the big expansive scenes in movies…fantasy films but also just about every period film released these days…but how do we create them? Here’s a basic shot example…

    The first step is matchmoving the shot. We use Real Viz Matchmover for this stuff. We need to define points in three dimensions so the software to see how they change in relationship to each other…this is used to reverse engineer the camera position so that our computer camera moves the same way.

    We then need to build the background. Rough models are thrown together in Cinema 4D and then rendered to Photoshop. We then paint over the renders there and then project these paintings onto the models in Cinema 4D.

    Once the background is complete, we composite it with Apple’s Shake or Adobe After Effects (depending on the artist).

    RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
    www.pixelcorps.com
    www.adobe.com
    www.realviz.com
    www.apple.com
    www.maxon.net

    PRODUCTS SHOWN
    Adobe Photoshop CS 3
    $999

  • Watching your back at public hotspots.
    Randal L. Schwartz
    General Manager of Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.

    WEP/WPA not enough in a public hotspot
    - others are seeing your traffic
    why important?
    Show jaiku.com login (http)
    Show gmail login (https)
    Show gmail spam page
    read a piece of spam
    describe how that content is visible
    Show Mail.app security settings on stonehenge.com

    Solution - Use a VPN
    Commercial software solutions (Hamachi)
    Company you work for (CiscoVPN client)

    mac: TunnelBlick (OpenVPN Client) - http://tunnelblick.net/
    mac/win: Anchorfree Hotspot Shield - http://anchorfree.com/hotspot-shield/
    show IP before turning on (ippages.com)
    turn on
    show IP afterward - Sunnyvale!

    He used various well-known sniffing tools (Wireshark and Ettercap) to
    show how a mail client (Mail.app) or FTP access reveals the passwords
    if set up incorrectly. Then he visited a few web sites to show the
    kinds of information revealed by “http” rather than “https”.

    He then talked about a few VPN solutions, including the free
    Anchorfree and commercial solutions like Cisco VPN.

    RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
    Tunnelblick can be found with versiontracker, macupdate, Apple Software search
    Anchorfree Hotspot Shield is at http://anchorfree.com/hotspot-shield/.

    PRODUCTS SHOWN
    Tunnelblick (free)
    Anchorfree Hotspot Shield (free)

  • Promoting Your Business with Social Media.
    Jordan Behan
    President, Tell Ten Friends Marketing Co.

    Promoting Your Business on the Web with Social Media

    -first, start blogging
    -build relationships with a much broader audience
    -stay closely connected with your network
    -enjoy a more complete web presence that is great for SEO

    RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
    www.facebook.com -A private (closed to the non-member public) social networking site that already has most of your friends as members.
    www.linkedin.com -The most prevalent "professional" online social network, mostly for business-to-business contacts
    www.bebo.com -Has a massive user base, mostly in Europe, and still growing steadily
    www.virb.com –A social networking site that is slowly growing in popularity due to its ease of use and superior design esthetic.
    www.flickr.com –An extremely user-friendly photo sharing site with many different networking options built in.
    www.squidoo.com –A site that offers you a single page (they call it a ‘lens’) to position yourself as an expert on a certain topic. Has a revenue model built in, and will syndicate your blog content, etc.