Daily Archives:August 5th, 2005

Modern Art?

Here’s my artistic creation for today, inspired by the work of George Eliot:

FCP art

Actually, I created this rather by accident. I have been experimenting with the FXscript capabilities of Final Cut Pro. For those not familiar with these, FCP is a professional video-editing package which is widely used in the industry. It has a whole variety of effects filters to do things like changing the colour balance of your movie, adding lens flare effects and so forth. FXscript is a programming language in which you can write your own effects.

As part of my experiments I had created a filter which averages several past frames and then subtracts the result from the current frame. I then fed it some footage from the BBC’s production of Middlemarch. Casaubon is walking morosely into the distance:

Casaubon

and there’s a cut to Dr Lydgate, who is watching him depart:

Lydgate

And the result is what you see above.

Drive me crazy

I powered up all my Firewire drives today. I don’t often do that.

Lots of drives

Quentin’s Second Law

It is more important to read things with which you disagree than things with which you agree. How else will you broaden your horizons?

Notes:

1. A second form of this law may be phrased thus: It is more important to eat food that you don’t know, than food that you know you like.

2. Quentin’s First Law, for those who may have missed it, states that “The best way to be remembered is to invent a law”

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser