January 1st 2011
 
This post was almost a fail.  Luckily a last minute adjustment saved the day.
 
Today marked the end of my friends own 365 day project.  My friend Dean has refrained from having a single drop of alcohol in the past year and tonight was the night he would have his first beer.
 
I knew the whole day what my creative task was going to be.  You see, last thursday I had been hoping to be able to stop by Dean’s house to try out a piece of slitscan software that I have so fortunately been given to test.  The application is PC only and Dean’s specs are right on target.
 
So, this evening I brought my camera and my computer over to Dean’s place and attempted to run the software amongst various partygoers.  The program runs from the command line which is pretty foreign to me but thanks to my friend Joseph we were able to successfully run the application.  The only problem was that whenever it got to 99% it would crash.
 
We opened the task manager and decided it was most likely a matter of memory.  At the time Dean was transmitting an HD movie from his computer to his PS3 and I figured that was hogging some processing power.  I decided to wait until the movie was done and I would try again.  Unfortunately, people started looking up youtube videos which then turned into a rowdy session of chat roulette.  I figured I had better call it a night and come back in the morning.
 
I did just that.  The next morning I came by and gave it another go except even without the other programs running it still crashed at 99%!  I tried various settings but to no avail.  Just as I was throwing in the towel I decided to run the software again so that I could take some photos for the blog.  This time, though, I decided to use forward-slashes rather than back-slashes for my file paths.  It was the opposite direction from what the command prompt would give back to me but it was the same direction as the example given in the programs ReadMe file.
 
Sure enough, it suddenly worked!
 
What can I say about this software other than, I love it!  It is truly blazingly fast and its extremely versatile as well.  I have only scratched the surface of course.  Once it began to work I wanted to stay and test but unfortunately I had things to take care of.  But in the short time that I spent testing it (about an hour) I created multiple images as well as an 20 second video clip.  That is unheard of with my After Effects setup.  It would take all night to create 20 seconds of video with my setup.
 
The extremely long images you see above are shots from Day 297 when I filmed some hanging mobiles in my friends shop.  In each of those images you are seeing the life of a single scan-line over many minutes worth of video.  If you click on any of them you can explore high-rez versions of them.
 
I think they are beautiful.  Absolutely beautiful.  I am completely inspired and jazzed by the opportunity I have been given with this program.  I can’t wait to create more images and video with it.