Monday - The eMacs have arrived!!!

Our first day with some real horsepower.

So just an update, Roddy and I didn't go on a trek on Sunday. He was out of Petrol and today...the guy getting the petrol for Roddy was arrested for carrying the petrol (it's against the law to stockpile Petrol...which is, of course, what everyone is trying to do). Anyway, we hope to go out later this week.

Today it was very cold, 50's (13 c). It's hard to think of a cold Africa but not anymore...

Trevor Davies from Samso...He's the man behind the eMac donation. Thanks Trevor! It was a life saver! Samso provides video and photography training as an outreach program as well as photojournalism services.

Anyway, we came to ZIVA and were greeted with new eMacs! Saki got the CPUs through customs Saturday and we spent the first hour getting them set up. From there, I spent another hour giving the students a primer in OSX. They are very comfortable in Mac OS9 but have never seen OSX...I tried to provide enough tips to keep them out of trouble. With our experience in San Francisco, we have become fairly good at structuring the user permissions to minimize the amount of damage new users can do...OSX is exceptional at this...

That's me doing a little OSX primer.

As an added bonus, ZIVA had a huge write up in the local paper. It was great exposure for the school and the program. We even got a plug as their partners!

ZIVA in the news! The picture may look familiar...I used it on TechTV a few weeks ago.

The project definitely moved into overdrive in the afternoon. The Students finally had enough computers to really get going (though we already want to get 8-10 more).

The Compositing Team learned dvMattePro literally in minutes! I was amazed...dvMattePro isn't available in the US yet..we just completed beta. I wanted to see what the students would do with it. I gave them a manual but they didn't seem to need it.

Tanzi working through a very challenging greenscreen in Adobe After Effects . They handled it in a half an hour!

The Video Team began re-editing some of their work. They had finished 3 segments but it was lost when the first iMac we sent (3 years ago) crashed and burned. They're going to re-edit them in iMovie and then edit them one more time in Final Cut Pro. Their iMovie days are almost over...I had to keep them focused on finishing the project that they were on before they started digging into Final Cut Pro (they're chomping on the bit). I think they will will be cutting video like pros by the end of the year. I had lunch with Rumbi from ZIFF again and we discussed ways to get the students into the film projects that ZIFF is working on. The Students are about to add effects to a few music video shots. We're also looking at ways to stream some of the movies from the festival.

The Video Team editing in iMovie .

The 3D Team tackled texturing the set pieces for the digital set and playing with rendering techniques. For the set, we're looking at Cinema 4D or the 3D Toolkit as the rendering engine. Both are fast but the Radiosity in Cinema currently is an edge in it's favor.

Shawn working in the 3D Toolkit .

The immersion team continued working on modeling heads today in Real Viz Image Modeler. They are starting to get the hang of it. While not truly complicated, the process has lots of pitfalls one needs to learn to avoid.

Bradley and Nozihpo working in Real Viz Image Modeler.

Anyway, that was about it. Tomorrow more work and in the afternoon I'll be presenting for a local ad agency.

Posted: Mon - July 7, 2003 at 05:46 PM Africa, Summer (Winter) 2003 Email Comments