HPDZ.NET News

What's New

Following the frenetic activities in December and January, a hiatus seemed necessary. But now we're back in business with a new video. This time, it's a montage of ten older fractal animation projects that never got published for various reasons. Some are too short to stand on their own, while others, well, I just never got around to it, or a more compelling project came up.

Click here to visit the Montage1 page on HPDZ.NET.

This montage has an eclectic mix of fractal video types: a magnet zoom (not deep), two Mandelbrot set deep zooms, three secant fractal morphs, a Nova fractal zoom, a Hyper Nova morph, a Mandelbrot set morph, and one of the very few Tricorn fractal zoom animations ever made. Here are sample images from each of the animations:

This project is encoded at extreme quality, and is one of the most gorgeous creations on HPDZ so far, if you are willing to download a nearly 1.5 GB file for 12 minutes of video. That is about the same data rate that a really good HD movie on a Blu-Ray disc would have.

Multi-X Metaphase Variation Update

Last time, I published this really cool animation inspired by Stardust4Ever (see YouTube or DeviantArt) and his very nice extension of the "Metaphase" concept originally discovered by Paul Derbyshire in the late 1990s. Sony Vegas, the video editor I use for making these projects, was having a problem importing still images from video captures and matching the colors properly to the video, and I didn't want to publish a full set of video files until that problem was resolved. That problem is actually not exactly resolved, but Sony did provide a workaround, so I've gone ahead and made a full set of compressed video files, including some really gorgeous 15-20 Mbps encodings, and an INSANE 60 Mbps file that is absolutely stunning.

This is a truly DEEP zoom, with a final size of 5e-119, one of the deepest Mandelbrot set zooms ever made, especially outside of the relatively easy western fiber area.

New A/V Hardware

Some upgrades have been made to the workstation that is used for non-fractal-rendering tasks like email, updating the website, and doing the final production edits of the videos to incorporate sound and titles.

The video has been upgraded to an EVGA GeForce GT240 (also on the fractal system). I am still working with a pair of 17-inch CRT monitors from the stone age, but upgrading to a pair of 16:10 LCD monitors is next on the wish list.

The audio has been significantly upgraded to an ASUS Xonar Essence STX sound card. In addition, two sets of new headphones have been added - a set of Grado SR60 on-ear open headphones for times when comfort is important and background noise is not a problem, and a set of over-ear, closed Shure SRH750DJ for achieving a nice quiet environment.

Now I just need to do something about the main workstation power supply fan. It's a nice Cooler Master unit, but the fan is still noticeable, especially when significant power is being drawn. To put this in perspective, when the 980X system is running at full load, it is only slightly louder than the main workstation drawing idle power. The HAF-X case that the 980X is enclosed in makes a big difference.

Looking Forward

Following the messed up earlier Magnet Fractal zoom, I felt that a new Magnet Fractal video was certainly mandated. The short non-deep zoom in Montage1 doesn't really count. But a high-definition (1280x720), deep-zoom (2.6e-74) animation into the Magnet Fractal is being rendered at this very moment on the 980X system. It's been going since 6 Apr, and the estimated time to completion of the raw data calculation is about April 26-27, so hopefully sometime in May it will be published.