This is the monthly newsletter for my fractal animation site, HPDZ.NET. I am sending you this because I think you might be interested. I realize this almost qualifies as spam, so if you would like me to remove you from the distribution list for this newsletter, please send a reply to this e-mail. Please also let me know if you would like me to update your e-mail address if you get a new address.

– Mike Condron

HPDZ.NET News

JUNE 2008

www.hpdz.net

Volume 1, Number 1

Newsletter Premiere Issue

I thought making a newsletter might be a fun way to keep everyone informed about developments on my fractal animation site. It’s more visually appealing than a plain text e-mail and really doesn’t take much more work. I hope everyone likes it, and I also hope I can keep producing good work to write news about!

New Animation

My latest animation, Rift, is ready for viewing on the site, and I have also posted it to YouTube.

Rift is the second animation I’ve made based on a set of coordinates originally discovered by Paul Derbyshire and published in a FractInt PAR file in the 1990’s. Metaphase was the first animation I made based on this file. Both Rift and Metaphase are named using the titles from that file.

I rendered Rift a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been getting it integrated with some audio, and now it’s ready to go!

Here are some representative frames. Visit the Rift page for the videos.

 

Boring Technical Info

This is also my first real head-to-head comparison of MP4 and WMV formats. I think MP4 comes out ahead. However, I’ve not been able to get it to stream in real-time yet, so I’ll keep using WMV until I can figure out how to make MP4 stream, if it can. It’s also making larger files than WMV for the same video bit rate, which I don’t understand yet, so the jury is still out on this matter.

In the Pipeline

I have a few projects underway. Here’s a quick look at what should be coming next month.

High-Definition Animation

I have completed rendering a short animation at 1200x900 resolution. This is one of only a very small number of high-def animations ever created (by anyone, not just me), and will be the first one on HPDZ.NET. I will be posting in sometime in June, once I have some music and have worked out the optimal compression method.

Why 1200x900 rather than a standard HDTV size? I explain this in the Technical section of the site.

DEHP re-rendering

One of my favorite animations, DEHP (for “distance estimator high precision”) is being re-rendered in 640x480 resolution. This will take about 5 days on the the new computer system and I should have the new video posted in early June.

Scripting and Joining

This is really more of an internal technical detail, but I have finally finished creating a parser for a small scripting language that will let me create multi-segment animations much more easily than before.

This parser will also let me start on a project I’ve been meaning to do for a while – reading FractInt PAR files.

I have also finished the code for a new technique to join animation segments together smoothly and seamlessly. I could do this before of course, but it was extremely tedious to get everything to match from one segment to the next. Now I can create complex multi-segment animations with far less trial-and-error. For an example created with the old method, see PanTest2 on the Technical Animations page.

The new DEHP will be the first published animation with this technique, but there will be more! I’m thinking of something like PanTest2 but a little more complicated.

All MP4 files on my site are generated with an H.264 codec for optimal video quality at both small and large file sizes.

I do not use the MP4 format as a container for lower-quality compression.

Any video format with more than 720 lines could be considered “high-definition” although there is no precise definition of this term.

Before the scripting and joining support, I had to manually calculate too much to get segments to match. It was error-prone and tedious, so I just kept all segments joined by moments of no motion, which looks a little primitive.

I hope you enjoy receiving this. If you’d like me to stop sending it to you, or if you have a new e-mail address, just let me know. Comments are also welcome.

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