I’m home- still recovering from jetlag, and readjusting to reality.
I’m doing my best to catch up on all the email/youtube questions and comments that I received while away. Please be patient if you haven’t heard back from me yet.
I have several videos left on the burner from before we left. These just need final editing and post-production, so stay tuned!
Hi everyone,
I’m in China right now visiting family.
Internet access is intermittent and slow/glitchy from where I’m staying in Urumqi, and it looks like the great Chinese firewall blocks all access to youtube and facebook, so I won’t be able to reply to youtube video comments or private messages until I return in a couple weeks. Thanks for your patience!
I did receive everyone’s facebook birthday wishes via email update, but am unable to reply. Thanks everyone!
I’ll look forward to sharing my travel guitar experience when I return 🙂
John
I recently unveiled a new planetz logo in the intro of my AC15 Comparison video. Here’s the story.
In January 1999, when I launched my original website at planetz, I asked a brilliant digital artist friend, John Weir, to make a logo for me. He used a Mac and an SGI workstation, with programs like Adobe Photoshop and Fractal Design’s Painter, and produced a really interesting and unique piece of artwork for me:
Years later, when I asked him how he had produced it, he couldn’t really remember all the details other than “massive amounts of layers, filtering, distortion, plugins, etc”. And unfortunately the original file was lost, so he couldn’t give me a higher resolution version of it.
I really liked the rich colors, the cool “bubbles” and raking effects, and low-fi distortion of the characters making up the word “planet”. But, I always wished I had a larger, higher resolution version of it, especially as I started to get into high definition video. Also motivated by the shift to high definition video, I needed an image that didn’t crop so closely to the letters. And I kinda wished the Z was a bit curvier too.
So I recently set out to reproduce the logo from scratch, in a larger high resolution format. There’s no way I could make it identical, but I wanted to make something new, inspired by the original.
Using the free open source graphics editor GIMP (which has a lot in common with Photoshop), I spent countless hours experimenting and tweaking. I learned a lot, and made some interesting discoveries along the way. Here’s the finished result:
What follows is a detailed step-by-step guide for making this logo. More
The last few weeks have been a bit crazy, and I’m way behind on my inbox. I get quite a few emails and youtube-comments every day. I do try to reply to all questions, but I apologize for any delays.
I also want to express my gratitude for the many kind thank you’s and great job’s I’ve received—these messages really do make it all worthwhile. I don’t have time to individually respond to every one of you, but please know that I really appreciate the kind feedback!
In other news, my next video, comparing the Vox AC15HW1 and AC15C1 has been stalled for the last couple months, due to hangs and crashing in my video editing software of choice: Sony Vegas Pro. I’ve been working with Sony tech support on tracking down the cause of the bugs. Meanwhile, I’ve restarted my project from scratch several times now, and I’m starting to go a little stir-crazy. I shot all the video in December, so it’s starting to feel ridiculous that I haven’t been able to get this out yet. Hopefully I’ll get er done in the next week or so.
Updated 6/29/2011 with notes about the “Remove from Project and Delete Files” command
As I prepare and edit a video in Sony Vegas Pro, I tend to get a bit disorganized, bringing in source pictures, video and animations from various places on my hard disk. I’m especially bad about saving pictures temporarily on my desktop.
Sometimes, I do a bazillion takes of voiceover audio, and end up with countless unused wave files in the project.
So, in order to eliminate those unused takes, and to consolidate the files into a single location, ready to be backed up, here’s what I do.More
Hey there. This is my first post that isn’t about guitar.
It has been just a few months since my first blog and video post, and there have already been nearly 20,000 views of my guitar videos on youtube. I never could’ve expected that!
It’s been an interesting evolution for me. This started out on a whim, recording a quickie review of my new guitar on my crappy webcam and throwing together a video in Windows Movie Maker. Then, as I started tweaking the electronics in my guitar, it evolved into a video diary of sorts. Now, I’m recording in high definition on a nice camcorder, with multiple microphones, close-ups, various camera setups, and using Sony Vegas Pro to edit it all together, with countless edits in each video!