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Virtual Studio Sets

Recently completed – a brand new virtual studio set for Setanta’s iTalkSport show that launched on Friday.

iTalkSport is a late-night sport discussion programme and the set prominently features views of the Dublin skyline.

This virtual set project consisted of two main challenges – designing and building the actual structure of the set, and putting ‘live’ shots behind the presenters and guests.

It was a close call whether we would be using four permanently mounted roof-top cameras to feed the backgrounds. In the end we went for a less expensive (but more complicated!) solution. The whole thing is running on the RT Software tOG VR system, isn’t dependent on the weather, and has the uncanny feature of rendering street-lamps invisible.

I’ll give a full behind-the-scenes glimpse later on, but for now, here are some grabs from Friday’s show.

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

Complete set of animating weather icons

40 original weather icons at 4 different sizes, ideal for websites and iPhone / iPad apps.

There are now 3 different formats available – PNG with solid backgrounds, PNG with transparent backgrounds, and this new set of animated GIFs.

The animations have all been optimised to keep the file sizes low – but run at 25fps for nice smooth animations.

This new set of Weather Icons consists of 40 individual symbols. They match the original Set 1, but are animated GIFs, seamlessly looping over 2 or 3 seconds each.

Here’s a brief run-down of all forty symbols:

1. sunny, 2. sunny intervals, 3. white cloud, 4. black low cloud, 5. hazy sun, 6. mist, 7. fog, 8. clear sky (night), 9. light rain showers, 10. heavy rain showers, 11. light snow showers, 12. heavy snow showers, 13. sleet showers, 14. light hail showers, 15. heavy hail showers, 16. thundery showers, 17. cloudy with light rain, 18. cloudy with heavy rain, 19. cloudy with light snow, 20. cloudy with heavy snow, 21. cloudy with sleet, 22. cloudy with light hail, 23. cloudy with heavy hail, 24. thunderstorms, 25. light rain showers (night), 26. heavy rain showers (night), 27. light snow showers (night), 28. heavy snow showers (night), 29. sleet showers (night), 30. light hail showers (night), 31. heavy hail showers (night), 32. thundery showers (night), 33. cloudy with light rain (night), 34. cloudy with heavy rain (night), 35. cloudy with light snow (night), 36. cloudy with heavy snow (night), 37. cloudy with sleet (night), 38. cloudy with light hail (night), 39. cloudy with heavy hail (night), 40. thunderstorms (night)

Example at 128 X 128 pixels – thundery showers (night):

Example at 100 X 100 pixels – heavy snow showers (day) :

Example at 64 X 64 pixels – cloudy with heavy rain (day) :

(NOTE – the images on this page are watermarked as examples, but the real ones aren’t!)

For a limited time, this new set of animated GIF weather icons is also available as part of a special pack (along with the first two sets) for an impressive 40% OFF (compared to the cost of purchasing separately).

These symbols are royalty free, and once bought and downloaded can be used freely for both personal and commercial projects. (For full terms and conditions, see the weather symbol download page).

angelfield.com

I’d already changed the look of the main site, making it more of a tribute to Brian, who died tragically last September. He was the singer in the band, a fine musician and lyricist, and my best friend.

We formed Angelfield some time in the late eighties, although we’d been playing music together for many years before that.

As well as music, anyone that knew Brian would know also of his love of horses and racing. With that in mind, his family and friends have sponsored a race in his memory.

The Brian Spencer Memorial Chase is taking place at Plumpton on the 9th of May as part of Family Raceday 2010.

According to the Plumpton Racecourse site the Family Raceday is “an action packed programme of family entertainments … with Free Entry for children under 16″.

So if you’d like to have a child-friendly fun day out, remembering Brian and the good times, in the company of old friends (and horses), then get down to Plumpton on the 9th May. I think there are coaches being organised too, I’ll update this post when I find out more about that.

So, they’re off! The 2010 Election Campaign starts now, and while most people will be wondering who’ll be in No.10 next month, I’m wondering who’ll come out on top in the Election Graphics stakes.

The last BBC Election programme I worked on was back in 2006, and there’s a part of me that misses the excitement of a live election broadcast. Often weeks, months (sometimes years) of work all come together for one almighty extravaganza. A nail-biting marathon of TV graphics where the entire programme is only a power-cut away from disaster.

Swingometer

I notice the BBC has launched its Election 2010 website – and among other things they already have a nice interactive swingometer here with a neat explanation from Jeremy Vine for the uninitiated.

There’s a possible hint of the Election night graphics by way of a branded banner at the top of all of the Election 2010 web pages : party-coloured discs or buttons radiating from a central point.

It’s hard to say whether this is ‘Campaign’ branding, or ‘Election’ branding – I would guess by now that the various departments are all working to the same design guidelines by now.

That certainly wasn’t the case back in 1992, when I was responsible for providing the Election campaign graphics for the BBC 9 O’Clock news – the graphics for the Election Night special were so much ‘under wraps’ that we had to design everything from scratch, and the only ‘nod’ to the big night itself was the ‘92′ logo.

9 O'Clock News Swingometer 1992

But the 1992 Campaign, and more specifically the US Election graphics that I designed later that year, did mark a turning point for BBC Election graphics. As New Scientist reported in 1992, these were complex computer graphics, generated live, at broadcast quality. Apart from revolutionising the way Election data was presented on screen, it was also a reaction to the inevitable wasted effort of pre-preparing graphics for scenarios that would never materialise on the night. The BBC press release at the time stated that “Presenter Peter Snow will have more than 200 graphics to choose from for Decision ‘92, the Presidential election broadcast, compared to the 5000 graphics prepared for the British general election in April – though only 6 per cent of those were used.”

BBC Swingometer 1994

Although the 1992 graphics used SGI machines, the ‘live’ elements were keyed over pre-rendered 3D backgrounds, so this really was a leap forward. Possibly one of the reasons too that the Election graphics in 1994 got me my first Royal Television Society award nomination.

Looking back on it, more startling is the fact that these graphics were rendered in HD. The reason for this was to keep the images nice and crisp even when the camera zoomed in to Peter Snow’s back-projected screen. If memory serves, the output was rendered at 1920×1152 – which is probably something like analog HD. Anyway, I’m fairly sure it wasn’t 1920×1080.

It was also the first time that Peter Snow’s swingometer appeared in 3D – showing the coloured MP’s and percentage swing in the normal ‘flat’ view and displaying the outcome (’hung parliament’, ‘majority’ etc) on an outer edge.

The swingometer was to remain pretty much unchanged for the next few years, culminating in the famous Election night of 1997, which saw both a Labour landslide and the smile being wiped off Michael Portillo’s face.

BBC Swingometer 1997

We also had a full 3D House of Commons which filled up with little MP’s depending on the forecast numbers as the night went on. Of course, this isn’t what you’d call ‘virtual’ in any sense – the graphics were all still being back-projected.

There’s a useful reference page on Election graphics at TV Ark – it looks like Sky embedded their presenter in a ‘virtual’ Commons chamber – I forget now how well it worked – those early virtual graphics seemed always to be plagued by the feeling that the presenter was lost in his own green-screen world with very little idea of what was going on around him – gesturing half-heartedly towards what (he hoped) was the right bunch of people. Interestingly, that Sky graphic from 1997 seems to show the Conservatives as the largest party – I’m not sure quite what’s going on there.

By 2001, the pressure was on to ‘go virtual’ – but still we steered clear of dropping Peter Snow into a complete green-screen swamp, and instead provided him with a virtual swingometer and virtual House of Commons that appeared magically on a (real) table in the studio. The 2001 swingometer was essentially the same structure as before, but turned inside-out so that it sat within a hollowed-out table-top.

Swingometer 2001

Of course, the ‘Holy Grail’ of Election night graphics remains a truly convincing virtual reality House of Commons chamber. My secret sources at the BBC are hinting at something pretty spectacular this time round. The graphic technology is being supplied by Brainstorm – a Spanish company that I worked with on the 2006 Election Special – technically very good, and a really nice bunch of guys too. I know the graphic design team has been working away furiously for months now – I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it all goes well for them on the night.

Good luck everyone!

Memory Lane

Here’s my showreel of some of my graphics from various BBC Election programmes. The music is by Rick Wakeman – the extended remix he made for us in 1997. Listening to it brings back many happy memories, and a little lump to the throat. Thanks and best wishes to everyone who worked with me on these.

more old BBC showreels here

Are you Mac or PC?

I just took the test and came out 100% Mac.

Actually it was my second attempt, the first go was very nearly, but not quite 100%. But let’s face it, “87% Mac” doesn’t look quite so impressive. So anyway, if you want to skew the results, think carefully whether you want to think ‘different’ or ‘differently’…. you’ll see what i mean. Oh, and obviously Mac users eat salad!

While you’re there, you can read my guest blog “10 things I love about my MacBook Pro” – a run-down of the ten things I like best about my laptop.

My MacBook Pro narrowly avoided disaster a little while back (see my earlier post The Luckiest Laptop in Leitrim.

realtime graphics software website

More of a face-lift than a complete site re-structuring, nonetheless they are very happy with their new look.

The site itself is built on a bespoke (i.e. not Wordpress) content management system, and the code was very clean with enough class and ID selectors to play with, so in the end I managed to give the entire site a complete make-over by changing CSS only, and then uploading a few new images that are referenced by the new style-sheet.

See : www.rtsw.co.uk

And of course, don’t forget to visit Booth B24 and have a chat with our good friends at RT Software.

RT Software develops and supplies PC-based real time 3D graphics solutions for broadcasters. These solutions are aimed at sports, news, elections, interactive TV, virtual sets and for playout graphics.

Visit the RT Software site now for Real-time 3D graphics broadcast solutions.

Well anyway, it seems my laptop bag is more watertight than anyone could possibly hope for, and the Macbook Pro survived. Some papers just beneath it in the bag had started to go a bit soggy, but the machine itself was dry as a bone.

The luckiest laptop in Leitrim

Here’s a kind of reconstruction taken a few days later, so most of the mess is cleared away, but it should give an idea of how things were.

So there we are, we had a lucky escape – particularly as no-one was standing underneath the ceiling when it came down. Waterlogged plasterboard is heavy. And I guess my Tesco laptop bag is pretty well padded too.

FontExplorer X also crashed when trying to view the offending font, but it appeared OK in Font Book.

There’s a couple of different ways to proceed if you’re faced with a similar problem. Obviously deleting the bad font (and re-installing if that’s an option) is one way to go. That assumes that the font file itself is bad.

But there’s also a chance that the font is OK, but the font cache is corrupted.

There are a couple of ways to clear your Mac’s font caches – one is to restart in Safe Mode (hold down the SHIFT key immediately after the startup sound and release after the Apple logo appears).

Fortunately, FontExplorer X has a couple of options under the Tools menu – ‘Clean System Font Caches’ and ‘Clean Application Font Caches’ (this gave me the option of cleaning the ‘Adobe’ application font caches). I cleaned both.

The end result? Photoshop CS4 working fine again.

A word of caution: there can be a number of reasons why fonts might go screwy on your Mac. Adobe has a page on troubleshooting font problems here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/327/327791.html . I’d suggest reading it before doing anything too drastic.

As a big fan of Magic Bullet Looks, this was a great opportunity to upgrade to the full Magic Bullet suite.

I’ve just had a quick try out of a few of the plugins in After Effects – Instant HD 1.1 and Frames 1.0 look pretty nifty. Steady looked promising if a bit slow, but to be fair, the test footage I was trying was VERY shaky. I may try some more realistic tests later in the week.

Anyway, a big thank you to Mary and Dave at Red Giant for replying so promptly to my cheeky emails.

And also a very big thank you to Angus for phoning me earlier to let me know the sale was on in the first place.

holiday apartment web design

If you view the site in Internet Explorer you’ll see that all the boxes (including the heading banner image) have square corners, but if you use a proper browser like Firefox, you should see rounded corners. I know it’s a bit of a cop out, and I did (briefly) investigate JQuery rounded corners, but in the end I opted for a IE conditional comment to replace the heading strap with an alternate (square cornered) image so that at least the look and feel is consistent depending on which browser the site is viewed in.

I’m also now a big fan of Parallels Desktop for the Mac. While I was doing a quick check for cross-browser compatibility I was able to run Firefox and Safari and Explorer versions 6, 7 & 8 all at the same time on my laptop. Possibly the subject of a future blog post I think…

Hi Mike

Dave

Of course it’s always nice to get a ‘thank you’ from a satisfied client. But I was particularly chuffed by this email. First, I’d never met the producer in person. Also, he’d found me through this website (which proves at least that some of my tentative SEO efforts have paid off).

But more importantly, it was a real test of remote working for broadcast clients in the UK. All the briefings were done by phone or email, preliminary design ideas were presented via this site, and all the finished graphics were done entirely remotely from my studio here in (lovely) Leitrim, Ireland. I uploaded all the video files on to this site and the guys at Cactus TV downloaded them at the other end.

Of course there’s probably still going to be occasions where a face-to-face is called for. But for the time being, Mohill’s the place to be…

Tolkien Fonts - cufon text replacement example

So, the plugin is called WP-Cufon and you can get it at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cufon/

It’s quick to install, has good documentation, and it’s easy enough to specify some rules to control the text replacement on your site.

So for example I’ve used :

Cufon.replace('h1', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h2', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h5');
Cufon.replace('#navbar a');

which replaces the font for h1, h2, h5 headings and any link text within the ‘navbar’ div with a special font of my own making. All of the subsequent styling is covered by CSS. It really is very simple to set up.

You need to convert your font first into a format that Cufon can handle – there’s a Cufon generator that does the whole thing very neatly. It also, importantly, allows you to limit usage to certain domains to protect the font from use elsewhere.

I’d previously looked at Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) but I have to say I think Cufón may have the edge if only for ease of set-up – although, granted a lot of the hard work has already been done by the plug-in. Oh, and Cufon doesn’t use Flash.

I don’t claim to understand exactly how Cufon works, but if you’re interested in that kind of thing have a look at http://wiki.github.com/sorccu/cufon/about which goes into all the nitty-gritty.

And here’s a link to the creator of the wp-cufon plugin, Tobias Battenberg

OK, Tolkien fans

So this next bit is only really of interest to fans of The Lord of the Rings… (look away now if hobbits and dragons aren’t your thing!). No really.

The site I’ve used Cufon on is a Tolkien book collecting site – and I created a special font that brings to mind the calligraphy of the author J.R.R.Tolkien – I was pretty pleased with the end result, so if anyone’s interested they can buy a copy of Tolkienesque Regular (in Truetype font format) from my store.

I also ended up tackling another Wordress theme design from scratch – so the entire site has a kind of ‘Tolkienesque’ feel to it. That’s the name I gave to the theme too.

Tolkien Wordpress theme

The Wordpress theme makes heavy use of categories to organise the 400-odd entries, and has a neat ‘Random Item’ widget that I made to pull a text link and the first thumbnail image from a random post. Anyway, I was quite pleased with the end result. It’s been a labour of love built in spare minutes snatched here and there over the last few months.

But I’m most pleased by the fact that I can now use any old font I like in Wordpress, subject of course to EULAs and other legal niceties, or at least until the legal quagmire surrounding @font-face, font embedding and linking gets sorted out.