Here’s the recently completed promotional video for the MxV1 – a revolutionary putter with a curved surface that matches the diameter of the golf ball ensuring a perfect hit each time.

The MxV1 Putter is based on the principals of Newton’s Cradle (MxV = mass x velocity = momentum).

“The radius of our putter face is exactly that of a standard US Golf Ball (1.68 inches) and even with a minor tolerance we have found more accurate strikes and optimal roll” says Brian Wittman (inventor of the MxV1) “By essentially striking a ball with another ball, you almost can’t miss the center of gravity.

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The final episode of Series 3 of Little Howard’s Big Question is on this afternoon – BBC One 4.30. It’s the ‘Little Howard Awards’ show – so basically another excuse to show all the best bits from the series.

Oh, and there’s also some dancing ants.
 

Here’s a little test of Newton – the physics engine for After Effects (almost a snip at €179 from motionboutique.com).

I wondered how easy it would be to build a quick pinball simulation – so I threw together some pretty crude shapes in Illustrator, pasted them on to an After Effects layer and let Newton do the rest. It automatically splits each mask on to individual layers (if you choose to) and allows you to set all kinds of properties for each object (friction, bounce, angular and linear damping etc).

I did cheat the flippers a bit, which in the original project were just flapping about like crazy using wiggle expressions. Tweaking them for the few collisions is the only post-Newton fiddling that’s gone on. Oh, apart from tilting the whole thing in 3D and putting auto-orient towards camera on the ball. The important thing here is that the motion of the ball is entirely automatic and probably next to impossible (or at least mind-numbingly tedious) using traditional keyframing.

Anyway, here’s the result.
watch video…

Seems the latest version of After Effects from Adobe (CS4) has changed the PAL D1/DV Widescreen square pixel preset.

In CS3, compositions using that preset would be set to 1024 x 576 pixels. The new version (CS4) uses 1050 x 576.

So which is right? 1024 or 1050?

Well, to begin with, it’s all a bit complicated. I can still remember when it was first explained to me many years ago when I was still at the BBC, and it’s the kind of thing that’s quite difficult to get your head around without drawing little pictures on the back of envelopes. Anyway, there’s a few resources out there that try to explain this (links included below) – but I thought I’d have a go myself.

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