imago Reel 2010
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s address change, I am happy to present you with the latest reel of imago studios, closing down year 2010. Not much to talk about here – press play, sit back and enjoy.
Archived entries: Announcements
Hello imago (dot com)
Although it’s been over half a decade since we last designed a commercial website at imago, the original domain name imagonewmedia hasn’t changed. That is, until today.
Out with the old, in with the new. It is my pleasure to introduce all of you to a new home for our studio: helloimago.com. Pay it a visit if you haven’t yet and enjoy your stay.
New reel coming really soon. It is all cut, ready and even uploaded, but we’re still waiting for one of our new commercials to clear for air before we can put it out. Should be any day now…
StarCraft 2 Guest Pass Giveaway: Ended
My Collector’s Edition of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm contained two guest passes for Starcraft 2. If you still haven’t played this amazing RTS, here’s a chance to give it a try. Each guest pass will allow you to download the game and play it for 7 hours or 14 days from activation (whichever comes first).
I have two of those to giveaway. Simply post a comment below for your chance to get one. You will have to be a registered user of this site in order for me to be able to send you the activation key. The two winners will be randomly chosen on Friday evening (GMT).
Update!
Thanks to the generosity of Michael Hoskins (http://www.pixelbath.com/), I now have one more key to give away! (that’s total of 3) I am going to extend the deadline to Monday, so all you less frequent visitors get your chance, too.
I need a hand with the next tutorial…
Quite literally, I need a hand with the next tutorial for QubaHQ. To be precise, I am looking for a CG artist who could provide me with either a render, realistic illustration or a 3D model of a human hand in two forms: normal and skeleton only.
Why? Quite simply, because I am bored of using text layers for every effect in the tutorials, and would like to do something special for you guys this time.
If you are willing and able, simply reply to this post – if you are a registered user of this site, I will look up the e-mail you registered with and contact you shortly. The images used in the next tutorial will also be distributed with the project file, so please make sure you own the rights to them and are OK with giving them away for free (no budget on this gig, except for credits).
Hope to hear from some of you soon!
Quick note about Facebook
Every day I receive quite a few new friend requests on Facebook. Many of them (I can only assume) come from the readers of QubaHQ. Unfortunately, due to the high volume of spam and phishing attempts, I usually reject/ignore those requests without giving it a second thought. If you have requested to “friend me” on Facebook and have been ignored, it’s nothing personal. Here’s what you can do:
If you are to try and “friend me” from my Facebook profile, make sure to include a small note in the request. Mention that you come from this site, tell me who you are. Otherwise, I can only assume another batch of spammers are trying to get to me.
By the way, there isn’t really anything special on my Facebook profile. I post regular updates to what’s on the site (which you can easily get via either RSS or Twitter). Apart from that you may see an occasional casual photo, some silly YouTube link or a rant against my Internet provider – pretty much the usual stuff people put on FB.
So… see you there… or not.
Poll Results: CS3 it is (huh?)
OK, so after running the poll for around 2 weeks, the results are in. A majority of you are using After Effects CS4, with CS5 following closely in a second place. CS3 takes the third with 14% of votes. What does that mean?
It pretty much means I will continue producing the tutorials using CS3 as a base, lowest version supported.
More after the break.
Poll for Y’all
With the new system up and running, I am slowly getting ready to resume producing new tutorials. On the old system I always kept a copy of After Effects CS3 installed and made all the tutorials using that version for all the folks using older versions of AE.
I have migrated my workflow to CS5 quite a while back and was wondering – which version of After Effects do you use? Is there even a need to make the files CS3-compatible anymore? Do I really have to install the old program on my computer?
The results of this poll will help me determine how to proceed. It will remain open until the end of October, so cast your vote and let others know to do the same – the larger the voting base the more accurate the information will be. Also, feel free to comment on this post if your answer cannot be summarized with a simple 1-choice selection.
Which version of After Effects do you use?
- CS4 (47%, 138 Votes)
- CS5 (38%, 111 Votes)
- CS3 (14%, 40 Votes)
- CS2 or older (1%, 3 Votes)
Total Voters: 292
Loading ...The poll is now closed.
New Rig
Until earlier this week, the system I worked on (and recorded all the tutorials) was pretty miserable. Running on an old 2.4GHz QuadCore processor (Q6600) with 4GB of RAM and dual nVidia 8800GTS SLI cards have been fun two years ago, but as the demands of operating systems and software increased I found myself spending too much time on waiting, and too less on creating. Most of the work done in PAL standard was still OK, but all the projects mastered in HD were bringing my old compy to its knees.
This is the first post written from my new system, custom built by a friend of mine (who would have thought World of Warcraft was such a networking opportunity :). It’s a monster (the PC, not the friend).
I am still finishing up several projects, and the computer is not fully installed, but I can already see my productivity increase incredibly. To give you an example, the monstrosity mentioned in the previous post took over 17 hours to render on my old machine. The new system did it in 1 hour, 20 minutes. Full specs after the break.
Work, work…
It’s been quite silent out here at Quba HQ for a while now. That does not mean it is silent at imago, at all. I am currently finishing up two new ads, waiting for a new rig to arrive and getting ready to resume producing new tutorials for you all. It will still take a while longer before I am done with all the work, but once it is over I promised myself to put aside more time to devote to the site.
Meanwhile, while still under NDA, I thought I would share a bit of the madness with you. Here’s a wireframe mode screenshot from the scene I am working on now. 400 layers in this monstrosity, not counting complex pre-comps :)
Still Swamped
I know many of you are still waiting for me to complete the two remaining tutorials promised for June. It seems however that it is going to take a while longer. Summertime is usually a very slow commercial season with not many TVCs being produced, so I naturally assumed I will have tons of free time to work on the tuts.
Things tend to work out not according to plan, though. I am still completely swamped with the projects for various clients and new ones just keep on coming. My current estimate is that I will be able to catch a break and record the next tutorial probably within 1-2 weeks, but only time will show if that’s realistic at all.
QubaHQ tutorials are quite important to me – just so you know, I have decided that I will not play a minute of Starcraft 2 until we get the next one online. And that’s a big commitment for me :)
Header photo by Ajfraser
