But for anyone like me who works with computers in the animation, graphics  and video production industries the learning never stops. Each time a new version of software appears I am overcome with a mixture of anticipation and frustration. Sure, I look forward to new features which enable me to work quicker, do more and produce better quality work. Sometimes these features are enhancements to an existing set of tools and are easy to understand. It could be a tool that does something in minutes that once took hours. Great. But often you are given a completely new set of tools that require you to study tutorials, learn new terms, understand the theory of, or go and spend money on a course. This eats into your productive time but you do it anyway because it gives you an edge. Maybe it enables you to provide a new service that you weren’t able to before. It’s a continuous learning curve.

One of the major bits of software I use is 3ds Max. Over the 18 years I’ve been using 3ds Max, it has grown into to a huge monster of a program. When I first started out the program was a hundred times simpler and I knew every nook and cranny of it, inside and out. Nowadays I challenge anyone to say that they know how to use every single feature in 3ds Max.

Back in the nineties, I did a 3-day course with a well known Canadian writer of 3ds Max “how-to” books, Michele Bousquet. She had come on a trip to Australia to hold a series of training workshops. Back then the program was called 3D Studio and it ran under DOS (this was before Windows). I had taught myself everything until then, from the very well-written manuals that came with the software. A new feature I had just learned from the manuals was the ability to show a fully shaded 3D object in a pop-up window in real-time! Commonplace now, this ability had just been available. In the training course, we were making a 3D character in a wireframe viewport and when we were finished Michele told us we were to render it -which in those days meant you might as well go to lunch. A simple low poly count render was taking 20 minutes. I popped up the new real-time shaded viewport and when Michele came and looked at my screen, her jaw dropped and she said “how did you do that?”.  I explained to her the new plugin, which she immediately instructed the class to try and there were gasps of amazement as everyone realised what a powerful new tool this was. I was incredulous, here I was paying a fortune to be doing a course when I knew more than the teacher! I’ve got nothing against Michele, she is a lovely person and has written a bunch of books on 3ds Max but it was at that moment I realised the value of being an autodidact (a person that is mostly self-taught).

The internet is the perfect environment for an autodidact. There are both written tutorials and videos on virtually every subject. Even 3ds Max no longer comes with printed manuals, the help files and tutorials are online. It does save a few trees I guess, but I do miss curling up in bed with the manuals and having a good read. I just find having a laptop in bed is so much less convenient, but then I am a bit old school.

Max has gotten so big that recently it was split into two slightly different programs, 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design. Both are exactly the same, except 3ds Max has the ability for users to write their own software for the program with SDK, whereas 3ds Max Design loses this ability in favour of additional high-end lighting tools more suited to Architects and Designers. What frustrates me is that this divergence may be the thin end of the wedge. Users had to make a choice last year whether to continue with one or the other. I chose 3ds Max Design because it was better suited to the work I do. I have no interest in writing software code and  I can still do everything in 3ds Max Design that 3d Max can do, including character animation. What concerns me is that Autodesk, the company that makes this software, may start taking out features like character animation tools until users like me who do both Design and Entertainment projects end up having to fork out the cash to buy both programs. The fragmentation of software into specialised, separate entities is something that Autodesk seems to do continuously. They have a bewildering array of products, many which appear to be very similar. It seems to me that many of these fragmentation decisions are motivated by the desire to make more money. Why sell one product that does everything when you can sell two that complement each other? Perhaps Autodesk would argue that the programming code becomes unwieldy and inefficient once a program gets to a certain size. In their defense however, I will say that I have made a pretty good living out of Autodesk (and Adobe) products and I do enjoy using their wares. Plus the tax deductions on software purchases soften the blow.

The learning never stops, and neither does the forking out of the cash. Now don’t get me started on hardware, I’ll leave that for another blog!

Demographic information surveys vary, but the most recent data may surprise you.  It seems that the average Twitter user is in their mid to late thirties with a roughly equal split between males and females. Same goes for Facebook.

Business has embraced Twitter like a teenager given unlimited free SMS.  There is a revolution occurring in the way people are doing business and communicating online. People have become immune to corporate spin. People like dealing with people, not faceless company drones reciting company mantra.

Static websites are no longer enough. People want fresh information, updates, instant responses. Phone calls, letters and emails can do that, but Twitter’s messages are limited to 140 characters and forces you to be concise. Which means it’s faster and makes your communications very efficient.

Build relationships by being a real person first, salesperson second.  Hard sell is out, no one likes spam.  Communicate without being obnoxious.

Attract the people you want to work with by being open,  honest and above all else, yourself. You are more likely to enjoy working with someone with similar interests and values anyway. Inform your customers about interesting projects you are working on, within the bounds of client confidentiality.  Or tell them about the great fishing trip last weekend. I can’t tell you what to write, but be aware that once sent out into cyberspace, it’s on the public record. So try to be professional about it. It works.

Firstly you need to understand the basics. TV screen images are comprised of a mosaic grid of tiny squares called PIXELS, each one evenly colored. If you put a magnifying glass up to a Plasma or LCD TV screen you will be able to see them. Like the ancient Roman mosaic tile pictures, the smaller the tiles, the better the detail. From a normal viewing distance they blend together to form the picture. The more pixels built into the screen, the clearer (potentially) the picture.

Manufacturers will state the number of pixels in their TV, which is expressed as the number of pixels wide by the number of pixels high. This is called the screen’s RESOLUTION. For example, a “Full” HD screen has a resolution of 1920 pixels wide (horizontally) by 1080 pixels high (vertically) which is usually expressed as “1920 x 1080″. This is the highest resolution of TV’s currently available and is the type of TV that you should buy to be “future proof”. 1920 x 1080 is also the resolution of blu-ray DVD’s.

Now here is the misleading part where people often get confused. Some TV’s are sold as “HD ready” or HD (High Definition) as opposed to ” “Full HD” (Full High Definition). HD TV’s can be significantly cheaper than Full HD because they have less pixels and thus are cheaper to produce. Typically, HD TV’s will have a resolution of 1366 x 768 or sometimes even less. The difference in picture quality may not be noticeable if the screen 32″ (81cm) or smaller, or if you sit far away, or only watch SD (Standard Definition) TV broadcasts or standard DVD movies (which have a maximum resolution of only 768 x 576 for PAL countries or 640 x 480 for NTSC countries). But if you want to buy a very large screen, 40′ (101cm) or bigger then it is better to buy a Full HD TV with a resolution of 1920 x1080. SD Plasma or LCD TV’s are virtually no longer available as nobody wants them. Essentially they had the same resolution as the older style, curved glass picture tube (CRT) TV’s.

Most shows on TV are not yet Full HD or HD. This is changing as more shows are being produced in this new format, and eventually all new shows will be Full HD. So don’t be disappointed if your favorite show doesn’t look any clearer than it did with your old TV. It may not have been recorded in Full HD. Even dedicated free-to-air HD channels often transmit SD shows and the TV merely zooms in to fill your screen. SD has only about a quarter of the pixels of a Full HD image (roughly half the pixels wide by half the pixels high). They can’t create extra detail so this is what happens; SD video has it’s pixels “blurred” into adjacent pixels when displayed on a Full HD screen. You know you are watching a Full HD broadcast when you see a closeup of an actor that you thought had flawless skin, but now you can see every skin pore and wrinkle in their face!

I have tried to keep this post simple, there is a lot more I could tell you about TV specifications like refresh rates, contrast ratios, backlighting, plasma versus LCD etc. but this may be explored in future posts if any interest is generated by this one. Please leave a reply and tell me if I was too technical or maybe not technical enough. Happy viewing.