infobong.com

I've been up in Studio 4B, trying to teach myself the 3D animation package Softimage XSI. Obviously, there's only so much I can learn over the break, but its been worth my while. Hopefully, I'll learn enough to get students started working with it in a future semester, if not generate my own projects.

The Danish exchange student was up there, too. He's been trying for weeks to author a PAL-compatible DVD from an NTSC-formatted After Effects project. From the start, I've thought he would have to go about this by either running it through a hardware scan converter and author the DVD from raw video or starting from scratch and adjusting his resolution and frame rates in After Effects. Either way is going to be a hassle and give less-than-optimal results. He has a Quicktime of his movie, and I keep telling him that it'll play on any computer with the plugin, so its probably not worth the effort to try to make it readable on a PAL DVD player.

Regardless, he's been trying to create a PAL DVD in various DVD authoring packages. He was mucking about with the cheesy wizard-based package that came with the DVD drives on our PCs, and I was like, "Um, you should be able to click something and get more granularity."
"What's granularity?"

Its sometimes hard for me when I'm working with non-native speakers when I use weird words in conversation. I don't want to dumb down my discourse, but at the same time, I want to be intelligible. I imagine the Dane and others do want to learn as many English words as possible, but, then again, how often will he run into "granularity"?

I said, "You know how sand is made up of a bunch of little grains?"
He nodded yes.
"Granularity is like you can mess with each of those little grains. If there's more granularity in software, you have more options to manipulate."
"Got it."
Awesome.