spench.net

I wrote the following major system components:

1) A multi-threaded, load balancing MPEG-2 video decoder engine, featuring:
• Automatic memory management & caching
• Level-Of-Detail support and seamless transitions
• Continuous playback or shot looping (given cut information)
• Asynchronous loading and destruction

[Initial tests indicate it can play over 500 videos simultaneously on one computer (with 2 HT CPUs and 1GB of RAM at the lowest LOD). TVisionarium is capable of displaying a couple of hundred videos without any significant degradation in performance, but there's so much still to optimise that I would be surprised if it couldn't handle in excess of 1000.]

With my latest optimisations, TVisionarium is able to play back 1000 shots simultaneously!
While profiling the system, total CPU usage averages around 90-95% on a quad-core render node!
This indicates that those optimisations have drastically minimised lock contention and support far more fluid rendering.
Have a look at TVis in the following video:

This is an in-development 'video tube' test of the video engine:
(Watch it on youtube.com to leave comments/rate it if you like.)

Inspired by the many animations used in documentaries dealing with our Solar System, the Universe and Man's exploration of it, I created an animation of one of the Voyager space probes leaving Earth.

While in Brazil, I used a digital still camera to create some stop-motion animations:

This is the finale of the year 2000 Prize Giving Video at my old high school. I attempted to create one of the Earth zoom-in/out sequences from scratch. They have been shown in many films, TV series and computer games. It features at the beginning of the video.

Some weekends ago I had access to a blue screen and performed a quick chroma key experiment.

Here is a neat trick you can do to make oneself see-through:

I also saw this as an opportunity to re-use an animation I created back in 2000 (it's not easy balancing your entire body on a small blue box!):