Youtube’s embed code that doesn’t fallback to iPhone gracefully:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="500" height="250" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ybPeQUEgk-0" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500" height="250" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ybPeQUEgk-0" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>

Example that does work:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/ v/ VideoID" width="500" height="250">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/ v/ VideoID" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
<!-- Fallback content -->
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/ watch? v=VideoID">
<img src="http://img.youtube.com/ vi/ VideoID/0.jpg" width="500" height="250" alt="[Video title]" />YouTube Video</a></object>

After Effects error: making file specification – no such volume (-35)

Yeah, it sucks.  Well, today was my first time experiencing this error.  I was opening an archived After Effects project, and as soon as it started to open I saw the error message.  I racked my brain trying to figure out why it was missing media because I was opening the project from a collected files folder.  I kept saying to myself,”This is what collected files is for…I shouldn’t be missing ANYTHING!”.  To top it all off, I had to continuously click the button as it tried to open the project because it was missing every single asset.  Finally it opened in After Effects and all assets were missing so I relinked everything and saved the project.  Fast forward 10 minutes later, AE crashed on me and I had to restart the program only to be welcomed by that annoying error message AGAIN!  So I got smart and googled the error message.

Well it turns out that the HFS file system on Mac has a 32 character limit on any Volume Name.  My external drive was exactly 32 characters.  I simply closed After Effects, renamed the external drive by shaving off a few characters of the Volume Name and TADA…Everything was fine!

So lesson of the day: Don’t make your Volume Names longer than 32 characters!

For example:  I have a Maya 2009 project that needs to work in Maya 2008.  It uses nCloth which was available in 2008 so we are golden there.

• Save the Maya 2009 scene file as a .MA (Maya Ascii file format)
• Open it in any text editor and make sure it’s in plain text format.
• Find the lines of code that reference the Maya version number like this:

//Maya ASCII 2009 scene
//Name: name of maya scene.ma
//Last modified: Sat, Jan 16, 2010 1:12:40 PM
//Codeset: UTF-8
requires maya "2009";

• And simply comment out the lines at the beginning of the file by adding two slashes “//”:

//Maya ASCII 2009 scene
//Name: name of maya scene.ma
//Last modified: Sat, Jan 16, 2010 1:12:40 PM
//Codeset: UTF-8
//requires maya "2009";

There is a new method since the Maya 2008 release (I think that’s when they started this). If you click on File > Open Scene > Option Box, you’ll see a little checkbox to “ignore version“. Much easier this way.

NOTE: If you are using nodes that are exclusive to a new release, this will not work or at least the exclusive nodes will not import.  That will require a little trial and error.

Well I found a page with a tip from Johnnygozy:

I think I’ve figured out a solution for this problem. If you click on the mail icon, then hold down command and option keys while clicking on preferences in the drop down box, you will be prompted with a box that has a key and value prompt. Type “AutocheckInterval” under key (this seems to be case-sensitive) and then under value type in the number in minutes of how often you want it checked. You will need to quit out of the notifier (again found in the drop down box under the mail icon) and then run the app again for your change to take effect.  I typed in 1 and it is checking every minute or so now for me. I hope this works for everyone else too.

This worked perfectly for me, but some users are experiencing trouble.  Give it a try.

If you are trying to bring locators from Maya into After Effects, or camera data this is a very important tool to have. I especially enjoy the fact that you can simply select any object in Maya, type “pass2obm” and save it to a file.  Once in After Effects you can simply import the OBM file and it populates layers with white locators for each object.  After Effects has the ability to bring in .ma files from Maya, but the nulls have to be named null, and they are imported in as a hidden null object.  The MoCon script works with any naming convention, and creates small solid layers for easy visualization.

Check out 3Dmation here.

Error: File contains unknown nodes or data.  To preserve this information, the current file type cannot be changed.

ls -type unknown;

delete XXXXXX

If someone knows of a simpler method to remove all unknown nodes let me know.

print

So I pulled this bad boy out of the college print making pile. Our goal was to make a print that was related to Thanksgiving. Well…I took a photo of the remains of our turkey after we devoured most of it. Yes it looked pretty gross.

Untitled

Untitled print.

One day I was thinking about the lack of help technology provides at times. Not always but occasionally it becomes more of a hindrance than anything. Then I thought about childhood. My toys and ‘machines’ never let me down. Sure I had a couple of loose chains on my Roadmaster ‘BMX’ bike, but one wrench took care of that.