Twenkid FX - Compositing Test

Twenkid FX - Compositing Test at 26 Sep 2010 from Todor Arnaudov on Vimeo.

Sequences were shot for the experimental fantasy short film "The Gift". Edited and composited using Twenkid FX - my custom NLE video editing and compositing/visual effects software. Still it's a prototype, developing quickly and gaining critical mass of complexity.

Shot in Bulgaria and Poland in 2008. Camera and editing: me.

To be continued...

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Clocks in the brain - How Consciousness Forms, 40 Hz Thalamus Clock

Excerpts from a Rober Pollack's book, suggested by a new article discussing Executive Attention, published by the AGI researcher Boris Kazachenko:

The Missing Moment: How the Unconscious Shapes Modern Science

The key topics include:
- The thalamus as a clock, 40 Hz and 1000 Hz.
- 0.5 sec delay after a stimulus turns into a conscious sensation
- clock's phase synchronizing to external sound stimuli
- incapability of brain to discriminate and feel consciously events shorter than ~1/80th of sec
- even a slight thalamus damage may cause deep coma - circuitry goes out of sync


If you have free time and curiosity, check out the list:
http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/~amit/books/master-booklist0.html#Brain and Cognition

...and  others, such as:

The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

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Twenkid FX - Video Editing/Compositing/Visual Effects Progress (News)

It's not ready for public release, the GUI is rough and yet there are too many experimental features.

Some of the interesting features include:

- Non-Linear Editing - cut and rearrangement of video segments
- Generation of cut and append jobs for VirtualDub based on the editions in Twenkid FX
- Animated titles with Outlines, Zoom, Sweeping and other transition effects
- Chroma key blending tests ("Green Screen") 
- Blending full frames (two frames together)
- Matte painting tests (combining videos at selected regions using masks)

- Crop-Paste/Video in video - selection of regions from one video and rendering on the target video, either same size or scaled, keeping the aspect
- Split Screen
- Various Fade-In/Out transitions
- Scroll and Squeeze Screen transitions
- Reverse Playback
- Speed-up/Slow-down
- Insert Images (full-screen)
- Save Still-Frames

...

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EPOC - Mind Reading Headset | Brain-Computer Interface Gadget

Watch the presentation on Ted: A headset that reads your brainwaves

Order: :)   http://www.emotiv.com/apps/epoc/299/

Curiously, about a six years ago I was suggested by an AGI researcher I've met then to try to experiment together in EEG-recording and analysis for Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). Unfortunately I lacked motivation to deal with the electronics part, but it is possible to make experiments yourself - if not with mind reading, at least with EEG. In general what you need are:

- Electro-magnetic sensors
- High quality low-noise transistors to amplify the signal
- DAC - Digital-To-Analog-Convertor, connected with or part of a:
- Microcontroller or FPGA kit with an interface to a PC - e.g. USB, designed to fetch the data from DAC and send them to the PC.
- Basic interface software to capture the data.
- Machine learning software to find patterns and correlations in data

At a Caffe Scientifique event months ago I met a Bulgarian researcher affiliated to Bulgarian Academy of Science. He was enthusiastic about experimenting on this field and wanted to try from years, but they've failed to allocate enough time and to get funding, so he's been working in other fields, but he sounded as an expert who knows how to develop the software. Wavelets are current methods for frequency analysis. I'm too busy with a stack of higher priority tasks to join them right now if they manage to start to implement a prototype, but certainly it would be fun to play.

Думи: мозъчно-компютърен интерфейс, връзка мозък-компютър, мозъчен интерфейс, , мисъл, контрол с мисълта, ЕЕГ, мозъчни вълни, предаване на мисли, четене на мисли, телепатия, кореалация, научно, кафене, БАН, Стилиян Георгиев, Форум, Демокрит, научни, изследвания, уейвлети.

Интервю със Стилиян Георгиев: http://e-vestnik.bg/3685

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