overidon.com Central Database for Overidon Omnimedia

Pipeline

I’ve been making some short stories lately. And it is tough getting a rejection letter. But one way that I’ve been compensating for rejection is by writing a great deal of work that I am proud of and then creating a pipeline. A pipeline is a significant body of work that is in manuscript format that is either ready to be sent out to a publisher/agent or is already sent out and in the submission rejection/approval process. Since I’ve been writing short stories, I am able to fine tune the stories in less time that it may take to do the same on a novel. Many publishers do not allow simultaneous submissions for short stories, so the best way to get around this is to WRITE, WRITE, WRITE! Right now I have 4 stories that are in manuscript format that are all in the submission phase. I keep track of them using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. On the spreadsheet I write down the name of the publisher, the date of my submission, the rejection/acceptance date, any important identification information for the submission (This is MEGA important and we’ll talk about this more in a second) as well as the URL for any automated submission tracking.

For periodicals that accept digital submissions, they sometimes send you a tracking number or email that has information. Make sure to keep this information in a safe, special place. I enter the tracking number in my spreadsheet because it is often used in seeing if a story has been approved or not.

Here’s a tip: Be very careful when deleting emails. I accidentally cleaned out my emails from my webserver and I didn’t know that my Thunderbird email system was synched. So what happened is that I accidentally deleted all the emails I had. This included even the emails that were on my hard drive. It was really bad and I had to get another Story ID code from a publisher in order to keep tracking it. So make sure to be super careful when deleting any emails…and if you can avoid it altogether, then all the better!

Duotrope’s Digest is my favorite resource for finding publishers. It is a type of search engine with many different parameters for finding the right periodical that you are looking for. I really recommend that you bookmark that site if you are a writer. You will find that there are a lot more publishers out there than you may have previously thought.

When I first searched on Duotrope’s Digest, I realized that if I had a big enough pipeline of outstanding original work, then I would eventually get some of my short stories published.

Rejection letters are quite normal, so I try and not take it personally. Every piece of work should be something that I am extremely proud of, so making more stories should be pleasurable. So I take a rejection letter as an excuse to just write more.

It is important that you have enough stories that you aren’t sending the same story to two or more different publishers at once. That is usually looked down upon and can possibly complicate or even thwart a possible acceptance. So make sure that you keep good track of all your stories so that you only send a story to one publisher at a time. And then if you get a rejection letter, then you can send it to someone else after making whatever changes you deem necessary (if any at all).

-Tyler

When viewing Sacred Geometry, there is a simple technique that can help relax the eyes and mind in order to reveal the alternate images. These images are embedded within the geometry and usually can only been seen after the mind is no longer really looking for anything…or if the viewer is accustomed to looking for similar or the specific image already.

One good way that I use to view Sacred Geometry when the images are on the computer, is to sit in a comfortable chair and dim the lights. Sometimes I’ll have all the lights turned off so that way there is less distractions. I’ll put on decent quality headphones that actually cover the ears and I will listen to relaxing music of my choice…Preferably music without vocals.

Then I will make sure the Sacred Geometry image is comfortably sized on the screen. A good and fast program that shows images is the built-in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer that comes with Windows XP. That program makes it very easy and fast to resize an image on the screen without needing to do anything special.

When deciding what Sacred Geometry image to meditate on, it is good to glance at a bunch of images and seeing how you react to them emotionally. If one sticks out and seems to say, “I’m ready for this one” go with it. Sacred Geometry may be an exact science in the construction of the images, but the viewing is very subjective and emotional. Listen to your gut and pick an image that matches the emotional state you are in. Also, if an image seems to jump out and intrigue you in some way, that’s a great pick because you know it will keep your interest.

When looking at the image try and look somewhat near the center, but locking the eyes completely on the center is unnecessary and it can lead to muddying the entire experience. I try and keep my eyes open and relaxed as long as possible without blinking too much. If you’re eyes start to hurt at all blink and look away. This experience may be uncomfortable but it is not supposed to cause harm. So make sure to be careful at all times. Safety is the most important thing.

Not all Sacred Geometry in my experience has yielded the same emotional reactions. Sometimes the images just look cool. While other times I’ve seen the second or even third layer images and have felt deep senses of humility and connection. It all really depends on one’s emotional state at the time of the viewing as well as one’s experience with identifying common and uncommon imagery.

I remember the first time I stared into a well crafted decagram. It just looked like an interesting geometric shape at first. But over time, things pop out. When the mind can accept that things are made of smaller parts, and when the body can relax long enough to fixate on something as non-entertaining as some simple or complex geometry…then things can begin to happen.

-Tyler

Export to Quicktime

I was having this serious problem up until yesterday in trying to figure out the best way to create an FLV file from a flash animation (FLA) that had embedded movie clip animations within different simultaneous layers in the timeline. My first attempt at trying to deal with this was exporting an AVI file of the entire animation. But AVI files don’t show the embedded animations at all. So that was off the table.

Another attempt was to export a SWF file, and then convert that SWF into an AVI. But that ended up with loosing picture quality. Also the framerate was a little choppy, not to mention that the programs that said they could convert the SWF to AVI were not free either. So that was off the table.

But then yesterday I thought about directly converting the FLA itself into a FLV and I didn’t know how to do that, so I googled it. What I found was a website called ehow.com that recommended that I exported the FLA into a quicktime MOV format. This surprised me because I expected the MOV file to not included the embedded information similarly to an AVI. But it did in fact export the FLA into a MOV file that came with all my embedded movie clips and the framerate looked good as well. What I was most impressed with, was how the color quality was not affected, since I exported the MOV in “Animation” mode. Animation mode exports takes up a lot of processing power and hard drive space but they preserve the quality.

Once I had the MOV file, this can be easily converted into a FLV file that is great for uploading to YouTube. The best way to convert it to a FLV is by using an official Adobe Flash Video Encoder. But eHow.com recommended that I used quicktime pro to encode the flv file, but you have to buy quicktime pro for that. And since I already have Adobe Flash Video Encoder, that really is not necessary.

But there’s a twist to all this. Have you ever noticed that when you make a flash movie that is animated using vector graphics instead of bitmaps, that when you increase the size of the finished SWF during playback, that the image gets bigger without necessarily decreasing the picture quality? The reason for this is because of the vector based graphics, it actually redraws the stuff using processing power. So the super cool thing, is that when I end up exporting my finished FLA into quicktime when I’m done with the music video, I’m going to increase the video size. This way I’ll be able to make an image that should work on YouTube in HD, without having to actually draw the video using some huge resolution that takes up a ton of processing power and ram. This is extremely exciting since I want to show the music video to friends on a TV when it’s done.

The option for the size of the video shows up when you choose to export in Quicktime in Animation Mode.

I can’t tell you how much better this looks than trying to get creative by messing with SWF files and converters. This is seriously energizing and I’d thought I’d share the info with everyone.

Here’s a link to the eHow article on Exporting FLA files. Although I disagree with using Quicktime for the second part, it makes sense and is much cheaper if someone doesn’t have Adobe Flash Video Encoder.

-Tyler

Upscaled Image - Blurred on the top Half to remove pixelation

Sometimes while surfing the net, one may find an image that would be perfect as a desktop wallpaper. The problem is that not all images found on the web, are the perfect size to match the resolution of the current screen setup. So, even though we can choose to simply stretch the image to fit the screen, that can cause the image to look very blocky and pixelated. But if you have Adobe Photoshop or another similar program, there is an easy fix. There is a technique called Upscaling an image that is used often for the film and TV industry. It is kind of tricky, but they are able to take a low resolution image and make it larger, with a minimum amount of picture quality degradation. But since we aren’t working with video, we can simply resize the image and then add some blur in Photoshop to smooth out the blocky pixels. The first thing to do is to find out if the image you have is the right proportions for your desktop resolution. If you don’t care about stretching or distorting the image, then this isn’t a big deal. But if the image would look wrong if the proportions were manipulated, then you might want to crop the image to match the proportion of your screen.

So let’s say you have an image that is 900 x 750 (1.2 : 1) and your screen resolution is 1024 x 800 (1.28 : 1). This means that if you divide the width of your image by the length of the image, the ratio of width to length is 1.2 and with this in mind if you divide the width of your actual desktop resolution by the length then you get a ratio of 1.28. So if we want to preserve the ratio of the image we need to crop the image before we resize it.

But by how much should we crop the image?

Well, since we have a target ratio of 1.28 for the screen resolution, then we just need to crop the image enough to get it to change from 1.2 to 1.28, so it won’t take much.

A simple way to do this would be to multiply the length of the image by 1.28. What this will do is tell us what the new size of the width of the image should be, in order to have an image that is proportional to the screen resolution of the desktop.

Here goes! 750 (image length) * (times) 1.28 (ratio of the desktop resolution =  960 (target width)

This result of  ‘960’ makes sense because it is only a little bigger than the original size of the image…but wait, there’s a problem! If the original image is only 900 pixels in width then where are we supposed to come up with the extra 60 pixels? Exactly! We can’t simply add information without distorting the image, so since we are going to crop the image. We need to actually take away some information from the width and length of the image.

You can do this by eyeballing it, or else you can simply multiply the length and new width of the image by something like 0.90 (which is 90%). Do this to both numbers and you will still have a ratio of 1.28 : 1 which will match up with the target ratio for the desktop resolution.

So now you should do this: 960 (modified width) * (times) 0.90 (90 percent)    and then 750 (length) * (times) 0.90 (90 percent)

This should give us a cropped width of 864  and a cropped length of 675. All we have to do now is make sure the image is cropped by 36 pixels from the original width size (900) and crop 75 pixels from the original length size (750). This will give us the perfect proportions.

So now when we change the image size in Photoshop from 864 x 675 into 1024 x 800. The proportions will be exactly right. But now we have a pixelated and blocky image, so we move onto the next step.

All that is necessary to do now is to blur the image under “FILTER – BLUR” and/or “FILTER/BLUR MORE” options in the menu area. The more you blur the image, the less blocky it will look like. But if you blur it too much, it may look too low-quality, so pick a happy medium. The cool thing about desktop wallpapers, is that it is allright if they are slightly blurry, because we don’t usually focus intently on them anyway. But if the image is too blocky, it can be a real distraction.

When you are done I recommend saving the image as a high quality jpeg or an excellent quality bitmap. Because desktop backgrounds have been able to read high quality bitmap (bmp) files ever since Windows 3.1 back in the day. So there is no real need to skimp on quality, especially since you already put in all this work into your image.

I hope you had fun resizing and cropping and upscaling your image!

-Tyler

PS: This is a very jerry-rigged version of upscaling so always try to use hiqhest quality images when doing anything for professional projects!

Upscaled Image - Blurred on the top Half to remove pixelation

Sometimes while surfing the net, one may find an image that would be perfect as a desktop wallpaper. The problem is that not all images found on the web, are the perfect size to match the resolution of the current screen setup. So, even though we can choose to simply stretch the image to fit the screen, that can cause the image to look very blocky and pixelated. But if you have Adobe Photoshop or another similar program, there is an easy fix. There is a technique called Upscaling an image that is used often for the film and TV industry. It is kind of tricky, but they are able to take a low resolution image and make it larger, with a minimum amount of picture quality degradation. But since we aren’t working with video, we can simply resize the image and then add some blur in Photoshop to smooth out the blocky pixels. The first thing to do is to find out if the image you have is the right proportions for your desktop resolution. If you don’t care about stretching or distorting the image, then this isn’t a big deal. But if the image would look wrong if the proportions were manipulated, then you might want to crop the image to match the proportion of your screen.

So let’s say you have an image that is 900 x 750 (1.2 : 1) and your screen resolution is 1024 x 800 (1.28 : 1). This means that if you divide the width of your image by the length of the image, the ratio of width to length is 1.2 and with this in mind if you divide the width of your actual desktop resolution by the length then you get a ratio of 1.28. So if we want to preserve the ratio of the image we need to crop the image before we resize it.

But by how much should we crop the image?

Well, since we have a target ratio of 1.28 for the screen resolution, then we just need to crop the image enough to get it to change from 1.2 to 1.28, so it won’t take much.

A simple way to do this would be to multiply the length of the image by 1.28. What this will do is tell us what the new size of the width of the image should be, in order to have an image that is proportional to the screen resolution of the desktop.

Here goes! 750 (image length) * (times) 1.28 (ratio of the desktop resolution =  960 (target width)

This result of  ‘960’ makes sense because it is only a little bigger than the original size of the image…but wait, there’s a problem! If the original image is only 900 pixels in width then where are we supposed to come up with the extra 60 pixels? Exactly! We can’t simply add information without distorting the image, so since we are going to crop the image. We need to actually take away some information from the width and length of the image.

You can do this by eyeballing it, or else you can simply multiply the length and new width of the image by something like 0.90 (which is 90%). Do this to both numbers and you will still have a ratio of 1.28 : 1 which will match up with the target ratio for the desktop resolution.

So now you should do this: 960 (modified width) * (times) 0.90 (90 percent)    and then 750 (length) * (times) 0.90 (90 percent)

This should give us a cropped width of 864  and a cropped length of 675. All we have to do now is make sure the image is cropped by 36 pixels from the original width size (900) and crop 75 pixels from the original length size (750). This will give us the perfect proportions.

So now when we change the image size in Photoshop from 864 x 675 into 1024 x 800. The proportions will be exactly right. But now we have a pixelated and blocky image, so we move onto the next step.

All that is necessary to do now is to blur the image under “FILTER – BLUR” and/or “FILTER/BLUR MORE” options in the menu area. The more you blur the image, the less blocky it will look like. But if you blur it too much, it may look too low-quality, so pick a happy medium. The cool thing about desktop wallpapers, is that it is allright if they are slightly blurry, because we don’t usually focus intently on them anyway. But if the image is too blocky, it can be a real distraction.

When you are done I recommend saving the image as a high quality jpeg or an excellent quality bitmap. Because desktop backgrounds have been able to read high quality bitmap (bmp) files ever since Windows 3.1 back in the day. So there is no real need to skimp on quality, especially since you already put in all this work into your image.

I hope you had fun resizing and cropping and upscaling your image!

-Tyler

PS: This is a very jerry-rigged version of upscaling so always try to use hiqhest quality images when doing anything for professional projects!