I hope the troubleshooting strategies, solutions, and tool details are interesting and helpful to you.
This blog isn’t necessarily a “how-to” or “follow along” article as I assume you don’t need to make color synchronized videos from Atari BASIC, but I detail the challenges, remedies (hacks), and free and open source tools used to solve the problems encountered along the way and generate the final videos. I think it is totally awesome that all graphics and audio were created on Atari 8 bit computers. I reached out to fantastic Atari chiptunes artist Adam Sporka and he generously offered to share his music for use in these videos which is done on a real Atari 800. Here are 6 of the 24 resulting Atari BASIC Mandelbrot Set zoom videos, in the ones with frames each colored frame is half or twice as large as adjacent frames:
It the end it is more of a convoluted hack than a toolchain but it worked and that’s what counts! Having a concept or idea is one thing but the project was more complicated than expected and the final implementation involved virtual machines, emulators, hundreds of lines of code, a convoluted still and video tool chain, image, and video editing tools – entirely with free and open source software. I also thought if I captured video of the color cycling I could scale and synchronize the videos to zoom in while color cycling, and by offsetting the color cycling by a fixed amount with each zoom level I could create synchronized color coded animated frames that better showed the zoom levels. I realized that if you captured a screen at each size I could scale the bitmap and make an image that had very high resolution (small pixels) in the center, and then could zoom in on it. The program can zoom in and out on 12 interesting preset locations on the complex plane of the Mandelbrot Set. I dream of that vista of opportunity opening to more folks using this amazing tool.The Atari BASIC Mandelbrot Set renderer is not able to execute millions of calculations for every pixel, as a matter of fact it is configured to execute 81, at that depth the numerical precision of Atari BASIC’s floating point numbers appears to start breaking down, and with it’s 1.79MHz 6502 CPU, more cycles would start to take a very very long time.
Now I’m at $300 yearly income and I have a growing connection with a devoted audience. HitFilm composition was the vehicle that got my channel to monetization. none of which are likely to open up avenues to growth. Right now if you want to try your hand at a YouTube channel with $0 investment (because bills, social class), you have to choose between a robust stage presence, hundreds of hours of learning to animate by hand, putting up a boring slideshow or PowerPoint. To my mind, HitFilm could be the Egg that hatches: a single-purchase/freeware app that introduces a whole new class of users to motion design that would have never considered it, never been able to try their hand at mographs. There’a much more of a constant pipeline of folks wanting to try their hand and fan films. It’s kind of a chicken or egg situation: “most users do VFX.” Well, duhhhh.that’s what the features support. There are lots of tools we need that could make this project faster (better partial masking of effects, which right now I use layer duplicates), vector manipulation, and parenting things beyond scale, position, and rotation (what the call in AE "pick-whipping") Many things are individually keyframed, rather than math-based (thus, adjusting this comp would mean hell for changes sent back from a client, if this were work for hire.)
This is a huge use-case for HF (free/single purchase), more people could create their *own* branded looks in-house to help their business grow. Good enough I'm not shy to say HitFilm can create branded content, advertising and stuff that small businesses pay good money for.
With better tools, it could be faster: but the Goal here is to show: I'm just a noob: but this LOOKS GOOD. It represents about 2 hours of skills practice as I'm trying to master the tools. (using a set matte and a comp of a lot of horizontal lines).
This is all Created in Express (no packs), including the Tv scan lines gimmick, which I created manually. Why? I really like the Basic feel of the app, how buttery smooth HitFilm playback is compared to AE! I'd like to evangelize HitFilm for this use case, I'd like to see more people using it, which would in turn mean more features for 2D animation and vectors.įont is Lemon Milk. Hello! I'm really on a mission to show HitFilm's power to createMotion Graphics.