Adam Teale: News From Above

We are off. Lachlan & I are in Ensenada, Mexico.

On the 26th of August we made some very sorry adios’s to our buenos amigos and spent 13 hours in the air to LAX.
The flight was quite ok. The entertainment system was good and there was reasonable leg room way back in the last row of the aeroplane. The food was even edible.
I was lucky enough to sit next to Luis, a cool dude from Mexico City who had been living in Melbourne for the past 2 years or so doing his MBA. Thanks to him we now have mas lugares y cosas to see in Mexico.

After the 1-2 hours in Immigration at LAX we managed to navigate the LA pubic transport system to Venice Beach and crashed at a hostel for the night (after a nice 6 pack or two of Fat Tyre beer). The next day we bussed it into Downtown LA, found the Greyhound bus terminal and proceeded to spend 4 hours or so in some heavy traffic on the way down to San Diego. Luckily the bus had free WIFI.

San Diego turned out to be a really nice place. We stayed 2 nights out on Ocean Beach at the hostel there and met some cool peeps from Finland & Canada and on the 2nd night we befriended some locals who took us to their place for some beers and were even kind enough to drive us back to the hostel in the back of their truck.

San Diego is a really easy city to get around and seems a world away from LA. The people are just as friendly but there aren’t nearly as many people trying to out crazy each other. Downtown (Gas Lamp) area seems to be where all the action is. Balboa park was cool, as well as the harbour that is home to some retired warships

From San Diego we took the trolley/train down to San Ysidro and crossed the border to Tijuana. Probably the easiest border crossing I have ever made. No immigration. No stamps. But it looks like we were meant to get some sort of card & stamp so will have to sort that out tomorrow here in Ensenada. This was our first attempt at speaking Español. “Dos boletos a Ensenada por favor”.

Ahh Ensenada. This is our first proper taste of Mexico. We are staying at “The Ensenada Backpacker”, a great little place run by a lovely chica by the name of Gabi. This is our second night here and I must say I am really enjoying Mexico so far. We’ve had some great tacos, met some friendly Mexican folks, washed some underpants and I bought a pair of pantalones.
Tacos so far have been about $12MXN ($1USD) and are muy delicioso! I am really going to enjoy the food here.

It looks like Ensenada has a few things to check out, then from here we might try to somehow make our way to Sierra San Pedro Martir Nation Park but it looks like public transport is going to be a little difficult.

Photos and hopefully the first Planet Kapow Mexico episode 01 video to come soon.

¡Hasta Luego!

Whistling Kites, Adelaide River, NT from Adam Teale on Vimeo.

I just got back from a short excursion to the Adelaide river to see the “jumping crocs”.

The visit was interesting but probably the most amazing was the boat ride back down the river. We were tailed by Whistling Kites which swooped down near the boat and plucked pieces of buffalo meat out of the air (tossed out by our Croc conjuror Sharelle).

I just got back from a short excursion to the Adelaide river to see the “jumping crocs”.

The visit was interesting but probably the most amazing was the boat ride back down the river.

We were tailed by Whistling Kites which swooped down near the boat and plucked pieces of buffalo meat out of the air (tossed out by our Croc conjuror Sharelle)

Davina & Betty – maiden voyage from Adam Teale on Vimeo.

Davina takes her new scooter “Betty” out for a few laps

Watch as I try to find focus with the 50mm f1.8 lens I bought yesterday for my new Canon 550D.

The video features some cool cats.

It was all shot at 1920×1080 25p, ingested as Apple Pro Res LT via FCP and the Canon EOS plugin.
I bought the upgrade to Magic Bullet Colorista II as well a few days ago so I used it to push some colours around in this clip.

What’s the best thing you can do after doing mental hours in the vfx world and not seeing your friends and family for weeks on end?

There are probably many options out there. One of them is to let your friends do all the hard work and book a nice little house up in the Blue Mountains in a little town called Mt Victoria and cook tasty food and let you eat it and then drag you along on bush walks.

Fresh air, sunlight & good friends are truly amazing things.

So I finally got to test out my new camera, the Canon 550D (a.k.a the Rebel T2i) or as it is affectionately known in Japan, the “Kiss X4″.

I am sticking with 550D.
(I just need some black electrical tape to cover the red “Kiss” logo on the front of the camera.)

This camera is impressing me so far, and I think a fair amount of that impressiveness is coming from the “Tamron SP AF17-50mm f2.8 XR DiII VC” lens I was recommended.

Anyway enough gas bagging, here are some pics I punched through Lightroom 3 and put up on Flickr. Yes I know the grading is over the top and has killed all the nice dynamic range in the original image, lots to learn!

And they keep coming!

Continuing on from ep 14 of PPKP ep 15 takes the PPKP team to the mystical village of Zhongdian, a.k.a “Shangri La” high up in the mountains of Yunnan.

As always, make your way over to planetkapow.com for Lachlan’s much more interesting write up on what went down in Zhongdian town.

Ping Pong Kapow episode 15 from Adam Teale on Vimeo.

It’s been a long time coming, but here is the latest Ping Pong Kapow video from Erin, Lachlan & my journey through Thailand, Cambodia, Laos & China in late 2008.

Episode 14 takes us north of Lijang, Yunnan province, up above the Yangtze River to Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Check it out here, or be even cooler and check out our new site PlanetKapow.com and read in much more interesting detail about what we got up to. (Warning – contains graphic images of a pig being butchered, and the occasional/usual swearing.)

Ping Pong Kapow episode 14 from Adam Teale on Vimeo.

Seeing as I’ve found very little reference for the use of python in nuke on the web I thought I’d create this post and add to it with little code snippets.

If anyone has some cool snippets to share please feel free to leave them in a comment below.

disable “postage stamps” on all nodes

for a in nuke.allNodes():
    try:
        a['postage_stamp'].setValue(0)
    except:
        pass

“unhide” all nodes’ inputs – useful when receiving a sneaky comp/lighting script

for a in nuke.allNodes():
    try:
        a['hide_input'].setValue(0)
    except:
        pass

change the “first” frame of all selected nodes that are “Read” nodes:
(example changes the first frame to 1018)

for a in nuke.selectedNodes():
    if a.Class() == 'Read':
        a['first'].setValue(1018)

print a selected nodes’ methods

import struct
node = nuke.selectedNode()
for a in node['lookup'].animations():
    print dir(a)

print inputs (dependencies) of a selected node:

for a in nuke.selectedNode().dependencies():
    print a.name()

print outputs (dependents) of a selected node:

for a in nuke.selectedNode().dependent():
    print a.name()

find all the TimeOffset nodes in a Group called “Group2″, and change the value of each offset based on it’s position in the array of found time offsets

tos = []
for a in nuke.toNode('Group2').nodes():
	if a.Class()=='TimeOffset':
		tos.append(a)
for b in tos:
	b['time_offset'].setValue(tos.index(b))

set the ‘bbox’ for any selected Merge, Keymix & Copy nodes to “B”

for a in nuke.selectedNodes():
	classTypes = ['Merge' , 'Keymix', 'Copy', ]
	for n in classTypes:
		if n in a.Class():
			for p in a['bbox'].values():
				if 'B' in p:
					a['bbox'].setValue(a['bbox'].values().index(p))

remove all animation from a selected nodes

for a in nuke.selectedNode().knobs():
	nuke.selectedNode()[a].clearAnimated()

add keyframes – animate a mix

for a in nuke.selectedNodes():
	a['mix'].setAnimated()
	a['mix'].setValueAt(1,nuke.frame())
	a['mix'].setValueAt(0,(nuke.frame() - 1))

half the colour value of all the Constant nodes in a script

for a in nuke.allNodes():
	if a.Class() == "Constant":
		a['color'].setValue(a['color'].value()[0] / 2 , 0)
		a['color'].setValue(a['color'].value()[1] / 2 , 1)
		a['color'].setValue(a['color'].value()[2] / 2 , 2)

find all the transform nodes in a script, and if their input is a Crop, set the ‘scale’ value to be twice it’s current value (also checks if the scale is a list/array or a float)

for a in nuke.allNodes():
	if a.Class() == "Transform":
		if a.input(0).Class() == "Crop":
			x = a['scale'].value()
			if type(x).__name__ == 'list':
				a['scale'].setValue(x[0] * 2 , 0)
				a['scale'].setValue(x[1] * 2 , 1)
			if type(x).__name__ == 'float':
				a['scale'].setValue(x*2)

set all the gain values of all ColorCorrect nodes to be twice their current value

for a in nuke.allNodes():
	if a.Class() == "ColorCorrect":
		a['gain'].setValue(a['gain'].value() * 2)

print files with ‘mov’ in filename

for a in nuke.allNodes():
	if 'Read' in a['name'].value():
		if 'mov' in a['file'].value():
			print a['file'].value()

change font size of all “write” nodes in script

for a in nuke.selectedNodes():
	if "Write" in a['name'].value():
		a['note_font_size'].setValue(60)

create 20 constants with incrementing colour values

def makeConstants(amount):
	for i in range(amount):
		a= nuke.nodes.Constant()
		color= float( float(i) / float(amount) )
		a['color'].setValue(color)
makeConstants(20)