Blender Conference 2006 Announced

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waag.jpgThe fourth Blender Conference will be held from october 20-22 in the Waag, Amsterdam. The Blender Conference is THE yearly event where Blenderheads meet for three days to share their stories and ideas, learn and party for three days. You can get an impression of the event by visiting the 2004 and 2005 archives.

Like the previous years, there will be an Animation Festival and Suzanne Awards ceremony but details on those will follow later on the announcement page.

If you are interested in contributing, you can send in a proposal for a paper, presentation or workshop. You’ll find the details on the Call for Participation page. Please note that the proposals must be in by August 7th.

Of course BlenderNation will be there to party report extensively during the event!

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    • Rui Campos – rcas

      I will surely be there to comment on what is happening.

      Hopefuly I will also be there showing some stuff, like showing some images of what will be the Blender Professionals Portal (yes, the startup has been delayed to January 1st 2007), doing some workshops, having fun, drinking beer ….

      – Rui –

    • http://www.freewebs.com/jhblenderart Jason H

      Is there ever going to be a Blender Conference in the U.S? I mean, one like every 5 years would be ok. It’s just that most of us American teens can’t just hop across the ocean everyday you know?

      But this sounds great and I’ll keep up online.

    • Igor

      I hope that will have visitors this year microphones when asking video presenters, it’s sooo annoying when you can’t hear questions & there is no subtitles later on video tutorials…

    • http://www.osysi.net Bmud

      I think it would be great if people registering are asked where they are coming from. I bet there are in fact very few US atendees. I have to agree with Jason. I wish there was a US equivalent somewhere, or if it worked a bit like the olympics and hopped around from location to locaiton. The upside to having it in Amsterdam every year is obvious though.

      1. Ease. Same location? Same expectations. Less organizational stress.
      2. Novelty. Ton lives in Amsterdam… doesn’t he? Isn’t it cool to think that you’ll be in the king’s land? I think so. I want to go some year (not this year) for two reasons. A: Get geeky! and B: See Amsterdam! Legoland is there after all. :D

    • theblenderboy

      i agree with Jason H. as rediculous as it would be, ‘twould be nice if it were in, say, Hershey, Pennsylvania. yeah! at the Hershey Hotel!

    • mpl

      Well, i know it isn’t the exact same thing but you americans have Siggraph. I would just LOVE to visit Siggraph…

    • BenA

      Igor’s got a great point that I want to echo/emphasise. The session videos are great but it would be much more clear if a screen record was occurring during the session. Like the how to make a Blender tutorial video. Even if the presenter repeats the audience question I’d be pleased with that.

      Each year I wait anxiously for the session videos!

    • martin

      One thing that I would like to see is, high quality videos available for download. The videos from last years conference were good, but the image quality was at a point where you really could see anything decent.

      Probably one thing that should be considered as part of the distribution (if they do the higher quality vid’s this year) is to probably use bit torrent.

      Be nice if something like this came to the southern hemisphere though. I am sure that there are quite a few people from Australia that use blender.

    • Rui Campos

      If someone could lend a HD camera to record the sessions, it would be really nice and it would give much better results.
      Of course that I don’t really have the cash to buy one just to record the sessions at the Blender Conference ….

    • Big Fan

      I would just like to echo comments about video quality.
      I really like to view these,the content is great,but please improve the sound and detail visible.
      May be Ton can hire a HD camera if no one has one.
      Not every subject needs it but for the modelling tuts it would be really appreciated.

    • well

      Well I won’t be this year, too, there’s to much trouble in real live.

      But like allready said before it would be very cool if the videos would be in a better Quality. I know it’s difficult to capture screen, the presenter, the auditors for every meeting during the 3days but the videos are the only thinks people see that aren’t there. And the only things they get to improve their knowledge.

      Would be cool if there would be some videos in a TV reporter style to capture the atmosphere and how everything was build up and so on and so on….

    • VividHazE

      I’ve been to Amsterdam twice in 2 years, though in Feb time, so haven’t been to the Blender Conference yet, maybe next year when I ain’t so broke (and a bit better at Blender) :) What exactly is the Wagg? is it like some sort of stadium?

    • http://www.stani.be Stani

      A hd camera for the videos?! That’s a bit of overkill and will only make the editing more demanding. (Not even talking about the price.) The poor quality of the videos has to do with the low light condition and the compression techniques. What is needed is a good low light 3CCD mini-dv camera and separate wireless microphones for speakers and public. Also what is projected through the beamers should not be filmed but recorded immediately from source. Later in the editing this can be used rather than showing a movie of a projected screen. Mini-dv is really good quality, just compress it to mpeg2 for dvd (which is less quality) and distribute the dvd through Bittorrent.

    • http://www.konrad-haenel.de konrad8ha

      Now that I am working on a real “Blender-Product” (TM), I’ll absolutely do my best to attend the conference.

    • Dutchie

      Bmud, I think you’re a little confused. Legoland is in Denmark, not in the Netherlands ;)

    • Phreak Of Nature

      I agree with most people but i also think that ton and othres at the blender foundation need to be better PROMOTING the conference because if we get enough attention then we could get somebody to sponser the video sesions, just like the big festivals does ,have a small five second video ad before the video starts …just my two cents

    • http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v483/sago/ Sago

      Maybe I’ll drop by, could be fun. Say hello to some fellow BlenderArtists. And perhaps I should make something to submit, could be fun. Ha.

    • Alabandit

      i agree with stani, HD cams would be great but postporoduction will be a bit of an over kill.

      Though for the ordiance unless you have some one running to the diferant speakers, a choir mic in the front or above the ordiances will be surficient.

    • David

      As the problem seems to be the screen quality, do you think it would be a good idea to do a separate capture of the video feed that gets projected? I have seen some hardware DivX encoders that could do the job, and that don’t cost that much. For distribution of tutorials, you have the perfect screen quality, and you can just add the voice-over. It should give much better video quality (directly from the computer) and it should render the file sizes smaller, as there will be less noize -> better compression.

    • rcas

      Could you provide a link David ? And pricing ?

    • David

      I haven’t been able to test these myself (yet), but these are available in Belgium (and I think also in the rest of Europe):

      ADS TECH DVD Xpress Videoacquisitie DX2 USB 2.0 (€ 70)
      ———————————————————————————-
      - HW encoding of MPEG 1/2/4 and DivX. Not know if there are Linux/OSX drivers

      I have posted a question to ADSTech if there is Linux or MacOS support. Given that their downloads all mention Windows, I would be astonished if it were, but it’s best to ask first :-)

      PLEXTOR Digital video converter ConvertX PX-TV402U USB 2.0 (€ 147)
      ———————————————————————————-
      – HW encoding of MPEG 1/2/4 DivX. Linux drivers know to work.
      – Reviews: (both positive)
      http://www.engadget.com/2004/09/14/plextors-convertx-px-tv402u-isnt-exactly-a-personal-video/ (short)
      http://hardware.newsforge.com/hardware/05/07/01/0353218.shtml (Linux related)

    • Rui Campos

      @ David ; The Plextor one works nicely in Linux, but at the moment the only software that really has an interface to it is MythTV. Perhaps you can find some other nice software to record the session.

      And, a Dual Core system can record the screen nice and clean, for linux you have Wink, that uses a bit of the CPU, but on a Dual Core this isn’t really a problem.

      This with a Decent Video Camera should work like a charm.

    • David

      @Rui Campos

      I hadn’t thought of the Dual Core system. I don’t know how the presentations will be done. If everybody brings his own laptop for the presentations like last year, if something like this is done, it should be fairly transparent no matter what pc is used to do the presentation.

    • http://bestgamesbestprices.blogspot.com/ Katy Springman

      I am perpetually thought about this, thanks for posting .