Back to the present, Saturday 18th September 2010. Today was the DAY. I had spent the whole of week’s train journeys to and from work listening to Metallica (the first 5 albums and Death Magnetic). I spent most of Saturday morning and afternoon headbanging and “prepping” for the gig, watching Metallica’s “Français Pour Une Nuit”  DVD which was filmed and recorded live at Arénes de Nîmes. In the evening I headed up to Sydney’s Acer Arena for the gig, only to find halfway that I’d forgotten the ticket at home (typical of me). After going back for the ticket and taking the trains again to Acer Arena again, I realised I had missed the two opening bands of the night, The Sword and Fear Factory, although I wasn’t too bothered by it because I wasn’t too familiar with either of the bands (I’d heard of Fear Factory on a Gigantour DVD with Dream Theater, but never really took a lot of notice), and I’d come to watch Metallica. There was still some time before Metallica would be on stage so I queued up on merchandise sales and bought a tshirt, massive wristband (see the end of the post), and a booklet with photos from the World Magnetic Tour. I thought I’d grab a beer before the show but the bar queue was way too long and I couldn’t be bothered. I got myself a bottle of water (which required it to decanted onto a plastic cup) and headed to Gold Reserve seating area (the general admission standing tickets were completely sold out by the time I bought the ticket).

Being a sporting arena (and that Metallica usually always play in arena given their massive following), the stage was set in the center with the audience all around. I realised my seat was right above the entrance where they would enter from (yes!). The stage setup was same as the one in the “Français Pour Une Nuit” DVD–Lars’ fairly minimalist drum kit (compared to seeing Mike Portnoy’s black and silver monster when I saw Dream Theater live) was in the centre, with sets of 4 speaker cabinets laid out on either side and 4 mics on the either side for James to just walk around and sing to any mic near him (or for the other guys to sing backing vocals). There were several wah pedals around the stage for Kirk to use the one nearest to him.

After 10 minutes of waiting full of random cheers from the crowd a few mexican waves (sidenote on Mexican waves: …it it takes only the actions of a few dozen fans to trigger a wave. Once started, it usually rolls in a clockwise direction at a rate of about 12 m/s (40 ft/s), or about 22 seats per second. At any given time the wave is about 15 seats wide. These observations appear to be applicable across different cultures and sports, though details vary in individual cases), the lights finally went down and the PA started to play Ecstasy of Gold (Metallica’s introductory music, from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly)–the crowd went wild because it signalled that the gig had finally started. It was followed by the clean guitar intro of That Was Just Your Life, from the PA when the four ran from the entrance to the door and continued the song. Here’s the setlist they performed:

1. That Was Just Your Life
2. The End Of The Line
3. Ride The Lightning
4. Fuel
5. Fade To Black
6. Broken, Beat And Scarred
7. The Four Horsemen
8. Sad But True
9. Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
10. All Nightmare Long
11. One
12. Master Of Puppets
13. Fight Fire With Fire
14. Nothing Else Matters
15. Enter Sandman
16. Encore:
17. Breadfan (Budgie cover)
18. Hit The Lights
19. Seek & Destroy

The whole setup was very similar to the Français Pour Une Nuit DVD–The way James introduced the songs, way he introduced Kirk’s solo, the way they connected (and acted, haha) the second guitar solo from Nothing Else Matters to Enter Sandman, the way James called the crowd “Metallica family”, the fact they played a cover song (which is different on each show) on the same spot on the set (3rd last), and started the encore set with the same riff from Frayed Ends of Sanity (AJFA). And oh! the concert ended exactly like the DVD with James asking (the light guys) to turn all lights on and playing Seek and Destroy while a army of black beach balls rained from the ceiling.

Metallica are really in their top form. The band’s form during the Some Kind of Monster documentary and the Escape from Studio 2006 tour really had the fans worried with James’ lack of ability to sing on key (and the lack of solos on St.Anger). They were tight as hell on this tour with James singing perfectly on key (and sounding better than ever, he did the older stuff like Ride The Lightning really well, also hitting high notes sometimes). The setlist (as you can see) included material mostly from Death Magnetic (their latest album), and mostly pre-black album songs. The only song from the Load/Re-load era was Fuel, which still fits quite nicely with all the early thrashy songs. I was quite glad so hear certain songs on the setlist: Fight Fire with Fire, Welcome Home (Sanitarium), Hit The Lights and Breadfan. That was a nice surprise, headbanging to Fight Fire with Fire was especially awesome.

The thing with Metallica is given I’ve been listening to them for a very long time, I can sing along all the songs. And their songs also tend to be quite fast and catchy–very head bangable, both of which I ended up doing throughout the whole set (because of which is that I am sipping some green tea as I write this) A concert becomes so much better when you know the words and can sing along all the songs. Most of these songs were stuff I grew up listening to, and its just amazing to listening them LIVE having listened to them millions of times.  I really had a blast!

Here’s a video of the show thanks to dinbod:

Here’s the link if the video doesn’t show up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDAarga7p3E

\m/

Hetfield: “I’ve heard that Sydney likes their music heavy!”
Crowd: “YEAHHH!”
Hetfield: “You want heavy??”
Crowd: “YEAHHH!!!”
Hetfield: “‘Tallica gives you heavy, baby…”

*starts playing Sad But True*

Because the schedule was quite tight, E-2 wanted to use a purchased stock footage instead of spending time creating everything from scratch. Not completely satisfied I made my own test with me creating a similar effect as the stock video used with Trapcode Particular.

My Attempt at the 3D pixellated effect

I am working on this to expand it into a more meaningful piece. Man, that GI takes ages to render! So stay tuned.

This one was quite a bit of a learning experience for me. I wanted to test the shatter simulation plugin in Cinema 4D called Xbreaker 1.7 made by nitroman of Pariah Studios, but soon it became a little test of multipass rendering. The depth of field and motion blur was added in post using depth pass and motion vector passes (respectively) out of cinema 4D and into After Effects. And also managed to setup Cinema 4D plugin in After Effects so that it could read AE projects generated by Cinema 4D. This is awesome because it can export full 3D information of the lights and cameras. Saves a lot of hassle. And I added the sound effects from a little collection that I have using Garageband, just because I am very familiar with it and know my way around quite well.

The way I like to follow tutorials is that I like to follow the classroom approach. I watch a tutorial to it’s completion, while taking quick notes on things I find interesting or things that are new to me. Then I try to do it later by myself. If I have a problem or run into a wall, I go back to the specific point in the tutorial and find out the particular information and quickly get back. I find this method way better than following the tutorials step by step.

I just received the Images and Word: Live in Tokyo/5 Years In A Livetime double-feature DVD by Dream Theater on the main today from Amazon. I was quite happy that I got the DVD on Amazon for less than half the retail price on the stores, but it didn’t come without any catch. I popped the DVD in and turns out to be a region1 disc (instead of region4 in Australia)! Anyway, thanks to my experience with these kind of stuff, I quickly figured out a solution that worked. Yay!

This DVD is seriously something all Dream Theater fans must have. I especially love the DVD commentary that goes on throughout the entire two discs by the whole band together. And there are some real funny bits in there. Just that in itself makes up for the trouble I guess.

That was exactly when Apple released their amazing refresh on the aluminium iMacs. There were five models:

• 21.5″ 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo
• 21.5″ 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo with ATI Radeon 4670
• 27″ 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo with ATI Radeon 4670 (with an option for ATI Radeon 4850)
• 27″ 2.66 GHz Core i5 with ATI Radeon 4850
• 27″ 2.8 GHz Core i7 with ATI Radeon 4850

I was particularly excited with the the highend model with the Core i7. Together with the model with Core i5, it was the first quad core iMac and it was a beauty, especially for the price of A$2,881 (with 4 GB of RAM). It was arguably a workstation Apple computer priced very competitively with PC workstations.

Here are the things I like about it:

Processor: Intel 2.8 GHz Core i7-860 “Lynnfield”

The new line of Intel Core i7 processors are just legendary. Built on the new 42 nm Nehalem micro-architecture, they have several new features than the older Core 2 Duo/Quads or the older Xeons (the newer  Xeons are also built on the Nehalem micro-architecture).

• Multi Threading
  Each of the the four cores enables two threads which act like virtual cores, making the processor have 8 cores in total.
• Turboboost
  Multiple cores are really useful for most things I do, such as rendering comps in After Effects or rendering out a scene in Maya but when I things like browse the internet or watch movies, there is little use for the multiple cores. In cases like these, the processor dynamically shuts down the unused cores and overclocks one or two remaining core to 3.6 GHz  (Infact the Lynnfields boost five multiplier steps, higher than two additional steps of Bloomfield).
• Direct Media Interface
  Replacing the Front Side Bus technology, Intel Direct Media Interface establishes much faster, higher bandwidth communication between the processor and the memory and the motherboard or logicboard in Apple lingo (although it lacks the Intel QPI and triple-channel memory in its big brother Bloomfield).

27″ Monitor

The 27″ monitor is really one of its kind. First of all, it’s just huge, almost comically. It’s bigger than anything I’ve ever worked on. Not that it’s just physically big, it can display at 2560×1440 resolution, the same horizontal resolution as the 30″ Apple Cinema Display. It uses IPS technology and LED backlighting which results in perfect representation of colors, just what I needed.

Magic Mouse

Magic mouse is, for those not familiar, world first multitouch mouse. The whole top part of the mouse is a multitouch sensor and it  only comes wireless. Apart from looking awesomely sleek, it’s also lot of fun to use. Especially for browsing the internet or reading documents.Whenever you need to scroll a lot (thanks to it’s momentum scrolling). The only drawback of the mouse is that unlike the Mighty Mouse (which was quite annoying to use), it does not feature a middle-mouse button. This isn’t really a big drawback for most people, but I happen to use Autodesk Maya where the middle mouse button is pretty much essential. But being a multitouch mouse this problem isn’t very difficult to fix, a firmware update could add a middle mouse button to equation but it something like that hasn’t been released by Apple yet. I guess I’ll just use my Microsoft Standard mouse (which is quite good for the price) whenever I use Maya until someone fixes the problem.

Anyway, I am loving Here are some more pictures of it: