Mike Afford Media BLOG

Latest news, observations, and the occasional comment

Magners League Virtual Set

Virtual Set

Virtual Set

Here’s my latest virtual set for Setanta Sports Ireland.

You can see it on some of the Magners League shows, and it’s also on air for ‘The Hub‘ with a different logo in the virtual screen.

As usual, it was built as a 3D model in Cinema 4D and then painstakingly textured up using my special secret process (which I may reveal as another blog post at some point).

Finally, it was exported as an fbx file which I loaded into tOG (by RT Software) for some final tweaks before the whole thing was zipped up and downloaded by Setanta at their end.

It was a pretty fast turnaround for this one – under a week to get it on air, with a few updates supplied after the first TX.

You can see more images here.

RT Software at IBC 2009 (RAI, Amsterdam)

Conference : 10-14 September
Exhibition : 11-15 September

Although I won’t be able to make it over to Amsterdam for IBC this year, I thought I might just give a quick heads up to all you media types that my old pals from RT Software are exhibiting again this year. RT Software’s tOG 3D system is the technology behind some of my virtual studios and many of the real-time election graphics that appear on my site.

RT Software at IBC (RAI Amsterdam) : Hall 3 (3.A59)

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Royalty Free Weather Icons

UPDATE (July 2013). Since this original post, this Icon Set has been updated several times and now includes a massive 92 weather conditions and 4 sizes of each icon (including extra large 512x512px) AND a complete set of icons in SVG (vector format).

Original post follows:

In response to requests, I’ve created a new set of Weather Icons based on the popular first set. These symbols are essentially the same but are now all PNGs with transparency, so the icons themselves can be used more easily on maps and other backgrounds (the low-res image below shows the icons on some suggested colours).

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WordPress Weather Widget (almost)

Over on the right there you should be seeing a little widget-like thing showing the weather forecast for Lovely Leitrim. (UPDATE: currently disabled). It’s using my own TV graphics-style Weather Icons which you can get here.

I don’t know exactly (yet) how to make it into a downloadable widget that other people could use on their own sites, but if I get time I may investigate how to package it up. At the moment it’s just hard coded into a regular text widget. And it’s also hard coded to pick up the weather forecast for Carrick-on-Shannon, so I expect the appeal might be… er… limited. read more »

2 Comments

Weather Symbols

UPDATE (July 2013): This set has now been updated to 92 different weather conditions, 4 sizes of each icon, and a complete set included in vector (SVG) format.

Original post follows:
I’ve had plenty of people visiting my site looking for weather symbols to download so I thought it was about time that I actually made some weather symbols of my own.

Lots of people have been in touch wanting to use the old BBC ones which I ‘refreshed’ slightly as part of the 2005 BBC Weather relaunch. Obviously those symbols are owned by the Beeb, but I’ve been directing people back to the Weather Centre anyway, in the sure knowledge that they won’t be allowed to use them for copyright reasons. One visitor also reported back that they were refused permission because it also might be perceived as a ‘degree of endorsement by the BBC’.

Which is entirely fair enough.

So I decided to design a set of 40 new and unique weather symbols / icons that have a kind of ‘homage to old school TV graphics’ quality to them, but which have been designed entirely from scratch and obviously haven’t taken a single point, line or vector from the originals.

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PAL D1/DV Widescreen square pixel settings in After Effects (CS4 vs CS3)

Seems the latest version of After Effects from Adobe (CS4) has changed the PAL D1/DV Widescreen square pixel preset.

In CS3, compositions using that preset would be set to 1024 x 576 pixels. The new version (CS4) uses 1050 x 576.

So which is right? 1024 or 1050?

Well, to begin with, it’s all a bit complicated. I can still remember when it was first explained to me many years ago when I was still at the BBC, and it’s the kind of thing that’s quite difficult to get your head around without drawing little pictures on the back of envelopes. Anyway, there’s a few resources out there that try to explain this (links included below) – but I thought I’d have a go myself.

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Weather Symbols for BBC Weather maps

BBC Weather symbols

Full set of BBC Weather symbols

I’ve noticed quite a bit of traffic coming to my site searching for ‘Weather Symbols’ so I thought it might be an idea to upload the full set of symbols that I made for the BBC as part of the 2005 relaunch. These are based on the original designs by Mark Allen, who submitted the familiar symbols to the BBC in 1974 while still a student in Norwich, and subsequent revisions by BBC graphic designers over the years.

UPDATE: I’ve changed the little preview of all the BBC symbols, due to increasing numbers of visitors deciding to snoop about and pinch the images for themselves. Tut tut.

The new set of symbols were redrawn in Illustrator and converted to PNG’s for use in Metra’s Weatherscape system which drives the graphics for all of the BBC’s weather graphics, both the realtime 3D forecasts and all of the web content too. The main changes are to the raindrop, the basic cloud outline and the colour of the lightning bolt. I had designed several possible replacement symbol sets as part of the initial pitch, but in the end there was no reason to change the classic icons – other than a couple of cosmetic tweaks. read more »