"The music goes really well"

I've lost count of the number of times that clients say to me "The music goes really well!" when I present them with an animation which has been choreographed to music.

What they perhaps don't realise is that actually it's the graphics that are going well with the music (not the other way around), and that is because I've painstakingly spotted all the 'cues' within the music (beats, bars and musical nuances) and made sure the motion coincides with those musical events. Not quite the happy coincidence it's often perceived to be!

This is why it's key to choose (and settle on) a piece of music before starting work on a project - it really does influence everything else in the process, and changing it further down the line will add a lot of time and therefore cost to the project.

Geek update

I've just splashed out on a new workstation, as my 'youngest' was a three year old Athlon dual core machine that was struggling a bit with CS4 and the increasing complexity of projects that I'm working on.

I spent all of last weekend carrying out a major operation to get the new computer installed, and shuffle everything around in order to retire my oldest 'admin' PC which is 5 years old.

For anyone who's interested, the spec of the new machine is as follows:

Processor: Intel Core i7 Processor i7-930 (2.80GHz)
Memory: 12GB CORSAIR XMS3 TRI-DDR3 1333MHz
Motherboard: ASUS P6T WS Professional
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit
Storage: 1 x 250Gb for OS etc, 4 x 1TB configured as 2 x 2TB RAID-0 drives for video storage
Graphics Card: PNY Quadro FX580 512MB GDDR3

It's running like a dream! Rendering is at least 4 times faster than my other workstation.

This is also the first time I've used Windows 7 and I really like it. (Thankfully I missed out Vista altogether!).