Week 4/5: Notch Stump

Feb 17-March1st

Learning a Program

I lost track of what days I did what as these past two weeks have been rough. Everything picked up the pace and it became a bit overwhelming but now now I have figured out my rhythm and things should be okay. Learning a new program is hard, especially when there is not a ton of videos out there that help you do exactly what you want to do. I really hope that more people start using Notch and start putting videos out there because having a strong community like how Adobe has with their products on YouTube is really useful for creators.

Originally, I had my Notch project due this week BUT as I was watching and working through tutorials I realized I was not ready to do a project using Notch. I still have so many basics to learn. So I pushed it back to this week.

Things I have learned about Notch:

• I still thing the cameras are hard to navigate. As I was working through the Audio Reactive tutorial I became stuck for about 30 minutes trying to get my cameras back to where my visuals were. It was very annoying and frustrating, I almost scraped my file because of it. I was searching around and could not seem to find a reset button for the camera in use when you have not put any extra cameras in. This feature should definitely exist if it doesn’t already.
• The shortcuts for moving the camera are also slightly annoying. Alt + click is the hardest one to move around with as is Control + Alt + Click.
• When I was saving my file I saw that, if I understood correctly, you cannot use a file you saved in the learning license on a pro license. I understand why but now I have to figure out how I’m going to use the pro learner license for playback on campus for my project if I cannot use a file I saved on my learner license.

Kev Zhu!!!

I have been thinking about what I have been wanting to do for my Notch project and although I really enjoy the particle system, I think I am going to stick with Audio Reactivity. Kev Zhu’s tutorial on this really inspired me and made me realize how much I can do with Audio Reactivity. I am still not sure what I want the visual to look like but what I want to do is have the user put in a song of their choice and an amazing visual pop up tailored for them. This is what I will be doing this week.

I have also realized that he is my favorite person so far. He has some fantastic tutorials on his channel and I have spent the last two weeks looking at a lot of them. His system control video really made me think about the way my Notch file can be organized to be able to easily understand and control various aspects of my project.

To see my progress in Python for this week, click here.