Post
by rose4emily » Thu Jun 17, 2004 11:44 pm
Otohiko: Nope, just the write-up and you're all set.
Jasper-Isis: If the second video is very near or at completion, I'd love to see it and find a place for it. The first one suggests such a good successor that it'd be hard to pass up. Also - as I remember, the original plan stated that ALL videos were supposed to be in 16:9. The only reason for the 3:4 section is that enough people managed to produce great videos while screwing up on that rule that I decided to abandon it. Even if the 16:9 section is longer, it also might have the same file size as the 3:4 due to it's lower number of pixels per frame.
FTP: Stable one - not yet. My server still hasn't come in (will probably be another week or so before it ships, last I checked - damn wait periods on custom-spec hardware), but I have been digging up all the info I can find on setting it up so it'll be ready the night it shows up at my door. As to my laptop, the poor thing's hard drive is sliding yet farther toward oblivion and I've had X-Server crash on boot twice in the past week because it couldn't properly decompress the temp files. Needless to say, between that and the fact that I can hardly take away my father's internet connection when he's doing 60-hour weeks and trying to test and fix some especially buggy outsourced code, I've only had my server up for a few hours in the last several days. Again, apologies, and I'm doing what I can. The good news, in the mean time, is that it seems you've managed to work around this rather ugly obstacle quite nicely, especially where I failed to see it coming and warn you all ahead of time.
Credits Audio: The "Fly Me To The Moon" arrangement, when I actually started working on it, had two big and inescapable problems: it didn't go too well with every piece in the show, and it was way too long. Consequently, I'm thinking of using Louis Armstrong's recording of "What A Wonderful World" instead. It's not instrumental, but it is the ultimate counterpoint for most everything leading up to it - and enough people seem to like the song that it shouldn't scare anyone away from seeing all of your names plastered across the screen for a couple minutes.
Intermission Audio: Finished that. I ended up doing a mix of the Monty Python intermission theme and the Offspring's Ixne on the Hombre Intermission theme (in essence, the "Ahhhhhh..... Intermission....." part). Nothing fancy, but it seems to work. When the new FTP finally is up I'll have it up there for you all to see.
Background graphics: I keep going back and forth - should I try for a very realistic looking setting (as in set up a room and photograph it), a quasi-realistic setting (as in do a detailed drawing of a room), or a flat-shaded anime-looking room (as in somewhere between the appearence of a real den and the 'thinking chair' from Blues Clues). Everything I've done so far has been in the second catagory, but it just doesn't seem to fit and, sadly, I've lost my scans anyhow (once again, dying hard drive) so I figured I might as well just pose the question up here.
By The Way: I've just finished the first functional part of my Java Advanced Media Studio (JAMS, unless I find out the name is taken by something more similar than a collection of spreadable preserves). It plays a collection of PNG images (as enumerated in a text list) at a user-specified frame rate - and, to my joyful surprise, actually seems to do so pretty smoothly even before I start into the optimization work. It doesn't do sound, or transport controls, or any actual editing yet - but it's a start. I do have to replace the timer function, however, because the standard Java timer I'm using now has rather pathetic resolution on Windows (10ms for Win2K/XP, 30-50ms for Win95/98/ME). It's 1ms in Linux, Solaris, and probably on Mac, but the Windows machines seem for some reason to have a pretty bad implementation. There's also a redundancy codec under way that essetially searches past frames for identical frames to locate duplicates and loops that should make a losslessly encoding as small as a typical fansub DivX for most forms of anime - and even smaller for American sitcom animation, provided the video is encoded from pristine source (the PNG encoder compresses previously uncompressed images much better than ones filled with compression 'noise'). That's it for the editing codec, as I want to keep the frames independent, but I might create a distribution codec in the future that also does bitmasked delta frames and the like to really cut down the file size without killing any quality - not much use for live footage, however.
JAMS is actually being designed as more of a media creation studio (vector graphics, event-driven audio, audio and video synthesis engines...) than a media editing studio - but the ability to work with existing media is important both as a feature and as a convenient starting point for me to test its rendering output, so it will also allow the editing of PNG streams and PCM audio.
If anyone wanted to know where all my leftover time was going, there you are.
BTW: Just previewed all this rambling, and happened to notice Bakadeshi's DVD covers. Very nice - the big-label folks should learn to produce such attractive packaging.
may seeds of dreams fall from my hands -
and by yours be pressed into the ground.
) but do be warned that it's kinda... weird. As it's a beta, there are still a bunch of effects that I need to fix... but the overall layout of the video is there.
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