Instrumental Anime Project

[rose4emily]

Thank you.

Yes, most things are easier in Windows, but (being a developer) I like to know all of the "behind the scenes" stuff, which is actually easier to see in Linux. That, and the manner in which I'm doing the compilation really is allowing me to minimize any loss that would be caused by the multiple re-encodings that would be needed in every user-friendly editing suite I've encountered (Windows and Linux alike - if you can call Cinelerra "user-friendly"). I can also note that the rendering process is going about twice as quickly as I remember from trying sync Alice In Wonderland to Pink Floyd's "The Wall" (which actually worked, believe it or not) in the Windows Media Maker, converting from MPEG1 to WMV9. There's just a lot to process here, and some of the segments needed to be rescaled - which is computationally expensive no matter how you cut it if you want a high-quality bicubic algorithm.

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Now, the reason why I just stepepd back into this forum:

I need to do a check on name pronunciations, so correct me if I have your's wrong:

Chris Lee (no problem here)

Chris Nguyen (Vietnamese pronunciation sounding much like "new yen"?)

Arian Sangers (I'm guessing Arian starting with the syllable "are" rather than "air" and ending with the syllable "ann" rather than "en" or "on")

Wendy Mihail ("Mi" = "Me" (American pronunciation of "Me", not the Latin one that sounds like "May") rather than the syllable used in "Mickey" and "Mig" (the Soviet plane), "Hail" as in ice cubes from the sky rather than the German salute)

George Ross (no problem here)

Helen Ye ("Ye" [Chinese surname?] using the Latin prununciation rhyming with "May" or "Day" rather than the Old English "Ye" rhyming with "He" or "Tree". From what I've seen of Romanization standards, the Roman pronunciations (go figure) are preferred to the American or British ones, so I'm guessing along that trend).

Kareef Huggins (I'm guessing that "Kareef" sounds something like "Kareem", as in the basketball player who appeared in "Enter the Dragon", and that "Huggins" uses a round "U" sound as is found in "Hugh" or "You", rather than the short "U" in "Hug" or "Bug").

Christian Paro (God, I hope I don't screw this one up).

Soren Berg (Scandanavian pronunciation with "Soren" being much like "Soarin'" and "Berg" as in "Iceberg"?)

Daniel Steinberg ("Stein" as in "Einstein" or "Steinbrenner" and "berg" as in "iceberg")

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I'm not sure if I'll end up using all of these names in the spoken narratives or intros, but it'd be nice to have them right where I do.

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While I think of it, there's a song called "Baka Ein Stein" by the Hellbillies. It's in Norwegian, though, not Japanese (with a German Name), so the oxymoronic statement that popped into my head when I first heard the title was in no way intended.

They are a pretty good band, though, with a folkish sound much like that of the Grateful Dead (Listen to their "Hinmann Og Eg" for a direct comparison).

[jasper-isis]

LOL. I wanted to see Oto the linguist tackle these names.

[insert a la Otohiko style.]

Yup, "Ye" is a Chinese surname (meaning "leaf"). I always go by the "yee" pronounciation, even though "yeh" would actually be more true to the original. I'm not sure why my family hadn't kept the more accurate version, but it's been years and years now, and the latter pronounciation had stuck.

So in short, just go with "yee."

[Otohiko]

LOL. I wanted to see Oto the linguist tackle these names.

It's actually not as easy as it might sound, since there's a lot of variables and such. And which system (english or of language of origin) the person relies on to pronounce their name.

If I were doing it, I'd probably do the same thing rose4emily just did and asked everyone.

*sigh* See, linguists can't do everything.

***

I guess I should email that one image I still need to send? It won't be needed until you get to the widescreen section, I guess, but I still better get around to it.

And I do hope Bakadeshi is still planning to do the DVD - would be neat to say the least. Now that we're in the final stage, maybe we should start thinking about that (I'd do something like that myself, but I don't have the equipment nor the bandwith right now)

[Bakadeshi [AuN Studios]]

Kareef Huggins (I'm guessing that "Kareef" sounds something like "Kareem", as in the basketball player who appeared in "Enter the Dragon", and that "Huggins" uses a round "U" sound as is found in "Hugh" or "You", rather than the short "U" in "Hug" or "Bug").

Its like in "hug" or "bug". And yea my first name sounds like Kareem but with the F. "reef" part pronounced just like the "reef"s in oceans.

And I do hope Bakadeshi is still planning to do the DVD - would be neat to say the least. Now that we're in the final stage, maybe we should start thinking about that

Yep, I am still planning to do them, I recently did a DVD of my video Swallow in much the same fassion, with Title movie and working menus and all for my friend and gave it to her like that, partly as practice for this project. I do have a handle on how I am going to go about making it, so that part is out of the way.


Rose4emily: If you want to do them, its no problem, I just figured Maximum quality would probably come from the creators themselves, if they encoded them to mpeg2 directly from the Huffys. Unless you actually have the huffys with you. That and your sources are all non DVD sizes correct? (512x288 for widescreen, and whatever fullscreen was). Scaling it up to 720x480 may make it look quite soft.

What I woulod need from you either way, is the intermissions, credits, and bumper segments after they are completed, in 720x480 resolution in either Huffy or Mpeg2 format to compile onto the DVD. They can be all in one file, or seperate, wichever is easier for you, I can split them up and relocate them in the program.

[Otohiko]

Well, rose4emily has both of my best sources (a fact for which I should repeatedly be hit with a pointed stick, as they're both compressed, even if well-compressed), so I hope he can send those to you. In any case, sadly, my upload limit would run out if I tried to send something that big.

[rose4emily]

Rose4emily: If you want to do them, its no problem, I just figured Maximum quality would probably come from the creators themselves, if they encoded them to mpeg2 directly from the Huffys. Unless you actually have the huffys with you. That and your sources are all non DVD sizes correct? (512x288 for widescreen, and whatever fullscreen was). Scaling it up to 720x480 may make it look quite soft.

What I woulod need from you either way, is the intermissions, credits, and bumper segments after they are completed, in 720x480 resolution in either Huffy or Mpeg2 format to compile onto the DVD. They can be all in one file, or seperate, wichever is easier for you, I can split them up and relocate them in the program.

I'm pretty sure I do have the HuffYUV copies from every editor who had one in the first place, and the best encode available for everything else. My processing, resizing, and compilation work is all being done with lossless PNG images, from which I can generate a set of MPEG2 files that all have an identical framerate, resolution, and codec implementation. The part I'm unsure of is whether the MPEG2 encoder I have is one that will behave in a DVD player, as I haven't exactly had a chance to try.

Correction noted on the name pronunciation.

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Yup, "Ye" is a Chinese surname (meaning "leaf"). I always go by the "yee" pronounciation, even though "yeh" would actually be more true to the original. I'm not sure why my family hadn't kept the more accurate version, but it's been years and years now, and the latter pronounciation had stuck.

Got it. My surname was once either Pierrot (as in French for "Sparrow", or a stock pantomime character) or Perot (as in the large-eared Reform Party candidate), but at some point between France and New Hampshire my male-side lineage became illiterate and some more recent ancestor decided to make it a four-letter word phonetically matching the "par-oh" pronunciation of "Perot". Yet, for some reason, my immediate family pronounces it "pair-oh", as in the Spanish word "pero". It's amazing how much proper names change over time and language barriers - despite the fact that their not really supposed to. Hence "Caeser" becoming "Kaiser" (correct pronunciation, wrong spelling), "Caeser" (right spelling, but what's with the "Sea-zer"?), and "Tzar"/"Czar" (why use two syllables when you can get away with one - and make it sound cooler?), or the whole bit where "Nihon" was somehow transformed through several stages of phoenetically ambiguous translation to "Japan". For that matter, it's a bit odd to live in a nation that has at least four commonly used names for itself other than the formal "United States of America", an which once had a series of serious debates (and, eventually, a war) over whether the "United" should be capitolized. I could never figure out exactly how CCCP translates to USSR, as even the Russian title suggest SSSR - though their "Respublic" is nearer the original Latin form combining "res" (thing), and "publica" (for the people). Note the "for the people", not "of the people". But I digress...

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I've just found the kink in my network firewall system that was keeping the web server down and fixed it. My upload speeds are uncharacteristicly slow at the moment (don't know why, probably a bunch of Freshmen throwing LAN parties until classes start), but it is at least working again.

I also finished recording the narratives for the fullscreen section. Unfortunately, I picked up a bunch of noise through the cheep equipment I can afford to use at the moment. Fortunately, I was able to at least minimize it by using a piece of paper as a windscreen (good ole New-England ingenuity ), speaking with the mic a bit close to my mouth (about 4-5 in), and cutting out most of the high end, along with the subsonic bass frequencies in post-processing. I tried automated noise removal, but that just made it sound like a low-bitrate mp3 file, so the manual eq method seemed to be the way to go. While a low-pitched speaking voice is generraly a hinderance to intelligability, it certainly helps to be able to roll off everything above 8KHz (and a fair amount in the 4-8KHz region) without losing any audible portion of the actual vocal signal. At least I turned the obnoxious white noise into a queter, yet "meatier", pink noise (which I imagine is named in analogy to the visual spectrum, in which pink is a form of noise weighted toward the lower "red" portion of the spectrum). Oto, Hikari, all the same thing to those crazy signal processing people.

Now, I take notes on the frame count I need to give to each "set" image to make the transitions fall in the right places. When that is done I can create my framelists and run them through my file copying and renaming utility, followed by a pass through MEncoder to generate the compressed versions, and we'll have the first section done.

Other than the intro and that intermission/credits thing. But I don't think that'll take me too long.

[pen-pen2002]

On name pronuciation: My name is technically Søren Berg (the ø is a Norwegian letter,) which translates to "Strong Mountain." The correct pronuciation is more like Surin/Sū-ren , with a slight roll on the r. Since that is tricky to pronounce (for a kid at least) I grew up as "Soren" and that's what I go by, just thought I'd provide some fun for you etemologists.



On a much less optimistic note, I'm not sure if the requeim huffy is complete. If it is not then I have a couple of options. Worst case senario I try to get the convention quality file off of the AWA Pro DVD that I have and try to set up a server behing my college's firewall. Option 2 I try to get my brother to finish the upload if R4E can get the server up again.

[rose4emily]

Pen-Pen: Is that why the HuffYUV I have in unindexed - that the upload was never completed?. If you'd like to try putting it up again, I'll turn the server back on, and you can put it back up. Just don't worry about the fact that the whole directory structure in there has changed - I needed to re-organize and clean things up a bit before I could proceed with Instrumentality's complementation (I wonder what the record for consecutive Eva references that still make contextual sense is...). My download speed seems to be plenty fast right now, so you could probably upload the file pretty quickly given bandwidth on your end, it's just upload speed on my end that seems to be constricted at the moment.

From what I've seen of the unindexed HuffYUV verson already on my server, though, the video quality is beautiful.

Why would your brother have to do the uploading?

I use "o" instead of the Norwegian letter whose name I can't think of, but which closely resembles a no-smoking sign, because I still haven't figured out how to type those extended characters in anything other than HTML using their Unicode numbers. Or is that how you're doing it in the forum?

I can only imagine the kind of fun the Chinese and Japanese must have trying to type in their native languages. From what I hear, the process involves a lot of phonetic equivalents and drop-down menus. Come to think of it, it's probably more like typing code in Eclipse than typing a document in Word. I wonder if anyone makes keyboards designed for syllabic "alphabets" like the Kana?

Even bigger mystery - who the hell came up with the touchscreen interfaces for Star Trek? Appearently the people of the future are all such good computer users that they can do anything using an 8-color display with five or six unlabelled buttons surrounded by enormous bands of solid color. Not to mention the fact that I can't imagine what advantage is gained by piloting small craft using what looks like an ATM console rather than something like, say, a yoke or joystick.

I suppose the really funny part is that, while most sci-fi flicks think we'll all be zipping around in flying cars and teaching elementary school students genetic microbiology by 2015, it seems Mr. Roddenberry gave us 500 years to come up with a ten year regression in GUI technilogy. At least the voice recognition seems pretty sophisticated. And they have solid holograms, teleportation devices, and a free vending machine in every room that will not only give you a Snickers bar and a soda, but also a creme brule and two glasses of upper Sonoma Valley white wine. Just no keyboards, windows, or labelled icons. Must be that the open-sourcers won, and foolishly proceeded to ban everything that reminded them of Microsoft. Maybe it's under the same principle that the Proffessor on Gilligan could heat and power the island using bamboo and a radioactive meteoroid - but was appearently unable to build a boat. Maybe it's more like how the 'gang' from Scooby-Doo never came to the realization that the ghosts were inevitably the rubber-mask wearing owners of whatever was being haunted, trying to drum up publicity, hide some criminal activity, or collect insurance money.

Never watch TV with me. It's probably not a terribly fun experience.

[Otohiko]

Never watch TV with me. It's probably not a terribly fun experience.

No, you know, with that kind of analysis - it might be amusing enough to get me interested in TV again (which I pretty much haven't watched for almost 3 years now).

And, CCCP (which in English would be SSSR, thanks to the differences between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets) is short for 'Soyuz Sovetskih Sozialisticheskih Respublik'. The main difference is in the word 'Soyuz' or 'Union' which is of Slavic origin, that's why it has no relation to it's English/Latin counterpart

I wonder if the Norwegian 'ø' sounds like the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) 'ø'. If it does, I do know how to pronouce it right...

Err, anyway, going off topic again.

***

Oh yea, I think I tried to ask that before - any detail on how exactly you're planning to encode/release the final project? As in, the sorts of filesizes and compression we're talking about? (sorry if I missed it somewhere before)

[downwithpants]

whee name game.
Lee is the old spelling of the Chinese word for "plum," now spelled Li. Christopher means "Christ-bearing" in Greek, so i guess that makes me a Christ-bearing plum.

I thought the English word "Japan" came from the similarity of the Chinese pronunciation of Japan- "zhr ben". I dunno for sure, but that's what I assumed because of the consonant similarity.

My mom uses an electronic pen thing to write chinese characters when she needs to. I've also seen English-Chinese keyboards use the phonetic spelling symbols and intonations. Since there is a lot of redundancy, they would need to choose between corresponding characters that have the same phonetic spelling.



and I talked to songbird yesterday about her monologue. You should have recieved the new script and pics via email by now.

Distribution compression will depend if whoever's running the golden donut will let us upload over 100mb because it's a multi-editor project.

oh, and another question for rose4emily: will we be able to see the project before you premiere it to the public? so we can check for errors and such?