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2004-01-27 13:50:34
C-R-I-T-I-C-S.
Dumbfucks.
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Weekend:
2004-01-24 23:27:13
Inexplicable hatred toward netches:
Finally hooked up the borrowed Xbox and started on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. It has since chewed my brain to bits. I'm hoping I don't start dreaming about the freaking thing, because the theme is stuck in my head *right now.* (And I think the netches - these creepy floaty monsters that rarely attack anything - just remind me too much of Metroids.)
*breath*
Impulse to kick the sound card:
Have been fooling with files, getting everything in shape to work on vids, but my sound drivers are all fouled up again. And of course, I can't edit if I can't hear what I'm editing to. -_-; I can scan through clips, but am pretty much useless for anything past that. Quite frustrating.
Hopefully I can get it all cleared up within a few days and get back to business, because the FFVI deadline is coming up soon (thing 1) and my hard drive really needs to have some vobs cleared off it, which necessitates finishing said FFVI track (thing 2).
*deeper breath*
Insomnia fuel:
Coffee with instant chai mixed in tastes quite good. The part about clinging to the ceiling after a cup and a half may just be because I'd avoided most caffeine for a while beforehand. But then, I guess it's at least a little bit more caffeine than my usual coffee with milk, because instant chai is essentially nondairy creamer plus instant black tea - which is a little hit of caffeine, at least.
At any rate, I'll have to keep that in mind in case I ever WANT to be vibratingly awake all night.
Drugs are bad:
Got the last disc of Utena, finally - on it there's a commentary track from Kunihiko Ikuhara (the anime director) and Chiho Saito (the manga artist). Annnnd something tells me they should have done the interview five years ago, because Ikuhara doesn't seem to remember much. :P ("So, what was the symbolism of such-and-such?" "I don't remember.") That or he did remember, and made that up so as not to pin down one interpretation (there was a remark to that effect in another interview).
It was pretty entertaining, though, on the whole.
...what? I have a good memory, so shoot me. :P
Excessiveness:
Now, this is how bad I've gotten - I have to buy a box, or two, or something, for all the CDRs I have lying around - primarily fansubs and AMVs. My box full 'o' AMV CDRs is *full*. FULL. Est. 50 CDs. Granted, that's including all my old work files, but still. The "general" stack is probably over 100 now; the spindle holding them broke, so I'm not sure. Suffice to say it's stupidly excessive and I have to get a special box *just for this crap*.
...but that's tomorrow. Tonight there is attempting to sleep with who knows how much caffeine still in my system, and probably dreaming about running through those blasted mines with a blasted axe.
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2004-01-13 21:29:30
This is how seriously dorky I am: I ripped the audio from Animix 1/2/3 to MP3 just to get an early-90s-dance-music fix. But listening to it, I was actually surprised at how short the segments seemed in audio-only. Kind of an interesting effect, how the perception changes - the songs (tracks...clips, whatever) are the same, but they seem SO much shorter without the visual. Maybe the pace of AMVs is so fast that it seems to pack more into a very short time...though even the more slow-paced segments seem shorter in audio. Odd.
Though it gives me hope for my abysmal little track: no matter how bad it is, and even though it follows a really good editor's track (*facepalm*), in the end it's only 16 seconds long (one one-thousand... two one-thousand...) and will be over before I know it.
Let's hope.
Speaking of which, I do need to get down to working on the Umaro vid. I've felt like working on one of my "maybe" projects, which is candy-bright loopy stuff with uber-cheesy transitions and such - the kind of thing only I, and possibly a misguided newbie or two, will like.
So I've been encoding and junk for that instead of working on the Umaro vid. Figures... well, that's one of those things that I hope will come together quickly once it clicks.
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2004-01-10 01:43:09
So, the MPEG encode of DWR is 8 MB *larger* than the old encode (grr!!), but at least it's properly letterboxed and deflickered now. Still, the mofo clocks in at 69 MB for a five-minute video. And there's still compression noise, so it's not like it's DVD-perfect encoding or anything. What the hell.
The MPEG of River Valley is just under 50MB, which is just about as it should be by the 10MB/min rule of thumb. I swear I used the same parameters for both... although... DWR was resized in TMPGEnc rather than beforehand but that shouldn't matter, right?
Arg.
Oh yeah, sleep exists. Can always mess with this some more in the morning.
Should also take another stab at the Umaro vid. It's so short that I basically make a new version of it from top to bottom every time I set out to edit. And I haven't really liked the three that I've done so far, A, B, or C, which is a combination of A and B with no rhyme or reason.
Oh, just shut up and sleep already.
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Encoding
2004-01-09 10:58:29
Oh god. I just took a crack at re-encoding one of my vids to see if I could get the encoding right, FOR ONCE, and by following the guides and tweaking a little after that I managed to get a 72 MB DivX file down to a 49 MB MPEG. Granted, it went from Huff to DivX *then* to MPEG, because I was screwing around with the distro copy, so it's got some noise, but I think it's still watchable. And it sounds fine.
I am such a stupe. Of course, this does me little good right now, because I already have local DLs up for the too-large encodes, but I hope to make smaller encodes of everything just to have. Maybe if I have enough server space, I can put up indirect or direct copies too.
You know why I think it worked this time? Because I'm not working with a vid I just finished. I'm not in that adrenaline-fueled goddammit-get-this-thing-to-work-and-get-it-DONE-already phase, where I'm worried about 16 things at once and pissed off about something else in the process not working and it's 2AM and I have work the next day and blah blah blah. I don't work well under pressure. ;)
Now that I have that figured out, I'm thinking about re-ripping the SKU movie and fixing up that video; I've always meant to do that, fixing the proportions, getting rid of the flicker, and possibly subtitling the Portuguese parts. It's only four VOBs (that vid doesn't use the last one, IIRC), so it's not all that much bother. Hopefully.
Something to procrastinate with - I mean do.
JOURNAL: SarahtheBoring (Sarah B')
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