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Springtime
2006-03-20 16:39:29
This weekend wasn't much time for editing. On saturday I needed until early afternoon to recover from friday evening. During and after the practising with the choir I had oiled my voice too much. XD I moved some clips to a place where thy fit better. After doing that I had no idea how to fill the gap. It's weird, in my dreams I know exactly how it should look like and what to do. If I sit in front of my computer it's gone. So I worked on the AviSynth scripts and achieved a great approvement. Not quality wise, it's already good. But I could increase the speed more than 4 times by chosing a different method for cleaning.
Our choir has this year it's 100th anniversary, and sunday from the morning until early afternoon we had a ceremony. After that I wasn't able to edit.
Fortunatly it seems to get warm outside. While it means that I will spent much time at the weekends with riding my bike, it means also that I can edit during the week because the room where my computer stands is warm enough. And riding my bike frees my spirit, so it'll help to overcome creators block. -
2006-03-12 17:01:29
While I watched project "Secret" again and again, to get some inspiration where and how to improve, I figured out that with bringing the clips out of chronological order the lyrics would match much better. So I tried to move whole blocks, spanning multiple clips and tracks. But I had no success. Either it didn't work at all, or it moved only the compositing tracks, and the editing track remained at the original place. The manual didn't help on this matter. I posted this at an AIST board and hope for an answer.
To lose not too much time I decided to start a second project. I hope that I can switch between them if I stuck with one. My first idea was to start the Queen Millenia project "Eternal", to make something different than a Noir AMV. I took a look at the sources (a bootleg, you remember?), to make an AviSynth script for deinterlacing and cleaning. It was a good news/bad news thing for me. The good side: it is already deinterlaced. The bad thing: it has been done in a bad way, and the overall quality of the footage is really horrible. To clean that footage exceeds my actual knowledge of AviSynth. I'm bothering if I should get the original japanese DVD's since they are expensive, at least after what I found at the web.
So I decided to start project "Rose", another Noir AMV. The DVD's were alredy ripped and at my HD since I while. What I had to do was to index them with DGIndex and to make scripts. Because this project means really much to me, I try to improve the scripts (which are already good). This will be of course time consuming, but I think it' s worth it. Even if I should get the result that my actual scripts are the best, I'll gain experience. - 2006-03-05 17:04:47 Saturday I had to work again for that programming job, because the device they use didn't support the commands which I had selected. So I had to make a workaround. Today I could continue with project "Secret". Started to improve the synching. I made some inner synching, which I like but this AMV hadn't have before. Improved an effect which was messed up for an unknown reason. While doing that I encountered something strange. I use a chroma keyer, and the color was selected with a color picker. The hue value was around 280 for a specific color. I tried to enhance the color range by reducing the value. I went below 256. But I didn't get the wanted effect, instead it erased some colors that I wanted to keep. So I tried to increase it to it's former value, but I couldn't exceed 255. And that's correct, the value should be between 0 and 255. I used again the color picker, and got again a value around 280. Strange.
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Am I insane?
2006-03-02 16:42:09
In the mornig I'd forgotten to turn down the heating, os even the room where my computer is was warm. So I decided to edit for an hour before I went to the gym. I tried to replace a mask, which had cost me hours of working with the GIMP, with keys and masks from MP7. Only for the reason that it could work a little bit better, like in the other clip where I already had done it, But there I hadn't put that much effort in the mask before since it was a single picture and not a clip. After half an hour MP7 crashed with a memory error. It was my fault, because I had made too short timing settings yesterday after updating the BIOS. After correcting this and another half hour of work I came to the conclusion that it didn't work the way I wanted, simply because there is too less contrast in the clip. So I'll keep it like it is. But isn't it insane that I was willing to throw away so many hours of work for a possible improvement that the most viewers probably wouldn't notice?
To extend my entry from yesterday: I was really happy how the issue was solved. I mean, after figuring out that I hadn't SSE support, which my CPU should have, I was concerned that mine is damaged and I had to get a new one. The other alternative that came up after some more research was that I had to replace my motherboard. Even not better. As a simple BIOS update resolved my problem it was like birthday and Christmas together.
Today a colleague found a computer mag from 1988 somewhere in our company. It was funny to read it, to remember that times. 386 PC with 20 MHz as high end PC, 1 MB RAM, 60 MB hard disk being called "memory giant", 1200 Baud modem called fast. And if I looked at the prices: said 386 starting with 10.000DM, if you simply convert it it's around 5.000€ or $6.000. But with the loss of worth that money had you can say it equals now 10.000€/$12.000. Imagine what an incredible PC you can build for that money nowadays. And not to say, making AMV would have been impossible that days. -
:D
2006-03-01 15:22:45
Today I've figured out why MoviePack crashed if I tried to import MPEG1/2 files. It's a bug in the official BIOS of the motherboard. It disables the SSE instruction set of the Athlon XP. MPEG-decoding seems to rely on that. I've flashed with a hacked BIOS, and it works now. Many things work much faster now: The rendering time of project "Secret" with MX-Final renderer has decreased from 25 min to 16 min. And I'm sure if I test it again it'll be faster, since by mistake I had deactivated the L2 cache during the tests.
At the weekend I had no time to work on my AMV. I had taken a job for the company where my father works, My estimation was that I'd need half a day, in worst case 1 day. But it involved Windows programming, what I did last time more than a year ago, and I was never really familiar with it. So I had to try and read a lot. In the end the weekend was over and I still wasn't finished, had to add some hours on Monday and Tuesday. That's too bad, because if I had worked with the same intensity at my AMV, I had much progress.
JOURNAL: Keeper of Hellfire
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