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I'm doomed?
2007-06-14 15:59:14
I have tried several things to get project "Love" to work. I have deinstalled Lagarith and reinstalled it. Nothing. I have tried with HuffYUV clips. Sound disappeared. Have deinstalled MovieXone. Have installed another version of MovieXone - turned out to be 4.5. It seemed to work better - but it lacks one effect that is really important for this project and that I can't imitate. So I removed it and installed 4.0 again, in the hope it might fix something that got broke. Problem remained. Since it's always the sound that disappears I thought there may be something wrong with the wav. But it plays fine in any player. Audacity loads it without problems too. Despite I did rip it again - bit for bit the same file.
Today I did load the project into MoviePack. My workspace looked really weird after that. Maybe I should have loaded only the animation and not the whole project. But anything else seemed to look fine. I moved at the timeline to the point I wanted to edit - bang - waveform disapeared and in addition did MoviePack close. So my replacement plan fails too, and it give me less hope for another thing that I want to try - to make a third boot partition with a clean Win2K at my harddrive and to install only MovieXone and the necessary codecs.
At least I was able to fix a problem with my PC that did bug me since a long time. Always if I wanted to switch from one drive to another it paused for 20...30 seconds. I had no clue what happened - until I did use Windows Explorer (usually I use a file manager). It was searching for something. But I still had no clue what. Yesterday I figured it out - and it scares me. At my harddrive I had a mini partition assigned to drive letter D - 768 MB (yes, you read right, MB) FAT 32, to keep the installation files for Win2k. It was still there - but without contents. No data, no formating at all. With removing the drive letter switching the drives is fast again. But how could the contents of the partition disappear? It's my system drive, what if it happens to one or both boot partitions? -
Good news...
2007-06-11 14:29:26
...that are bad news. The good news are - it's not me who causes the disappearing of the music, I'm not the bug. Today I took care that I didn't do anything while previewing, but the music disappeared after some cuts. So the bad news are - the problem persists and I have no clue what it can be.
Meanwhile I consider to continue project "Love" with MoviePack and to limit myself to the effects and possibilities of MovieXone. But this is some kind of cheating. And I want to make a tutorial how I did the effects with MovieXone. :( -
2007-06-09 14:12:45
Today I have possibly figured out what is responsible that the music disappears sometimes. It's something that is in 95% of all cases responsible for mistakes of the software. The bug is outside of the computer, sits in front of the monitor and the keyboard - the user. :P The music seems to disappear if I click at a clip while the preview plays. So I was able to edit several hours today without problems. I need more patience. ;) But I haven't made progress with my AMV - it was more a training of effects that I possibly want to use.
But during last week and today I have found two real bugs. One of them is responsible for the synching issues that I had in the past. I believe it's still in MoviePack 7, and the developers may argue: "It's not a bug, it's a feature." The MovieX series has 2 preview modes: The "normal" preview, which renders in real time, and the Videocontrol, which renders first before viewing (I think the most NLE's have these 2 modes). Since my computer isn't the strongest (and before the upgrade it had half the speed), the preview is often very laggy if effects are used. So I did use the Videocontrol. That works fine - as long as you use PAL or NTSC footage (means 25 fps and 29.97fps). With any other frame rate (including the for AMV commonly used 24 fps) it causes desynching. :( So now I know - if I can't use preview and it isn't PAL or NTSC, I can't use Videocontrol, I have to render to hard disk.
The other bug happens during rendering. MovieXone has 2 render engines, the AIST OpenGL Renderer and the M3 Final Renderer. The first is faster (if you have a good graphics card), but supposed to have less quality and can't render alpha channels. The second is slower, but should have better quality and can render alpha channels. I use the OpenGL for preview and worksheet rendering, M3 Final for final export, like the name supposes. Today I made a composition - a clips shining through a (kind of) color matte with the help of the users mask. In preview and worksheet it looked fine - but the final export was a clip of solid color. After switching to OpenGL for final export it looked fine. That's something I noted in MoviePack too. Some effects I can see in preview but not in final export. Now I know why.
And I should reconsider my plans regarding the gamma correction of my clips. While it looks good on my CRT monitor, it is ugly at my TFT. I will not drop it at all - but reduce it signifcantly. -
Difficulties...
2007-06-04 16:18:05
...with the way that I did choose for making this AMV. I couldn't imagine how difficult it is to start editing at the end. Some kind of reverse logic. And I have too much footage. The ending became 55 seconds. :shock: I did originally plan to make it around 20 seconds. :/ The same happened with the part if the music changes it's character. it became twice as long as I wanted. In the moment I start to throw away scenes, to follow my first intentions. It's always a hard decision what to keep and what not. But I keep the project files if it turns out that the longer version is the better.
MovieXone does its part to make editing harder for me. As I was working on the ending and was thinking it's finished, I had to realize that there was a time difference of 9 seconds between the end of the music and the end of the video. But there was no gap between the clips. Somehow it (or I, by mistake?) must have shifted the clips while I was editing towards the beginning. So I had to rework it.
But another bug annoys me much more. After a while the sound disappears. The waveform becomes black, and the only sound that I can listen to is the rendered part for the preview - as long as I don't move the preview bar. I can't remember that it did such things in the past. And I don't understand why it happens now. The sound is wav and the clips are Lagarith. So it should work fine, especially since MovieXone can even edit with DivX/XviD! But since I used HuffYUV in the past, I have Lagarith under suspicion, especially because it's an older version. -
It's started.
2007-05-30 15:37:27
Today I did start to edit project Love - and I started with the ending. XD The reason is my fear of having too much footage. So I fill the most important spots first, and then fill the gaps between them. The danger that I see for straight editing from the beginning to the end is either that the AMV develops completely different than I want or that I have to go back and forth to get the arcs to the important spots. With filling that important spots first it's easier to see if it develops wrong or right.
My first attempt to streamline the job list led to mistakes - always the first scene of an episode wasn't created. The reason for this was that I added the KillAudio() command to my scripts after I added the clips to the job control. So the job control contained commands to deal with audio, but thanks to my streamlining only for the first clip of an episode. The clips which were created became incredible large. So I checked it in VDM - and it was uncompressed YV12. Because the first clip per episode was skipped, the compression algorithm wasn't set correctly (again "thanks" to streamlining). But there was one good thing in that - I could see that it has 23.976 fps and not 29.97 like I expected for a TV series. So I could convert them to 24 fps (MovieXone can't deal with 23.976) and start with the correct project settings. Otherwise I'd started with 29.97 fps, which had screwed anything for sure.
My corrections in the job lists was successful, and so VDM made the clips while I was at work. Now, in Lagarith, the clips need only one fourth of the size (taking in account that it are more clips the filesize is around 20%). But I have to create all the clips new somtimes - they need more filtering (in the moment gamma correction). But that doesn't stop editing, I can do this anytime until the final release. It can be that from finishing the AMV until releasing it here will need some time because of the Con. I have to read to rules. So maybe project Sisters will be released before Love.
While taking clips from ep19, which I couldn't watch with my old sources because it was the doubled ep23, I was happy to see that Yayoi rides motorcycle too. It happens only in that episode, and only for a few scenes before the end, so I didn't remember it from the past. With my downloaded Anime I often have mistakes with the episodes, so I wonder if this only happens to me (or better: with the downloads that I chose) or if it's a general problem.
While thinking about the AMV's that I already made and the ones that I have planed so far I did realize that they represent only a very narrow spectrum of my musical taste. During the biker party they played "Bat Out Of Hell" from Meatloaf. I thought that would be a good song for a Mirai tribute. I knew I have it on CD. So I checked it - and got surprised. Yes I have it, but only as live version, with a length of 11 minutes 24 seconds! Yes, you read right - nearly 11.5 minutes. So my diversification in musical choice has to wait.
JOURNAL: Keeper of Hellfire
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