-
New year starts...
2007-01-02 11:46:20
...and I'm back at home, so I can continue editing. Made some changes to the standalone version of the MEP track, hope I'm near the end now. For sure I will watch it several times before I release it. Maybe I find more to tweak.
Seems like today they aired the last episode of this season of "One Piece" because they started to repeat it. If so it is a really unsatisfying ending, because my favourite character Nico Robin left Ruffy & Co. some episodes ago and it is neither explained why nor clear if she will return. Crap. -
Nostalgia
2006-12-23 14:02:33
Yes, I became nostalgic. Did download MovieXone 4.0 and installed it on my normal (non video) Window. Wanted to know what would have been possible if I had used it long enough to get all the experience that I have now. Yes, it is very limited. It offers only 1 transition and 7 video effects. But the problem with missing transitions can be solved by getting the free of charge transition compiler. And some things that are realized as effects in other editing software (like slowmo) are built in functions. Never forget, its free of charge. And if you compare it with WMM - yes it has less effects and transitions. But you have full and comfortable controll over the effects. It allows frame accurate cuts. It has in addition to the A/B editing roll (which you can configer as 0 and transition track like in WMM) a compositing track which allows you not only overlays, but also scaling and moving clips. With a trick you can turn the A and B track in compositing tracks either. You can configure the appearance of the program how you like it, how it fits your workflow. It doesn't limit you with the export formats like WMM does. And it "runs" even on Windows 98 with a PII 233MHz and 64MB RAM. (Lately somebody in the forum did ask for software for Win98 and 64MBRAM. At that time I didn't know it's satisfied with these configuration.) Only the graphics card must support Direct3d or OpenGL - but usually they do support at least one of these standards. Maybe in addition to making an AMV with it I write a tutorial.
My actual project is nearly finished. Some slight tweaks and improvements are still necessary, but it's much better now. I learned something interesting about MoviePack. Don't have any folder opened in the browser (the built in of MP) that is used from MP7 while you render. MP actualizes it permanently, what slows down the render process. After figuring this out, the render time for this project droped down under 42 minutes. (Remember, before was it around 1:45 hours, and meanwhile I added transitions and some effects!)
Since this will be my last journal entry this year:
Merry Christmas and a happy new year to all my journal readers! -
Stressing my computer
2006-12-22 13:55:32
Yesterday and today I worked on the standalone version of my MEP track. Mostly tweaking timing, adding some more effects. While doing this I reached the limits of my PC. Nested animations seem to be very resource hungry. Normally MP7 keeps the memory use under 90% of the physical memory. But now it breaks immediately after the start my 1 GB limit. A real swapping orgy starts, the whole system becomes inresponsive. The weird thing is, if I can stand it for a longer while and continue with working, the memory usage drops again under the physical limit. And the CPU usage is incredible either. The systems doesn't become much more responsive after the swapping stops. Since MoviePack shows every change in "real time" (means immediatly after you do it), the CPU usage rises to 100% for seconds because all levels of the nesting have to be rendered, one after the other. Having 3 animations nested into a forth means average four times as much time as usal.
This project will not be released this year. I visit my parents, starting at 24th and return home new year. I can't edit there, and tomorrow is not enough time to finish it.
Did you ever "wake up" from one nightmare into another? It happened to me last night. I woke up from noise at the door - and there was a burglar in my flat. It was real to me, and I felt fear, until I realized some wrong details and knew it's a dream. In that moment I woke up from noise at the door.... This game repeated somewhere between 6 and 8 times, until I really woke up - from noise at the door. It was... ....the wind. -
2006-12-20 13:00:38
During the last week I let my project rest. Watched it from time to time, but didn't work on it. The final result looked not right, but I had no idea why. Today I replaced the hard cuts in a slow part with short fades. I think it's much better now. But I'm not sure because I didn't render it now. In this project I used nested animations (timelines). All footage inside a nested animation can't be Intelli-Rendered, and in some parts I have a nesting level of 3! That increases the render time much, for that 3:21 min piece it needs 1:45 hours. So I'll let it render if I'm not at home.
With the nested animations I figured out a bug in MP7. The transitions I added are of course intermittend A/B and B/A. But all transitions inside a nested animation became rendert A/B, that way causing a hard cut to the new clip, fading back to the old one and again a hard cut to the new one. So I had to go back, to cut all clips in the middle and move them around so that all transitions became A/B. I reported that bug to AIST. Waiting for their reaction. -
2006-12-06 14:13:33
The last two days I did work some hours on my MEP segment. The necessary adjustments were less than I thought, but not only necessary for joining with the additional parts of the stand alone version. Some slight improvements of the synching. A little adjustment of the main effect made it look like I wanted. But there was also a real mistake. Because of the workflow that I used for this projekt was the aspect ratio wrong. It was stretched twice with the 1.2 PAR for 16:9 NTSC footage. Not only that everyone and everything was too "fat". The resizing degraded und blurred the even bad footage more. I'm happy that I found this out before releasing it. For some parts I use the camera of MoviePack to create a synched motion. I did assume that it would use standard square pixels like anything that's placed in the compositing tracks. But despite that it is a 16:9 project, the camera was adjusted to 4:3 (0.9 PAR). So my correction with factor 1.2 wasn't enough. Since the output of the camera becomes adjusted to the project settings, everything taken with the camera was streched even more.
Today I did check my folder for project "Secret". It's over one year ago that I started it, and over half a year that I did work on it. It's not dead yet, and I really want to finish it someday. I hope the inspiration will come back if I do some more other projects meanwhile. And getting more experienced with MoviePack, so that I can realise some ideas better or at all, will help either.
JOURNAL: Keeper of Hellfire
Current server time: Sep 10, 2025 03:10:35