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left to die in a six foot hole
2004-08-31 10:59:53
It's not every day that you'll see time to completion on a render measured in DAYS. Monster ep 7 would have consumed more HDD than I had available rendering as HuffYUV, so it was down to the slow-as-shit Indeo codec, which may produce a finished product by the time I get home from work tomorrow (having started around 7PM last night), and may yield something SVCD-usable by Thursday morning, which for something that needs to be delivered Friday night, is cutting it a little fine. Needless to say video work, for the rest of the week, is totally out of the question. In between starting work again, going full-bore on assignments, and looking for a dojo in the first week back at school, some more work may get done.
I'm in a unique position with regards to club, in which I've already taken out (and duped) everything on VHS I had an interest in seeing. If I end up in this area after I get a job (not likely), I'll probably just stick to digital and minioning. It's less to carry in any case.
offtopic:
The US release of Hajime no Ippo is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the dub is really good (only gripe is Takamura, but Americans are more inclined to label that kind of puffed-up he-man as overacting than the Japanese are), but on the other, it is macrovisioned. Fuckers. So I can't run it off onto tape to share with club, which is a disservice to Geneon's future market. Macrovision does not prevent ripping, which is far more likely how this release is to be stolen by unscrupulous people. However, it does prevent donation to anime clubs, which are full of borrowers who may say "hey, this series is pretty good, I ought to buy it on DVD and stuff". With VHS piracy becoming practically nonexistent and the realities of the digital world giving an end-around on this technology (recently encountered a Macrovisioned bootleg -- obviously the disc image was stolen entire), it's time for the content providers to give up on the extra pain and expense of this now outmoded and useless scrambling system.
That's it for ranting; now all I have to do is rave against the idiotic niceties of the language I'm working with. If you've got a data member, open it damnit.
--Kai out
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i give a ring of gold
2004-08-30 14:01:19
Current video: Cales, "Days Of Emptiness" to various J-games. Progress check: 30%. Expected catalog number: #91. This weekend's round of cutting put source figures up to about 15 minutes, give or take; any time I need to do a demo in the future, I'll be able to reach back to this pile (which is probably going to become a 4-CD set of unused source) and just whip one up with minimal trying. Of course, in order to get to this point, I've got about 5 GB of Hell March still ahead.
The video is probably going to wrap shortly after I return to campus; I've got a shitload of stuff to do to get ready that will cut into my time, and there's still the huge hurdles of work to be cleared. I've got less than four days; if I take another day and a half to finish coding and another half day hunting bugs, that's about two days of testing before I hand it over. Four months on a seven-thousand line project (that's where it's at right now, it'll probably go somewhat over by the end); tough, but I probably coulda finished sooner.
That last Monster ep is still not done....I'll probably check it up tonight on the new box before I pack it up, while I'm moving over everything I have to take off this rig before I return it. I did however get some solid Otaku no Radio material Friday.....provided that the mic picked it up, which I'm not 100% on. What the hell; I've got enough content for any casual visitor, and after a certain level, more is just overkill.
Though many would testify to that state being reached after the first clip went up.
--Kai out
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holy fire, holy water
2004-08-27 11:54:58
No video work last night, obviously. And the last ep of Monster got chewed the hell up, so I have to think of some way to render it out, fit it under the 4GB barrier, and then still have the diskspace to do the SVCD thing. Next week.......
Club will be short tonight, so I might be able to get in some clipping or some such. The weekend is gonna be fucking clogged, as I've got to buy crap for school and start packing up stuff I don't need as well as hitting the usual round of dupe, watch sports, and catch up on sleep.
And I thought I was gonna have it easy only working 8 hours a day.....
--Kai out
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crawling up a stone wall
2004-08-26 10:20:25
Current video: Cales, "Days Of Emptiness" to various J-games. Progress check: 25%. Expected catalog number: #91. I threw two hours at the source pile yesterday, largely while running off Monster (despite glitches from the DVD player hating on SVCDs), which I really could not afford. As it is, the render that was sent down last night is almost complete now, and I'm dropping by home over lunch to set the last one producing, with an estimated 11-hour production time. Then I have to stay up late tonight reading and working out in order to burn off the last ep and "meet" the schedule forced by the VCR...and somehow bounce back to put in a full day's work Friday and go in to club for the next-to-last time.
This current project is teaching me a lot of stuff, though, among the most important being that I need to find out what the hell I did with my kana reference cards. In another week, I won't have access to the sort of expert advice that helped me figure out what a "u" with two diacriticals was. Another is that a large chunk of the source I collected was practically worthless due to bad transfer and poor enlargeability. One further is that Gaussian blurs can significantly ameliorate those effects in a lot of cases. The last is that there's a lot of 2D animation being done for video games, even ones which you might not suspect had the budget for it.
As of right now, the pool of potential source is about 50 titles deep with maybe half to two-thirds of the source volume unexplored. A nontrivial number of those titles are restricted to a single cut, though, so it is likely that they may not appear in the final video. The balance of the cuts are from eroge, but there is still a lot of non-eroge material, which will tend to swing the video back to normalcy. No ecchi cuts in this one. As with #86, this will be mostly a demo, but without any script as in the first bunch of demos.
A more comprehensive website for SH Prod/KK Studios will launch by the end of next week....even if not all of the pages are up. I've got a bunch of KK videos I'm short detailed information on, and then there's all the BAS/INSO stuff that was never detailed in the first place. Most of the content, though, is done....or done enough to launch. How done the rest gets will depend on how thick work is, how much I have to pack, and whether or not I can get over cracking the half-billion-point barrier in Gal Pani X. (Is there something wrong that I'm still playing this?)
--Kai out
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let it in
2004-08-25 15:57:39
No video work last night; I've been reading manga and books about the abuses of power by the US government in the early days of the Cold War. Good stuff like plotting terrorist attacks against US targets to make the public want to invade third world countries and overthrow their dictators, bears almost acidentally starting World War III because some genius decided to put nuclear weapons in air-to-air missiles and the entire strategic arsenal in the hands of a nutso general who had spent the last 15 years trying to make the Russians give him an excuse to blow them up, etc. And of course work, in the course of which it seems like every song that's come over the headphones I've done a video to.
Of course, that's not entirely surprising.....I've done 90 videos, most of them from stuff I listen to regularly. If six or ten of those songs come up in a singe day, it's not much to remark on.
I should be doing some work tonight, but there have been some glitches with Monster, and I'm a full day behind. I'm set to finish tomorrow night, but that doesn't include any tolerance for more mishaps. If it comes to that, I'll get two more production slots before Friday and be able to hand off a SVCD with them on it, but it's my view that "digital -> VHS" should mean "digital -> VHS", not "digital to something that might be able to be copied to VHS, assuming a competent DVD player".
I still have to organize what I'm bringing back to school....I'm planning 10 videos from DVD, plus all the VHS and digital I copied this summer and didn't watch, plus digitals to do videos from as a backup. There's probably 10 ideas already out in Michigan, but I have to take stock of what I have and what's in the to-do list, and how quickly I'll be able to get the DVD player in the new rig working.
I finally hit my targets for physical training last night, after nearly 3 weeks of cycling up. In that time I went from "nearly dead after 15 reps" to "winded but intact after 170 reps in sets of 35". That at least is marginally encouraging. Now I have to keep this up for another 345 days.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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