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slow i go
2002-09-05 12:47:22
...and the video goes much slower. I put in six hours last night between effects, assembly, and debugging, and I'm on build delta 4, and the damn thing STILL aint done. I really need a new editing station, because the one I've got seems now to be despising transitions of over .5 seconds if set to music. Fuck it. I need a new job more, though, because the upper management at my workplace thinks they'll continue to make money if they trim their workforce below support levels, and that's probably going to include me. Another week to finish up my last project, then fold up the tent.
Hmmm....maybe go back to school, maybe take a break from this and bum around Central Europe, maybe tell the world to fuck off and get a job washing dishes and spend my excess energy playing metal seriously....maybe find a real job in a stable industry (yeah right, like those exist). First, though, I got a project to finish and a video to polish off. I'll just do a bunch of preemptive fixes and try to build that. This one's probably going to Ani-Magic.
The new In Flames is pretty nifty, but it's still about the level of their last two; not up to the _Jester Race_ era yet, and there's some weird parts in some places, like indie-style sections in a pretty straight death-metal song ("Transparent"), and just "Cloud Connected" overall. Still, I can't get "System" and "Economic" out of my head. Earlier I got Death's famed _Spiritual Healing_ and Nile's heralded _In Their Darkened Shrines_, so there is much coolness on the musical front.
Did my AWA Pro judging yesterday; server must just have burped earlier. Here's the random logpage:
vid XX:
clean edits, but what the hell is the concept here? too tied to source anime to work. almost no relatable sequences. Tail-disjoints quite roughly, and audio is crumpled beyond tape limits. Story Vid Without Story = CRUD
vid XX:
nice '80s feel, but degraded video. nice edits, but better as an idea than in practice. what's with the ws/tv? action synch is just nonexistent.
vid XX:
SPACKLEVID! well-done, but still spackley.
At this point the question of what all these "spackle" comments are might arise. The answer is that because I have such a low overall opinion of digital effects, it is common practice to refer to them, in general, as 'digital spackle', and videos using them as 'spackled' to some degree. Is it possible to use effects tastefully, and to good effect? Sure, but most of the time, it doesn't happen, and you're sitting there, trying to mentally scrape off the spackle to see the video buried underneath.
Though, considering the other problems so many of the vids in this contest have, this is a minor problem at worst.
Current video: Nevermore, "Dreaming Neon Black" (edit) to Ai Yori Aoshi. Progress check: 95% complete. Expected catalog number: #50. Should be finished tonight; really should have been finished last night. Now I just gotta roll it up and see where I'm moving on to.
--Kai out
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quietly crept in and changed us all
2002-09-04 08:04:31
A minor forum kick-up (that someone else started, but I contributed substantially to, before someone else resolved it) in Contests yesterday, and more work on video #50; the way life goes.
I put in four hours of hackery last night, and while I didn't get as much done as I would have liked to, it was about as much as I really should have expected. For a five-and-a-half minute video, it's enough to be able to do a draft, and pretty much impossible to both finish a draft and do effects in one night. Fortunately, the effects are going to be less intense than I thought; one flip, one level-adjust, and that damn strobe that the end keys on. I thought I'd have to do a lot more level-adjust, but I was able to get enough clips naturally at the right levels to do those parts of the video.
I tried to judge AWA Pro yesterday, but the slaggin page aint up yet. I can wait; all my info is down on the judging log I've been posting from, even if my VHS deck is now dead. Here's today's logpage:
vid XX:
jawflaps AGAIN DAMMIT! Technically cool, but almost completely devoid of purpose or consistency.
vid XX:
<guy I know's name deleted> spacklefest! disjoint in many places -- fast edits do not necessarily equal good. However, in this pile of crud, it looks pretty nice. A definite for any pure technical award, but it's uneven as a _video_.
vid XX:
stutters horribly, period. If this is accidental, I'm sorry; if deliberate, it sucks. Good concept, but the videography has a tendency to kill it absolutely dead. good end can't save it.
I think that what I call 'stutter-frame' in this log is what ErMaC is referring to in his journal as 'swapped field orders', since I didn't notice any problem anywhere near as widespread. This difference in terminology is the dividing line between a digital A/V guru and a bass player who happened to pick up some video editing gear.
Now for real stuff:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/article.php?id=2532
Given this notice, you now will have a good idea of what fansub groups to throw bricks at come next month. Given the success of Mahoromatic, there are going to be a lot of people who want to get themselves some "name" by subbing the second season. Never MIND that it's almost definitely going to be picked up, and the traditional defenses of "show people stuff that isn't going to be licensed" and "convince American companies to bring it over by fan interest" just don't apply. Anyone who subs this show is doing it purely for ego reasons, not because they're interested in the wider fan community at all.
Speaking of communities, I finally understood what all those more experienced people were saying about the forums going to hell yesterday. I go into General AMV and it's full of crap. How ya knows school's starting, I guess.
Real stuff:
Current video: Nevermore, "Dreaming Neon Black" (edit) to Ai Yori Aoshi. Progress check: 95% complete. Expected catalog number: #50. Going to do effects and HQ build tonight. I'm iffy on this video; some parts are ok, and the ending I think works quite well, but there is a LOT of clip reuse that I wish I didn't have to do, and the concept gets strained in places. The 'fake-spoiler' ending is kinda cheap, but I'm not really sure how else I could have worked with it. At 5:26, even in the "Radio Japan airtime edit", this is the longest video I've done since February, and with an average of 2.34 seconds per clip it's one of the tightest. A lot of that is shims, though; I think I need to cut back on the "SH trademark" of dropping 15-frame slices of black into videos to a point where it's effective instead of just ubiquitous.
--Kai out
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we are the wounds and the great cold death of the earth
2002-09-03 08:39:46
Quite a productive weekend, all things considered. I finished up video #49, the Freeware AMV Project, and it's now open for request. I can't believe that people actually put themselves through this sort of thing to make videos. If it was this hard back when I was starting, I'd have given up, for sure. I'm more conscious than ever of the huge advantage I have just by using an editor that allows real-time drafting. Now I just ahve to live up to that.
Club....joined at MIT Friday, and wow, Hoshi no Koe. Just amazing, and more amazing that it's a video dojin put together by one guy with an iMac over seven months. These AMV creators who yammer on around here about art and such should go do something like this, and allow the rest of us to continue to make Music Videos. I'm sort of working on a video using this title now, but it's going to require an absurd amount of Meimi processing to get it to go the way I need it to; just have to wait and see -- and finish the current video.
For a while I was almost certain that I would have to abandon video #50 due to a lack of source. I broke one of the iron laws of Shin Hats (namely, have one subbed episode for every minute of video) right from the get-go, then found out that the only episode of Ai Yori Aoshi that really works with the song selected is the one I have raw. So I poured four hours into clipping those 24 minutes, edited about a minute out of the song, and came out with about 80% overage at the end, which gives me about enough wiggle room to make the video -- I think. If Shin Hatsubai Jitsu has a weakness, this is it: for a video to work, it has to REALLY work.
Quick weekend anime rundown (stuff I got):
Pia Carrot 2 (#2): cool, even though I got the wrong volume by the clerk's mistake.
Wild 7: Heavy Metal! Gonna have to try to run down the second volume of this.
Domain of Murder: pleasantly surprised with everything except the production values. Reminds me a lot of Master Keaton.
Excel Saga 6-9: haven't seen 'em yet.
I'm going to do my AWA Pro judging today; here's the current random log page:
video XX:
unsynched action = bad. + jawflapping = worse. Effects don't usually work. CRUD
video XX:
schweeet parody, but some of the lipsynch is kicked
video XX:
degraded footage (wrinkles). concept is weak OR too tied to the anime. Action doesn't synch.
video XX:
almost no fx, but very well edited/synched -- top hole.
video XX:
nice editing/synch, but still a lot of spackle. nothing done with scratching, and too much jaw-flappage. good vid limited!
Soon enough, my hatred against unsynchronized motion and stray mouth movements will go into the public record (sorta).
Current video: Nevermore, "Dreaming Neon Black" (edit) to Ai Yori Aoshi. Progress check: 85% complete. Expected catalog number: #50. I should be able to do drafting and effects tonight; I may not have to do as much playing with levels as I thought, but I still have to definitely do a VDub frame-by-frame strobe and probably some layering, which is desperately hard to emulate in MovieStar. Maybe a final build as well, but I won't stay up forever debugging tonight.
Con news: video #36 got exactly the reaction I anticipated at AnimeFEST; no awards and a big What the fucking fuck? from the Austin scene. I should have esteemed this contest better, and sent something better, longer, and more metal, because now a huge number of people think SH is a goob studio. Undecided on what to send to Ani-Magic, if anything.
--Kai out
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shivers me one last line
2002-08-30 08:58:53
Last night was perfect. Cold rain, cold wind, and chopping up Blood: The Last Vampire into tiny little pieces. I got a lot more done than I anticipated, and should be able to knock it off completely, even with the long-ass Meimi effect I'm going to use to open it off, by the end of Saturday. That's probably going to be the only effect in the video; hope it goes effectively. I just need to gin up a test-panel and a blackframe at the proper resolution, and I'm good to go.
Here's today's random AWA Pro judging log page:
vid XX:
overspackled, but well cut. too much cg/fx for feel of a true AMV; anime elements severely minimized.
vid XX:
too much yap, too many long edits (nice mods, tho, and excellent synch/match). Do manual footage stop rather than auro next time, tho. Too much 'plot' [from anime, inconsistent with/external to song] @ end.
vid XX:
red flashes do little more than distract. nice "condensation" of the OAV, but there's no original concept here.
vid XX:
unexceptional. good edits but boring.
Today's related rant has to do with another aspect of the Pro contest: it's definitely opened me up to a wider range of anime. I now no longer feel that Utena is totally inessential, for example. Really, how many of us would have ever seen something like Space Adventure Cobra without this contest? And more, how many of us, judging this contest and seeing that video, will ever be motivated to see any more of it, EVER?
However, this doesn't mean that a lot of the videos aren't with overused titles: 24 of the 75 are with the top 10 most used (mea culpa, I contributed to that as well). This isn't as bad, though, as ripping off other people's concepts; one video is attempting to be SRV, and another is a shameless conceptual rip of The Hell That Is Keitaro's Life. Salce-sensei sez "Do what cha' like people!", but who can like being so shamelessly dependent on other people's ideas?
Relevant stuff:
Current videos: Iced Earth, "Damien" (intro) to Blood: The Last Vampire [Solo Project #2]. Progress check: 85% complete. Expected catalog number: #49. Nevermore, "Dreaming Neon Black" to Ai Yori Aoshi. Progress check: 25% complete. Expected catalog number: #50. No work tonight; going in to Boston. Should get one, maybe both, done over the long weekend.
--Kai out
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reaching into the dark, retrieving light
2002-08-29 08:20:54
Watched the last of 3 AWA Pro tapes last night, and was pleased to find that it was apparently the 'good video tape', as overall the vids sucked less than on either of the previous volumes. Not that there wasn't crap, but what there was didn't piss me off to the extent of the previous two. Here's the random log page for today (masked as usual):
vid XX:
nice concept, but jawflaps and missed hits sabotage it throughout. turns into just another battle video in places, but about as good as this bunch comes.
vid XX:
good, old-school, but it doesn't stick out except by not sucking. The concept gets thin after a while, and the trail-off end is a disservice.
<-------------------- END TAPE X -------------------------->
vid XX:
some degrades, but nice synch and fx. good for a trailer.
Despite becoming SO FULL OF HATE whenever I see unsynchronized mouth motion, and despite having to sit through enormous amounts of crappy music without expressing my rage against it, I'm glad that I was able to enter this contest, and glad that it's peer-judged. I know know, rather than merely believe, that Shin Hats is able to compete at an elite level. I'm probably not going to win anything; my videos are solidly middle-of-the-pack here, something that might have been changed by sending something less than 6 months old, definitely not the very best, but far from the worst as well.
Of course, I've already won in this arena. I've already fulfilled my objectives. It is a win for metal to put Solar Signs and Blind Guardian in front of 50 or so 'professional' AMV creators, with competitive editing and in good video quality. Not to advance my name but to advance my cause. If either gets through to the final contest voting, I'll be surprised, but this is one of the first steps on a long, long, journey. Competition is not an end but a means; the end is what it's always been, advocacy, pure and simple.
Current videos: Iced Earth, "Damien" (intro) to Blood: The Last Vampire [Solo Project #2]. Progress check: 35% complete. Expected catalog number: #49. Nevermore, "Dreaming Neon Black" to Ai Yori Aoshi. Progress check: 25% complete. Expected catalog number: #50. Got in some good work last night on #49; hopefully I'll be able to get at least two more of the chunks cut through tonight, finish it up Saturday, and blitz through clipping and editing for #50 using the two open days of the long weekend. It'll be tough, but the Jitsu is not about shying away from tough or labor-intensive projects.
I should have mentioned this earlier: if you want 720x480, 2000kbps DivX 5.0, no-sound versions of Kanon episodes 1-9 and 11-13, the address to contact is merlane@hotmail.com. Sorry, not passing out source for Moon Without Face.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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