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the end of august
2010-08-25 10:56:13
The Euro tour is over, so I'm back, and fortunately the weather has broken and we're getting some nice cold rain. Fortunately, because I'm now working on a kind of odd project that I picked up an idea for in Europe; it's not an AMV and won't get a SH number, but if I can make it work it'll be out in some way in about a week or two. Interesting challenge at least.
I should be able to get a start this weekend, after the prep work for the festival report is done; lot of other stuff to do, like moving my brothers and catching up on Giant Killing, but it's a long weekend, and I ought to be able to squeeze some work in somewhere.
--Kai out
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and in the distance a stranger flashed his lights
2010-07-20 17:30:53
There is now zero likelihood of a new video before the festival break. This is due to a combination of time overcontention from fitba, death metal, and a family emergency, and also to the suffocating heat that has descended on the east coast. I *could* have a stable editing environment, but I don't have the time, around all the other stuff, to take the side panels off my rig for better circulation.
That said, I have a pretty good stretch of ideas for *after* the festival break, so like last year I'll probably slowly start to get stuff released come September or so. The "end of August, and on into autumn", as it were. The cold will come back, and I'll be able to get stuff done, the cycle continuing forward even well after I succumb to the allure of the earth.
Observers who can infer from this post what band I saw last week and thenceforward cannot stop listening to may not get an immediate reward, but might be in line for some shed deadwood in the process of reaching living trees. The very few who care know where to fire in on this one.
--Kai out
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are you ready - are you sure
2010-07-01 12:56:38
SH116:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 2/6
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
Another VOB killed, but in barely more than an hour thanks to the ED/preview/OP inclusion body and the mandatory recap at the start of the second episode, which represented a lot of frames that either I knew I didn't need to scan through, or had already cut through, effectively, the night before. Still decent yield, probably, and if things hold I'm looking at a 12 GB source pool for a 3-minute video, which is eminently doable. I just need to finish cutting, which probably won't happen before the end of next week, then sit down and edit.
It's almost depressing to look at the schedule ahead and know that the time to do such a simple thing as cut footage just isn't going to be there...but on the other hand, tonight through the weekend goes show-maybe cut-World Cup-show/BBQ-show and then potentially the semis if Germany doesn't get rolled by Argentina. Life is killing me? Hardly, but it's not quite having a salutory effect on my ability to sit in front of monitor and click in and out marks....opening up the perpetual question of whether such is desirable in the first place.
--Kai out
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starry wisdom lost
2010-06-30 09:31:50
SH116:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 1/6
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
I cut completely through the first VOB last night, but didn't check the source weight gathered; it took about an hour and a half, though, and was pretty dense, so results are looking tentatively positive.
This cut, though, is yet another argument on the thesis that AMVing makes you hate anime: going through fame by frame, you see every little flaw and inconsistency, and you despair of digital video ever being accurate and complete. The print on this title looks amazing at full speed on a TV, but when you take it in to VDub, there's blocking and color crawl at all the worst points, but, maddeningly, there is so much detail preserved everywhere else, and even at those points, that any kind of smoothing would just kill the picture dead. And that's not even counting the several cuts that fell out of the source pool solely because the character animation in them is no good. This, though, is what it's all about, to cut in, keep what works, and discard everything that isn't going to contribute to a good video.
As for the rest, well, that's what closure is for. And more fortunately, unlike a lot of other Gonzo productions from this time period, the budget appears to be pretty consistent from episode to episode, so the source gain rate will hopefully be constant as well. If I can scare up the motivation in these confusing and empty days of no fitba, the cut may end up half done by the end of the week.
--Kai out
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renew our faith which way we can
2010-06-25 08:41:26
SH116:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: none
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
After bringing in a new DVD decrypter to supplement the old, reliable, six-years-out-of-date one that wasn't parsing the disc for this project correctly, I got back on track and got shit set up. Despite the proliferation of overly tasty Cup clashes this weekend, I anticipate being able to do at least some of the cut, with an eye to finishing this one sometime in the next two weeks. Short project, but it's a little demanding and going to be used exclusively as a shakedown cruise for a new editing environment, so there may be additional delays involved.
After this one wraps, I may be able to fit in another video before I ship out, but that's going to involve some very old-school challenges: to cut down 30 minutes of hardsubbed source into a pool suitable and sufficient to cover four minutes or so, then actually do the video on that limited allocation. This idea is still not at 100%, but if it goes, it has a chance of being finished by the end of July.
I also successfully demonstrated VHS->DVD conversion with the "new" machine that I got back as Christmas, so another old idea hits the to-do list, but will be impossible to really work on before fall 2011. This is because I have approximately 350 tapes to process, which is a fucking YEAR's worth of work. Some of them are macrovisioned, and will be impossible to convert, and some I've since picked up on commercial DVD or digisubs with a better print (ex. Marmalade Boy and LoGH, respectively), but it doesn't change the fact that most of my VHS collection is fansubs or raws of stuff that I have not obtained otherwise, and needs to get converted over. Also, this idea kind of requires the diminished fidelity of a VHS fansub print and wouldn't work with DVD clarity, which is why it's not been worked on despite being like seven years old and the source anime being widely available commercially.
Even so, things are moving forward. There's less than a month's worth of CDs left, which will allow me to get those the fuck out of the way of the piles of tapes, and that should start proceeding as well. A grind is a grind is a grind, but the purpose of a grind is to get somewhere, and that doesn't happen if you don't start grinding.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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