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nothing left but carrion
2010-03-04 09:04:17
SH115:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 4/12
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 0/12
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
The rip is done, and I think I have the cleaning taken care of, at least for the first DVD, but no cutting as yet. The print here is pretty much crap, to the point that I'd almost rather edit from the VHS version I worked from earlier. Nightmarish rainbowing, exactly as advertised, to the point where I just could not remove it with SS IQ, and am now just not running with that filter in the chain, on the idea that it's easier and faster to just not take shots where the problem shows up. This is going to be a two-minute video avoiding most of the kinds of shots where this would be a problem, and it's not like this title has a lot of bunched black lines anyways.
There are other problems, like an inexplicable red-brown (I think) bar flashing on the left that may be an artifact of bad pulldown handling, and the fact that the print is unnecessarily oversaturated, but I can fix these. I can't fix the rainbows.
The likelihood is that I don't work on this till the weekend, between one thing and another, but it's also likely that I'll get through the first DVD by the end of said weekend. This is, as remarked, a 2-minute video that doesn't overlap with anything I'm going to be using this title for in the future, so the need to do a really exhaustive cut like on SH114 is not going to be there. I'm not going to speculate, due to the inevitable interposing factors of death metal and the social round, but it is not entirely impossible that this video could be done and ready to ship by the end of the month.
--Kai out
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and when the seven tongues align
2010-03-03 09:45:08
SH115:
- Source rip: none
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: none
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: none
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
SH114 has now been moved off onto 6 DVDs, with the master still waiting until I can decide on something else to pad out that volume, and I should be able to get the 115 source imported and the raw materials for 114 deleted. This will probably also take up most of the precleaning, but maybe not all, since this is a Pioneer source from a time period where they were regularly afflicted by rainbowing that made unprepared editors go hide behind the couch. I'm holding out hope, though, because when I worked on this title before, it wasn't an issue.
More importantly for the current video, though, I was able to dig up the song, get it converted, and get the structure blocked out. This video is by no means going to make itself, but it is lending itself to a plan, and if I can actually manage to work on it regularly and the cut isn't too much of a screaming nightmare, it might actually lend itself to getting done in a timely fashion. We'll see about that, and about how much new equipment is going to be required to make it work.
--Kai out
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forever carry on
2010-02-27 12:32:34
SH114:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: complete
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: complete
- Postproc: complete
- Export: 75%
Contest submissions are in the post, but because the credits didn't come out right, the distro version is still building. This is ok, though, because it's going to be like 5 weeks until the video's published, so it's not like this is under deadline.
I've got the video source for SH115 stacked up next to the monitor, and should be able to dig the song out without too many issues; over today and tomorrow, provided I don't spend too much time buying pants/Billy Mays gear (don't ask) this afternoon, get too fatally wasted tonight, or become morbidly despondent if the refs fuck us out of the chance to challenge for the title tomorrow morning, I should be able to get the SH114 source cleaned off and the SH115 materials on. I'm pretty psyched for this; 114 was good training for stringing a narrative together without a lot of lyrical material to go on, and also for creative applications of alpha masking. Just have to check if I can successfully multiball-troll, or if this is going to have to be a disgusting sellout at only one venue.
--Kai out
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of this restless world
2010-02-26 09:06:42
SH114:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: complete
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: complete
- Postproc: 75%
- Export: 50%
DVDs are burned and, as noted yesterday, awaiting packing tape to be turned into a package for competition. Luckily, I did the 3-minute video in HD and the 5-and-a-half-minute one in SD rather than the other way around; HuffYUV is better than the non-Lagarith alternatives, but still dicey when HD is in the equation. I tried to do my own upscale of SH114 for their convenience (640x480->960x720 letterboxed to 1280), but it was going to clock in at a format-choking 6.6 GB, and there was kind of a typhoon blowing outside, so I didn't want to waste time or run the chance of wasting the mobo. All said, future long-form HD videos are going to need to go out on like 12GB solid-state drives or something.
Incidentally, 48Khz can GTF. Contests that specify this for audio are within their rights to do so, but it's a fuckin bear to support. My environment is unable, apparently, of outputting audio on uncompressed AVI that is not at 44.1Khz, so for this submission, the process was to rip the .wav out of the finished video in VDub, encode it to 320kbps CBR mp3, then immediately re-encode that to 48Khz .wav and mux it back in. The reason that this unnecessary (if probably imperceptible) generation loss is *stupid* as well as *loopy* is that, obviously, the song in this video and probably still most videos in this contest came off CD, and all 48 kilocycles is doing is adding more empty space in the data. Maybe some people are working from DVD audio tracks and need the whole sample space, but it's a lot of work for extremely little result.
When SH114 is built into distro form (probably tonight unless there is emergency drinking scheduled), it will be built out in 44.1Khz. The components to do this aren't quite done yet, but it's going to be fairly straightforward.
--Kai out
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a final call to arms
2010-02-25 10:32:32
SH114:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: complete
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: complete
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
So what happens when you have a video that is cutting itself together largely from long cuts with internal synch, and a source pool that thanks to an indexing pass is now almost completely 'in memory' and easy to slot in? Apparently, a fanatically fast work rate, because SH114 wrapped last night, as far as editing goes (reproc to con standard and the credits and mixdown for distro still remain), and at a relatively blinding, for these days anyway, 1mph. Tonight, I bang on it and SH112 until they're in shape to send, then burn some DVDs and make a note to buy packing tape. Finished, and ahead of schedule, no less.
The only real regret in this process is that while the video as it exists meets all my standards, there is just so much good content left out that I could *not* shoehorn into this video. The requirements of constructing something that looked like a quasi-coherent narrative while still looking cool and hitting the necessary musical and lyrical synch points forced a lot of rather incredible shots out of the video; some will be back in that giant soul-eating project alluded to a few weeks back, but some are never going to crop up in a SH video. This is the only AMV I do with this source; if someone else wants to see the cuts that fell by the wayside, they can make their own vid.
I'm glad that I got in ahead of schedule, if for no other reason than that I was sick of poking along on this one and its 5-minute runtime. I'm well ready to start on the next video, which is only a 3-DVD cut, a 2-minute song, and even if it's going to require a lot of FX work, this is something I can come to an accomodation with. Hopefully, I can get this one done before SH114 goes to release at the start of April.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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