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to save us from the plague
2009-11-11 09:04:57
INSO15:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: song charted
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: 0:23/3:40
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
In 2008, I got deliriously ill in February and took a mad trip while watching Repo Man under the influence of various meds. This has nothing to do with anything on the video, but serves as a personal reminder that it is another four months, at least, before I can put in for my "I Avoided Dying To The 09-10 Swine Flu And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt" prize. All I did this weekend was win round 1.
All I did last night, though, was catch up on the video, covering the stuff that I should have done Friday if I didn't blow a tire, Saturday if I didn't have to take the car in for tire replacement and pick it up again after class, Sunday if I hadn't been sick, and Monday if I hadn't been sick. All the source is cut now, and since it's a moderately small source pool (~10.7 GB) and only 3 1/3 minutes of music, getting it wrapped by the end of the week is not totally unrealistic. I should get some editing in tonight, though I still do have to sit down, break out what lyrics go where -- Relapse did a super job of not organizing the lyrics in the Existence booklet at all -- and get a rough plan in. Once that's done, editing should go faster. If not, well, there's still the coming weekend to catch up. The quote above is a little misleading; the intro's done, but the actual videography of the song at issue is all still pending. It's something, though, and better to get it out of the way at the start rather than having to fuck around with it at the end when I want to just close the books and build a release version.
Unrelated:
I spent $20 on Warbringer merch last Thursday, a patch that I didn't really want and a CD that I'm now pretty sure I didn't want. I have enough Exodus CDs already (well, enough that aren't Impact Is Imminent, still looking for that one), and Exodus:Warbringer::Justice League:Teen Titans. Seriously. Oot with this band, I'm only listening to East Coast and German thrash-revivalists from now on.
--Kai out
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coming of a golden age
2009-11-05 10:07:04
INSO15:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 6/9
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 6/9
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
In today's update, I actually check how many sources I have in the pool, make arbitrary distinctions about what is considered one "unit", and go through about half of what remains. I also discover that gorging oneself on a cassecroute spread and putting down a quart of Wachusett beer before going home is pretty destructive to motivation, which is why this is posted today rather than yesterday.
I am still running well behind on clip totals, if ahead volumetrically, relative to where I think I need to be, but the reality is that I seriously don't fucking know any more. I think I can put together a coherent narrative out of the sources I've cut so far, and I also think that the last three movies in the pool will help out with building that narrative. Currently, the idea is to finish clipping...er....sometime before the start of next week, and edit rapidly following. This is blocked by the usual obstructions: two shows tonight, the niggling urge to go party Friday if I don't waste all my money on shirts and CDs tonight, class Saturday, and football Sunday. Life sneaks up on you, like Romanian turnstiles upon a Rangers fan.
Since the light is visible at the end of the tunnel on this project, it gets more realistic to plan the next SH video, which is taking firmer shape. I have to go back and re-listen to the Parasitic Extirpation demo to decide the song exactly, but the anime is continuing to reaffirm its good-decisionness every day and every way. This is the project that does not involve painting out logos: that's on hold until I can get a new monitor (and probably gfx card), because close-editing HD, especially clipping the way I do, on a box that can't push anything over 1280x1024 is pretty much a nonstarter. This one also has a smaller source pool and less stringent requirements for synch and timing, and should make a good test run of my HD editing capacities before going head first into a comedy video with intense timing requirements and most cuts needing either to be hand-edited or filtered and upscaled. The only silver lining in this is that I'm probably going to be forced to take a couple days off between now and the end of the year, and if that's not an excuse to go video-hikkikomori, I don't know what is.
--Kai out
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it's time | to raise
2009-11-03 09:53:22
INSO15:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 3/6
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 3/6
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
I backslid over the weekend, but made up for it with a thoroughly productive night last night: two (well, more like one extra-long one; 7200 frames is nothing next to the 32000 that the first two VOBs ran) vobs cut up, two more sources/combos assayed. Optimistically, we're looking at as many as three more AMVs before the end of the year, mainly because two of them are basically going to cut themselves together. I'll have to work on Beyond The Clouds a little to be sure I'm getting the right color temperature, since Shinkai as usual went nuts with purples and oranges in the sunsets, and this doesn't match in with the music at all, but that's an occupational hazard of working with stuff other people drew or shot for their own reasons rather than yours. The other one, though....nothing. Cut source, throw at timeline, add triggers. The triggering/brutalization will take some doing, but it's refreshing to be able to pick up something mind-numbingly extreme, and not have to bash on the anime with a wrench to make the video work.
Exactly which of the three doable-by-the-end-of-the-year ideas goes in first, though, is tough. The Shinkai one is not going first for philosophical reasons, the one that will cut itself together can be pushed down because it's using less source volume than the remaining idea, and that last one will probably involve painting out TV logos. I hate doing that, much like any other form of time-consuming pre-process work, but the lesson of SH032, if nothing else, is that if you can't get clean source, you fucking clean the source you have. This more than anything will be a conceptual stumbling block; the current plan is to use the coming week, which will be devoted to trying to finish the Revocation video, to scrounge cleaner source, then cut the video with what I have and paint out only the cuts that need to be fixed. This is a two-minute video with a lot of other junk in it, so hopefully I can get out of painting a few where they blend into the background. Less busywork, more time for actual editing.
In the course of last night, I also inevitably did a little "location scouting" for the major project that has already stacked up about 15 DVDs in its source pile. I can get maybe about a minute of content out of Beyond The Clouds for that one, which is about on pace as far as requirements. Tonight, I location-scout another movie and/or do some more cutting, since I can't get out of work early enough to see enough of the Heathenfest undercard to make the ticket worth it. More video work tonight, and I can save my gas money and tire pressure for Swashbuckle on Thursday, then bugging out across to Ralph's for MT....or sticking to actually see Vader, no decision on that yet.
--Kai out
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naechste mal als sieger
2009-10-31 11:37:21
I had a weird bout of flu/gut-problems-from-eating-expired-food yesterday and both a lot of work for work and some extra homework for French that I'd put off too long, so I wasn't able to get anything done editing-wise. Normally, this sort of setback wouldn't be worth noting, but there were some other setbacks yesterday that were a little more notable.
First is that try as I might search, the only publicly available Revocation videos from the Church show are shot with one camera from about halfway back. This means, essentially, no usable shots for the current video. (It may be worth noting also that the only songs available from said show are "Anthem of the Betrayed" and "Exhumed Identity", but this is supposed to be a general-audiences video, not a guitar-nut video, so that wouldn't've mattered.) Second is that any remaster of SH007 is on indefinite hold because I don't have my notes pack any more.
This is a little more significant; this large plastic envelope stuffed with scribbled-on graph paper is effectively the project files for the first 98 SH videos and a large chunk of my personal history as an editor, showing, through an excessively personal and difficult to interpret lens, the development of how I approach AMVage. Aside from this, the completeness of the early notes is what allows me to go back and do remakes; even if I still had the MovieStar project files, I wouldn't want to go in with an XML editor and see what the fuck was going on with them. I'm not sure that the notes on SH007 were complete enough to allow a remake anyway, but if they don't exist any more, it's definitely out of the question.
Despite this, Perfect Blue is still on the purchase list for today. Even if SH007 isn't remasterable, the movie still has some residual uses in another project...
--Kai out
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deine fahne ins gesicht
2009-10-28 22:03:18
INSO15:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 2/6
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 1/6
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
Mostly back to respiratory health and the broke finger mostly healed, I'm also back to video work, but that has a lot more to do, I think, with the introduction of White Canadians (play more KoL if you don't know what that is) and a 30-song Kreator playlist to the process. Milk, whiskey, thrash metal, and the Alt key make everything so much easier.
The first three should be self-explanatory, but the last deserves a bit of a note. The Alt key is your friend when it comes to clipping old live-action movies in Virtual Dub, for the simple fact that intercutting is basically unknown before the advent of television. If you start a cut on one camera setup, the next new setup is the start of the next cut, and you can scrub back from there to find your mark-out point; it's easier to do this when you go "right" 50 frames at a time rather than 1. It's also worth noting that, partly because of the theatrical assumptions then prevailing and partly because of the challenges of editing film that made intercutting such a pain, older movies tend to stay in one camera angle or setup a lot longer than more recent films. I'd never alt-scrub with anything animated, or live-action produced after about 1970, because with those kinds of sources it's a lot more likely that you'll miss shorter cuts. Here, though, I've found maybe two cases of a scene under 50 frames, and nothing under 40.
Not only does it not miss good cuts, but (duh) it makes the process go much faster. The first of about three VOBs that will be cut seriously is done, with the next two to maybe follow Friday. If I keep up at this rate, I'll be in a good position, time- and source-wise; after the lessons of SH111, I'm looking at my source pool differently. I should have caught onto this earlier, but with a NLE and the capacity to arbitrarily shorten stuff, total source volume is a lot less useful than total distinct cuts. Assuming 1 spc, though I'll probably cut this slower than that, I need about 400 cuts in the pool for 100% overage, and I have a little less than 80, one of which is going to be used as a title rather than in the video itself. I'm aware that this projects to only 240 cuts, but I'm still working out what I should aim for on this metric, and to the extent that I cut the other VOBs in the pool, every frame out of them is going in the video. And then there's the live video that I haven't ripped off youtube yet; I'm not going to cancel this for lack of source.
SH stuffs:
I almost did cancel the next planned AMV, though; combination of other contending ideas and simple redundancy. The other videos can wait, though, because even if the video source is getting played out, the audio is new, and the secondary video source is going to be enough to take the total video out of the 'played out' category.
I also did another listen through the song slated for the Berserk project (required for any metal editor, of course; once I finish this, I just need to do an actual fighting video and I can get my pro card) over the weekend, and that one is starting to take more concrete shape. Setting up two kinds of triggers for two kinds of blast beats will not be fun, but doing something that cannot be mapped to a linear read of Berserk will be interesting. If circumstances don't intervene, this one is looking like early 2011, though, so don't sit up waiting.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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