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we create | the poison
2009-10-22 10:53:09
INSO15:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 1/6
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: none
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
Despite being sick most of this week so far, I've gotten a little further poked along, and have the first (and hopefully, next to the only) movie under survey cleaned up as much as necessary, which, really, isn't that much. This is an old, bad, black-and-white print that telecided pretty nicely, though there's some blurring that I wasn't able to get rid of. Still, this one is supposed to feel like a midnight-movie reel on an independent TV station (do people who grew up post-cable-ubiquity even know what those are?), and the look of the source is right at that point, where any further potential cleanup would be both pointless and ballbustingly difficult.
Any clipping will go in either tonight or Sunday; tomorrow is Chthonic and Zircon (and Satyricon, aka 45 minutes of waiting to not hear anything off Dark Medieval Times) and Saturday French class starts again. Somewhere in here, I should also get ahold of the video from the Church show and process that; I still want to do the video first and sub the band in where stuff is weak, but without access to all three camera tracks, I also need a rough idea of how much Philcam and how much handheld made it into the final mix, and how much is in wide and presumably less useful.
--Kai out
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what is left is but a shadow
2009-10-17 16:42:43
INSO15:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: none
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: none
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
Despite my profound disappointment at the result this morning, I found the energy to rip everything and delete out the stuff I didn't need. I've got a rough strategy for this one to minimize the number of movies I need to cut through; we'll see if I have the get-to-ittveness needed to chop up an adequate amount of source over tomorrow. Being sick, I'm not optimistic about the prospects for the rest of today, especially since I need to go out and buy stuff for a wicked DIY fondue party. No, seriously, not making this up.
Likely unrelated:
There's plenty of time to upgrade and backslide because of how I had my payment structure set up, but I finally manned up and cancelled my World of Workrate account last week. I hadn't actually logged in for a while preceding this, but it still took some push to take that final step. Importantly, I missed a major content patch by doing so, so even if I do get a twinge to play and am in a situation where I'd be able to log in, I can't just dive back in like nothing happened. Technology and a patchy connection allow a much better coming-to-the-senses buffer than the people around me who are trying to quit smoking have access to, which is what prompted this meditation. 23 days to break a habit, or so I've heard; I think it's been about a month since I last logged in, but it's going to take longer to get completely shut of the desire to play.
I'm sure there are people out there who can play morepigs and have other hobbies, but in my case I was completely upside down: I didn't have the hardware to get the maximum content out of the pro-rated fee, and thus the value of time spent was over-dominating both the cost of access and the rewards granted. When I finally don't get charged for February's six-month payment, it'll be an effective bonus worth about half a plane ticket to Austin or Glasgow, and I'll have more to show for X hours of writing, hiking, video production, and other stuff as opposed to Y hours of pressing WASD and clicking.
Related:
I watched through the full content of my V For Vendetta (perhaps better subtitled A Very Timmy Counterfascism Epic for all the subtle anti-Rangers dogwhistling) package over the past couple nights and was bitterly disappointed with the Cat Power music video on the second disc. 2/5. Poor scene selection, next to no conceptual linkage, lazy editing. There's a reason this ends up after the fold on the second DVD of the special edition rather than MTV, and it's not just that the artist in question is on Matador.
--Kai out
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hear the roar of big machines
2009-10-15 10:14:04
SH038 is up in the new version, so....
SH Remasters Project: The Absurdly Long Upload Struggle
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local: 69/69
indirect: 40/40
All done; these may be of only limited general interest, but at least it's done. Further videos won't be in the format that 99+% of this was reprocessed to, but it's good enough for the long tail without requiring an ungodly amount of processing time. Work on the next video will probably begin at the weekend; what time I have in the rest of the week is going to be occupied largely with burning off source and project files for SH111 to prepare for that next project.
--Kai out
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alive or dead, it doesn't matter
2009-10-14 10:58:54
The processing of SH038 (and, incidentally, SH111) to a modern distribution format is done, and there are some significant takeaways from the process. SH111 is up on indirect currently, and the MP4 of SH038 will go local whenever the deletion request goes through.
Insights gained:
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1) I need more CPU horsepower. A single-core Athlon32 does not cut it for rendering to h264. Though I was using the slowest setting in Zarxgui, the render was completely CPU-bound in both cases, running a comfortable 250 MB in memory but maintaining 95-98% CPU usage for nearly all of a two-plus-hour render time. There was enough overhead systemwide that swapping should not have been an issue, but when I do that rebuild, I'm probably going to pick up more memory anyway as a consequence of the new mobo and processor.
2) The advantages of h264/m4a over properly-done XVID/MP3 are extant but relatively small. The MP4 of SH111 looks and sounds better than the distro XVID, but you need to look real close for proof of this. It is, though, nearly 20MB smaller, which is a significant selling point in its favor.
3) The biggest benefit of Zarxgui, globally, may be from getting people to compress their audio properly. The MP4 in my case looks much the same as the XVID because I have like a hundred videos' worth of experience at tuning output, have read guides, and know what to tweak if something looks like crap coming out of VDub, and it's "only" ~60% of the size because I have the presence of mind to go in to the audio tab and select proper compression. Zarx delivers good presets from startup; all you have to do is not mess with the video presets to get something that matches the source closely, and here the behavior of not paying attention to audio settings is to produce 128kbps AAC. As use of this encoder goes up, the question "did you compress your audio" will fall away from the process of getting people to submit sub-100-MB videos, which is uniformly a good thing.
Overall, the new format is a keeper: I make Lagarith masters anyways for various reasons, which makes it easier to use this encoder instead of Virtual Dub; I can do any post-production cleaning only once and not worry about keeping track of filter settings, then just feed the result into Zarxgui and go to sleep. I don't need to worry any more about tuning two-pass settings or making mistakes in the production chain, just starting with the right settings on the right file.
The experiences on this one have also cemented the conclusion, carried over from SH097, that going back and remaking/rebuilding old videos is not the sharpest idea in the whole world. I'd only ever consider doing this again for SH007, but even that depends on what information is available; on SH005, I was still keeping track of timecodes when taking source clips, which is really what allowed SH097 to be possible. I'm not sure I was still doing that even as late as SH007, which would make rebuilding it a difficult business.
--Kai out
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i resolve | segregated holocaust
2009-10-13 13:41:47
SH038 rebuild:
complete
After bashing out a few framerate- and resolution-related problems, the SH038 rebuild -- in which I added one extra cut that I can't figure out why I didn't put somewhere in the video initially -- is finished, and I have a Lags master. I also have a few MP4-encoding utilities, and it's tonight to play around with them and see if I can get something that looks good and finishes in a relatively small filesize. Depending on results, I may do some work on the omake for this release as well, but that requires reindexing the source and possibly doing source cleaning again.
I was thinking about doing a new edit of this video to release alongside the rebuild of the old, but in the rebuild process discovered that to be pretty much a pipedream. There are about four unique cuts that did not make the original cut that might possibly have been included this time, and throwing triggers at this (let's face it) very slackly-edited video would just make it look bad. There is not enough stuff in On Your Mark to do much better of a video than this; the choruses and solos are already as punchy as I can manage, and there's not much more that I can do with the rest.
As mentioned, the live-action Revocation video is next on the queue; I get to do a good turn for some local bhoys, get back into straight-cutting and internal synch rather than matching five goddamned beats a second and no riff line, and otherwise tune up for the next run of videos. This isn't a SH video, so I'm not sure that it will get fully tracked on here, but I'm going to be working in parallel on a couple other projects that should be; it's looking more and more like the next SH AMV is going to be something really bizarre that will look less technical than its actual requirements, which is a pretty radical turnabout from the last one. We'll see how that works out.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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