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virus spreading over the earth
2009-10-12 11:13:37
SH038 rebuild:
2:52/4:16
Source all cut up, the "editing" is proceeding apace; this consists mainly of finding the right shot among the 102 cut out of the original video, putting it in the timeline, and making sure the last frame lines up. This is harder than it looks thanks to the challenge of matching 23.976 fps for the new track to the 29.97 fps original, and tiresome as per SH108, but will probably finish tonight, after which it's time to learn about encoding MP4 -- or just grab someone else's mencoder frontend and see what it plops out. Whatever the outcome on this, though, I'm not doing another remaster project, not so soon after the last.
In the process of getting the source set up for the rebuild, I also did a brief test and confirmed that yes, I can handle HD (at least resolutionwise) even in my current environment. Playback is a little jerky, but there are solutions for that -- drafting, for one, and a total rebuild of this now five-year-old workstation for another. It's probably going to be a while before I have to work in HD on a video with actual timing, and Keystone lived for 6 years before being taken out of service permanently; no worries. By the time I need to take care of this, the workstation will be old enough to justify the rebuild, and I'll have cleaned up my kitchen enough to do the mobo/ps swap somewhere that there isn't carpet.
--Kai out
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burn the city down
2009-10-10 18:11:45
SH111:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: complete
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: complete
- Postproc: complete
- Export: complete
SH111 is done and released. It's going to be weird not staring at these same two characters for hours on end night after night -- despite the fact that I forgot entirely what their names are and have been using "Alec" and "Yasmin" in the notes for one impenetrable and one obvious reason. Hopefully, this has been a good learning experience and will result in better videos in the weeks and months ahead.
The key to completing this and making it come out was that I broke through my last hangup about nonlinearity and edited the end backwards. The last 15 seconds were edited, initially, from the end going back; this assured that I had the ending I wanted, and that it would be fully formed when I got to the crucial part of tying the body of the video to that ending. This, at least is important, as is the fact that simple choices made in effects design can add lot of thematic consistency and smoothness at the price of an unbearable amount of production effort.
The next project is the opposite of this: reducing On Your Mark to sequential scenes to rebuild SH038. Source gathering tomorrow, editing at the start of the week, buildout midweek, and release, along with the remasters-catalog thread, by the end. Then new ideas...barrel of worms, that.
--Kai out
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i saw the old man crumble
2009-10-09 09:21:13
SH111:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: complete
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: 3:55/5:01
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
If I really push on this one, I'll probably be able to get the announcement up without running into thread-quota problems. This of course assumes that "week" falls into the doctrinaire workers' definition of "seven continuous days, arbitrarily but consistently delimited, one following the other in sequence" rather than MUST HAVE SEVEN DAYS BETWEEN POSTINGS BLARG. Even if I ever was at that status, I no longer have the largely-illusory "pull" to get away with bending the rules.
Had things gone a little better last night, I might have gotten through the rest of the third verse, but as usual, shit came up; namely, "complexity wall" number three. Worse, where this came up pretty much guarantees that I will have to deal with another one RIGHT AT THE GODDAMNED END of the video. Periodicity more or less as follows:
1:35 | 1:10 | 1:05
This means that I'm going to have to, again, stop what I'm doing, back out an uncertain amount of video, check every single goddamned clip to make sure I've got it set to full-frames/no-interlace-processing, build out an uncompressed track, render back to Lags, then rebuild the project again, sometime between 4:50 and 5:00. How long is this video again, total? Yeah, what I thought. Still not giving up on Magix, though.
Regardless, I also have to bear in mind that I'm in striking distance: barely more than a minute left, and while the editing is probably going to be difficult, it's also going to be difficult to NOT finish this before I go out to see Todesbonden tomorrow -- provided, of course, that I get home in one piece from Parasitic tonight and wake up sometime before noon. Neither is assured, though; I got up early for work today, and the last time I went to this place I ended up spending three hours getting a joint taped back together.
--Kai out
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impossible to cure
2009-10-08 13:16:12
SH111:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: complete
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: 3:34/5:01
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
As anticipated, I was able to keep rolling -- despite early inclinations that I'd end up going to sleep without doing any editing at all -- by the pure act of sitting down at the goddamned keyboard and putting the fecking clips in the fecking timeline. Some ideas were crap, and got grouted. Some worked, and got fine-tuned and had effects pasted over them. By the time that I looked at my watch and decided that being sick (and injured) meant I had to stop working and rest up for work in the morning, about 24 seconds had been done up and I was comfortably through the first half of the last verse. There are going to be some problems in the next 30 seconds, and after that in finding new things to do in the third chorus, but the rest of the video should essentially cut itself together, and in any case, there are less than 90 seconds left.
One way or another, I'm finding my pace as an editor again, and as that happens, I can tolerate longer and longer sitting in front of the editing station, and get more done while there. I'm also getting the rough structures of my source pool into memory again: I have better command of where what I might be looking for is, and what I've used already, both of which make the going faster. Also, coming off the chorus, I'm somewhat deliberately backing the effects down -- half of this is that I don't have to recompose as many shots as on the second verse, but half is that I'm just not doing so, because the conceptual stuff in the third verse is a lot more important than lyric-synching every goddamned little thing. When"Terence Trent D'Arby" comes up in the middle of the line, I'm not going to fucking cut away to a poster (of a completely unrelated artist) or a spinning record, or a pile of LPs. I don't actually have any of those shots in the source pool either, but that's not the point; having them would be worthless because the visuals are potentially useful nowhere else, and I'm not going to break up the composition of the video just to say I hit every lyric and rebuilt all these shots that aren't in the source.
Long and short, I'm getting back to where I was in about May/June of 2005, the last time that AMV was anything close to a primary hobby focus. As far as "directed effort on a single video", this is the first project over 20 hours since SH105, which also runs north of four and a half minutes and also took more than half a year to complete. The next 30-hour project, which for several reasons is probably coming within the next five videos, will hopefully not run into this kind of morass.
Of course, when that comes is subject to all kinds of intruding factors. This is the not-yet-evaluated meta-queue remaining between SH111 and what is still somehow slated as SH112:
- rebuild of SH038
- public-domain live-action video for Revocation
- doki-inspired Sentenced vid that will probably be half INSO
- official slam AMV, probably with Parasitic Extirpation
- Cephalic Carnage live-action project pending source
Some of these will get numbers, some won't. Some may not even happen. We'll see how available time shapes up in the coming weeks and months.
--Kai out
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was a worker in the nuclear plant
2009-10-07 14:21:14
SH111:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: complete
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: 3:10/5:01
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
I was on a bit of a roll last night, but pulled up early as I was getting into the part at the start of the third verse where I was least sure of the meaning; difficult words now translated, I should be able to get back cracking tonight and continue to make significant progress. I'm experimenting with other effects to break up the run of boxes and lines that has so far dominated the effecting -- and will probably continue to do so -- and the results are looking decent, at least at this point. At a minimum, I'm pretty sure I can get through two more text blocks; if i get really lucky, I'll get up to the "tape" break in the third verse, after which the footage should about edit itself.
Technically, I could have skipped ahead and done that exact part last night; the source is all there, reserved since it was cut, and cutting it together is going to be fairly trivial. However, this is the one real block I still have about nonlinear editing: I use multiple tracks and do all kinds of weird gymnastics with layering and effects to make stuff come out the way it's desired, but I cannot and will not approach a video any other way than starting at 00:00 and plugging on, linearly, through the timeline until the last bit of audio is accounted for. Part of it is habit, but part is also philosophical: viewers are going to watch the video from front to back, and unless 3:00 builds on 2:59 builds on 2:58, they're going to get lost, or worse, lose interest because there's a minute's worth of complete filler salted between seven or eight cool hits. Linear composition forces you to make every part of the video up to standard, or you yourself will grow to hate or get sick of it in the editing process. I think I can hold myself up to standard enough despite jumping around in the timeline, but that's really not something I want to play games with.
Video projects keep cropping up and imposing. In addition to the new idea that's probably going to turn into SH112, there's also another INSO idea on deck, but I need to a) collect the film source out of my archives and b) pitch it to the band before they go on tour to see if I can get some live/studio footage. If not, oh well, it'll be done when they get back without the live bits.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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