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dance a hempen jig
2009-01-03 20:58:22
SH111:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 1/9
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 0/9
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
I have so far got the settings dialed in for my copy of UmiKiko, which should apply across all 4 VOBs. This is kind of subject to change, though, as I've dealt with DVDs in the past that have changed field order between VOBs, and I may need to tweak that. The bad news is that this print is pretty badly rainbowed. Not Trigun rainbowed, but rainbowed regardless, and that means Smart Smoother IQ, and also that clipping this is going to take next to forever due to the heavy filter load. The good news is that about 80% of the shots that fell in the necessarily-literal-lyric-synch-and-therefore-probably-impossible camp look like they're going to come out after all, and composing stuff around them, even if all I can get is just a synch hit, doesn't look to be flat impossible.
Of course, it never does, and then you start clipping, and then the shot's screwed up for some reason and you can't use it, but that's why there's two movies in the source pool. In a perfect world I could do this all with UmiKiko, but reality says that I'm gong to need to color in the margins with the other source. Fortunately, the aspect ratios match, and either I can tweak the colors to match in, or by virtue of shot selection -- and that this is going to be kind of a fast-cutting video -- it won't actually matter. In addition to the actual video work, I did some conceptual stuff last night and today as well: breaking up the lyrics into the rhythm of the delivery, re-listening to Rodriguez' commentary track for El Mariachi, and re-watching Lord of the Weed, though this was purely by accident, as it was on the DVD with Ame to Shoujo to Watashi no Tegami. Doesn't hurt; there are few better demonstrations of how good source selection, both music and visual, and some moderate editing, can match in really well thanks to closure. Also, the thing's a frickin classic -- "Wacken? Schon vorbei, du Spassti!"
--Kai out
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and then the spell starts to break
2009-01-02 19:46:08
SH111:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: none
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 0/8 or so
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
I've got the source materials in place, and should be in a decent position to start work on this soon enough. None too soon, as a matter of fact, because this one is going to take every ounce of my abilities to complete. There is a reason that SH110 is so relatively simple, and only half of it is that the concept drove rather simplistic editing and plotting. The other half is that the more complicated a video you try to pick up after a long layoff, the more likely it is that that video never gets finished at all. This time out, I have a 5-minute song that I can't realistically cut at all, and two independent sources, maybe even not at the same resolution (I didn't check this -- it's fixable anyway), and some intense demands of lyric synch on elements that I may just not have source for. There's nothing easy about this video, but really, the current to-do list includes some stuff that makes a project like this look like an AMV Hell clip. If I can't even overcome this much impossible, the stuff I want to do as an AMVka in the near future is going to be absolutely out of the question. Too much music for too little source; integration of diverse visual styles; hell, even plotting and timing a long video again -- all of this is preparation, and if I can't even do it here, doing it over the track that I've had half a ton of DVDs piled on top of my AV gear for a year and more won't even be worth attempting.
Uploads will start soon. I still have to plan out what and when I can do in this regard, because a lot of what was remastered was not on the .org, and I'm still up in the air about what can or should go up that hasn't already.
--Kai out
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what was never meant to be
2008-12-29 22:02:53
The project is over, and the stuff for SH111 is on deck. Why? Because I've been listening to (more than watching, watching only the good parts) my old videos, reading Megatokyo, and shotgunning Oranjeboom, and back when I was sober it occurred to me that this is what retired creators do, ceaselessly reliving the past and refusing to move forward, out of fear or maybe something else. I've been having enough troubles grappling with my own mortality today and recently, and thus need to keep moving on. Whether or not this video will actually get made, and whether or not it will be any good, is another story, but it's the thought that counts.....kind of. Wir werden ja nu sehn, was es moin bringt.
--Kai out
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how many times
2008-12-29 08:03:29
SH Remasters Project: 101/107
This is probably the final "all-in" number; I've removed three videos that I didn't actually remaster, just re-sourced into the distro pool (one that was already in a good format, and two in MPEG1 that I can't realistically fix), and I'm done with everything except the INSO stuff, of which about half remains. I'll finish tonight and be in good position to start uploads on schedule.
While these remasters have been cooking on my editing station, I've had some downtime to go back and re-read some old webcomics, in particular Sempai. It's not too long a comic, only about two years of drastically inconsistent updates, so it shouldn't take too long to bop over to sempai.org/comic and buzz through it. The art is self-admittedly minimalistic, but that's not the reason to read it; the written content is, hearkening back to an age of fandom less than a decade removed from the present, but now gone forever. If you want to take a look at the way things used to be, this comic is a pretty good place to start, and if you like me have enough fansub VHS tapes still hanging around to reach from floor to ceiling more than once, there'll be a lot that you find familiar. On the other hand, if your first thought on reading that last line was "why on earth would someone want to go through the trouble of dumping fansubs to VHS?", you'll probably be turned off by the artstyle and the references to stuff that you haven't seen not because it's new or cult, but because it belongs to an older age, but that's not to say that such people probably wouldn't benefit most of all from reading it.
Regarding said mountains of tapes, a lot of them are now superfluous; if, as I've heard, Funimation did Yawara box sets, then my 150 unsubbed eps have only nostalgia value, and I really ought to get around to buying the remaining MB collections before those go out of print (if they haven't already, which is more likely). Commercial releases only get you so far, though; I'm not going to lose any sleep waiting for Kindaichi, Urban Square, or Tokimeki Tonight to get brought over on DVD. And face it, you just wouldn't watch Tonde Boorin! if you had to pay for
it. (Notice -- still ISO/WTT/whatever for the rest of Tico & Nanami beyond like ep 8, mail me for my trade list.)
--Kai out
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supposed to be self-evident
2008-12-27 19:28:03
SH Remasters Project: 82/91
This represents the end of the 'real videos', and the beginning of the last stage, where I hammer out the demos, INSO material, and other luxury items. The speed of progress has been greatly enhanced by the fact that from 093 on, everything was pretty much clipped to the needed dimensions and color-balanced already, because the editor wasn't fucking with it and I didn't have the intermediary TMPEG step in the production chain. Hence, I'm basically finished, will probably take tomorrow to do the demos and such, and will start doing uploads on or about Tuesday, as I've got some stuff to take care of Monday that will probably interfere.
Otherwise:
I now have a all-region, multi-format DVD player to replace the one I used to have that ate a power surge about two years ago, and to replace my old R1 NTSC player that died about two weeks back. I now have no excuse for not doing videos from DVD; every DVD that I acquire, from wherever in the world, will have equal added value for normal viewing.
Also:
I did sub in a new audio track for 099. I like the astringency of the old version, but the video works just as well with the amount of lo-fi-ness that John Darnielle originally intended the song to have, and it further emphasizes that the audio track in this one sounds that way intentionally, which is important for the video. Those who might complain probably consider this whole project an exercise in sellout, and, as such, don't really care.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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