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the memory awakes
2008-12-26 18:01:19
SH Remasters Project: 71/91
Currently, 091 is building in its final version, which means that I'll have less than 10 to finish. An important hurdle out of the way is 090 -- that one tool more than an hour for each pass on a 90-second video due to the extreme amount of picture damage -- and also invoked the existential crisis of why exactly I was remastering a video that I can't distribute. This aside, the project is probably going to finish this weekend, and then I have a whole week off and not on call in which to do uploads. Ninety-one videos is a lot, but a lot of them can be parallelized (demo on mediafire, real video on local, for example), and a week, when this is your major priority, is a lot of time.
--Kai out
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the streets are still
2008-12-24 16:58:43
SH Remasters Project: 65/91
The reason that there is now suddenly another video on the total count is that I had MPEG2 versions of both the regular and chipmunk-mix versions of 083, and since this video isn't eligible for local anyway, I didn't feel restricted to put only one or the other up. Family commitments will probably tie me up most of tonight and tomorrow, but with 085 cooking right now, it'd be unlikely that I'm not able to get through 090 by the end of the weekend -- and I ought to be going back to do up the demo videos that were skipped before the end of the year. I've got a decent amount of vacation piled up that I have to use before the end of the year, and right now, to sleep, watch bowl games, remaster videos and bum around Boston, is pretty much as good a time as any.
--Kai out
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from the world beyond the world
2008-12-21 11:19:37
SH075 is now cooking, with the original audio. Here's why.
In the digital world, information has its own access rate coded into it. When a copy is made, that copy is either perfect or unusable. Not so in the analog world. When a record plays at 33 RPM, this is not a "hard real-time" value; even in the best audiophile turntables, the playback is governed by the motion of the disc versus the needle, and the disc's motion is mediated by its own spindle, the belt that drives it, and the motor that puts the power in. Even a drop or spike in voltage can produce minute changes, from second to second and from spin to spin. This, not nearly to much the pops and hisses, is what people mean when they thing records have more warmth, more soul, because even the most metronome-driven techno is going to breathe and pulse, much like a drummer does playing live, speeding up and slowing down intermittently, still in that general frame of reference that drops the snare on one and the bass on two, then repeats on three and four in about where you'd expect them. Each analog generation has a measure of this; each time that physical parts touch the signal, they leave their fingerprints. Generation loss, or an encoding of history -- and every time you hear something in analog, you hear a different performance, as wear, time, and physics all combine to create entropy.
The upshot of this, of course, is that the WAV you make from CD that you capped from a record on a cheap ION is not going to be the same as the WAV you converted from MP3 from a CD of a tape that was made from the same record on a better turntable 15 and more years earlier. The new recording is abstractly better, with less clipping (and it's also stereo) and closer fidelity, but it's also very slightly *faster*; not enough to produce a noticeably tweaked-out sound on listening, but enough so that I couldn't drop the track in and have it match up reliably. This would have been a remake, not a remaster, and I don't have the time -- or, really, th inclination, even though I like this video -- to do that instead.
--Kai out
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tomorrow belongs to nobody
2008-12-20 21:07:39
SH Remasters Project: 54/90
I am now up to 075, which is going to take a while to complete because, as with 099 and 038, I believe that I may have an audio track worth swapping in. Currently, I'm building a Lagarith copy to work with; sure, I could use Kalium's method to work with the MPEG2 master directly through AviSynth, but I'm shanghaied into using Vista on a machine built for W2K, and I don't want any more latency in the application than necessary. After this is done, I rip the audio, decide to work on it in the morning, and go to bed praying my phone doesn't ring overnight. On call; good for $50 extra a day, video progress, and the makers of antacid; not much else.
In setting up the new audio for 075, I made a discovery: I apparently have Way Too Goddamned Many CDs. In my bookcases, I have the equivalent of about 12 2-1/2-foot-wide shelves, and on my actual CD rack, I have three more three-and-a-half-foot spans. Doing the math leaves us with about 41 feet of CDs, not counting the pile of unlistened ones that is now for the first time in months less than 40 CDs deep. Call it 3 CDs to the inch, so 36 to the foot; I've got in the neighborhood of 1476 physical compact discs piled up, and the number is probably closer to 1500 given that a fair number are demos or burns or whatever in sleeves or half-width cases and take up less space. Of course, only about 15 feet or between 400 and 500 of these are immediately accessible; the ones I don't like or don't listen to are buried in the back, and it was here that I found myself digging to try and locate the CD I created back in the summer from the vinyl record that the song for 075 is off. My task was a little easier since I thought it was going to be in one of the normally accessible rows, and I knew it was in a slimline case, which stands out when nearly everything is in a full case with writing on the spine. Unfortunately, I missed it on the first sweep and only found it while I was moving those accessible CDs off onto another surface to get at the buried ones to check there.
The point of this is that one of these on-call days after the remasters project is finished and completely uploaded, I'm going to have to go through these racks and determine what I do and don't need a physical copy of going forward. Most of what I have has some value as a physical specimen, either (delusionally) historical or pure sentiment, but there is probably a lot of stuff that I can and should unload. I found CDs today that I don't even like, let alone listen to or value the contributions of the band on; these I should reduce to digital, archive, and try to sell off. Simplify, simplify -- or in my case, make room for more discs that in another 5 to 10 years I'm going to repeat the process with.
--Kai out
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like a ton of bricks
2008-12-18 20:53:51
SH Remasters Project: 43/90
This should maybe be 44/90, because work has been deadly this past week and I haven't even had time to check if 064 came out all right. This one suffers from having a critically dark print in my transfer, and also from a largely-unsmoothable originally-analog source. This one I have to sit and watch all the way through, then maybe go back and retweak it as necessary. I hate the lack of detail in modern TV animation, but it sure as hell compresses a lot better than cel-animated movies.
I'm off pace, of course, but being on call this weekend means I'm essentially chained to my desk, so I'll probably have enough down time waiting for my pager to ring to plow through another ton of videos and get back on schedule to finish before the new year. Looking forward, one of the very last vids in the schedule, 099, may get an enhanced remake, as I finally got _The Coroner's Gambit_ this weekend; low-fi is sort of the plan for that video, but the CD emphasizes the deliberate low-fi recording technique, so tinkering may benefit the overall video. If not, screw it, I can use the audio I originally edited with.
Any talk of future projects is premature and probably unwarranted until this slog is done, but I'm currently looking at two moderately complex mash-up projects, one using Fettes Brot and some Miyazaki films, and the other Cock Sparrer and some live-action. It's thoroughly uncertain that either of them will get made, but that's currently what's piled off the media racks getting in the way of emptied orange juice bottles and unwashed liquor tumblers.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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