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lost | in my eternal maze
2008-11-28 23:39:26
point 1: it is about time for the bi-yearly update of this moldering record of a retired creator.
point 2: peloton is finally finished, and will be up in one form or another presently; mediafire imminently because I'm impatient, and sooner or later on the Donut when the mods get around to confirming that Andalusia really exists and was produced in Japan.
point 3: the update schedule is going to be more frequent than bi-yearly in the near future, as I have finally started the SH Remasters Project.
What is the SH Remasters Project?
The SH Remasters Project is me remastering a bunch of my old videos. It gets a pretentious title because there are in the neighborhood of 90 videos that need to be processed, which back when I was actually doing AMVs would have been too intimidating to tackle.
Which videos are being remastered, and why?
Every video from SH017 to SH104, inclusive, maybe minus SH085 which I may have lost the master to, and maybe plus SH001, which got remade but never released in that form because I didn't like the result, is getting reprocessed to 640x(appropriate-aspect-ratio) two-pass XVID with proper sound. All of these videos exist in that format, but nearly everything before SH064 is packaged too small, and has really bad sound as the result of my old mixdown chain (MPEG2->ASF->DIVX). With increased bandwidth available, and my editing station not doing anything, I decided that I might as well try to make the distro versions suck as little as possible. Now, any and all suckitude will be the fault of the video and the editor, rather than the presentation format.
Why aren't SH002-010 and 012-016 getting remastered?
On those videos, what you see is what you get. They were capped, mostly from VHS, that way, and that is the screensize they are staying at.
Is the INSO stuff getting remastered as well?
Yes, if it needs it, but it will be on lower priority.
What's getting done first?
The easy stuff that I can render out of Lagarith masters. After that, I start from 011 and move towards the present hacking AVS scripts to deal with my legacy masters. After those are done, INSO material, and then maybe another new video.
When is this going to be available?
When it's goddamn done; check back for periodic updates.
--Kai out
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bound to violence
2008-07-16 20:38:23
Currently, I'm re-uploading an old video by special request (if you're also looking for something that's aged out, hit me up before I leave for Wacken)....and continuing to not work on the project I mentioned in the last entry from back in January. Since the Tour's on right now, I should be working on it, but since it's frickin hot, I barely have time in the evenings due to commuting, and I'm out of practice, I'm not doing so. I could probably knock it out on Sunday or so, but one of my best friends is getting married on Saturday, and I doubt I'll be up for it.
Maybe in August...after Wacken, and New England Deathfest, and maybe Loudfest, and....
--Kai out -
locked up in your own free world
2008-01-31 20:25:38
As mentioned previously, I'm working on something called 'peloton', which is now looking more and more like it's actually going to turn into something. I've now got two of the three vobs cut through, and my entire environment set up on my re-worked workstation, and the project is pretty straightforward, so it's getting to the point of "well, why *not* do it?" Of course, I'm probably not going to finish it until into next week, since I've basically only got tomorrow night between musical and sport commitments on the weekend, but it's better than doing nothing at all about this idea, as was the case for the previous 7 or so months.
Of course, at this stage in any project, the next question is what to do next; I'm still uncertain about this for several reasons: I've never watched much in the way of AMVs, and have now been more or less totally out of it for the last year and a half (modulo, of course, some stuff here and there from other conet participants), and now have no idea where or how my stuff fits in to what's current; it's like where I was in 2001, when I was just starting out, except with even less information. Of course, now, there's even less *care* on my part, but it'd be nice to knowin advance that I've slipped into total irrelevance -- since from there I can have more confidence to do more of the exceedingly weird stuff that's on the slate: the very odd Kreator vid mentioned in passing back last year, an old-school project with a song I got by accident in Germany, maybe something involving mahjong and Hatebreed, but this last is far from definite. Doing these might wrap by the end of April, or it might drag out another two years; there's just no way to tell for sure.
--Kai out
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lead & aether
2008-01-19 11:57:41
Man, has it really been six months? I guess that's what happens when you next-to-retire. In the intervening time, I lost one job, got a better one, saw a couple hundred bands, and just finished recovering my primary workstation from a major boot-HDD malfunction. In the process, I lost my conet files, which isn't so bad if you have to lose something; it's somewhat fitting that this is what vanishes, ephimerally, back into electronic noise from whence it came.
I'm still retired, but I'm also still sort-of working on something called 'peloton' that may or may not end up getting released, and maybe a project or two for some local bands, but those are probably using live-action stuff. The new job has a commute, so I have less time away from work, but there's much less travel and stress, so it'll probably all come out in the wash.
--Kai out
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notice: WMM sucks
2007-07-12 21:07:50
This is brought on by some experiments I was doing for work, not a video project.
1) I can't believe how crippled and dumb this program is. YOU WILL USE THE DEFAULT EXPORTS. YOU WILL TRUST MICROSOFT TO SET YOUR BITRATES. NO YOU CAN'T MIX-AND-MATCH, YOU DUMB USER, YOU COULD MAKE SOMETHING SUBOPTIMAL. YOU WILL OBEY THE DEFAULTS.
2) I can't believe how fucking SLOW this program is. Admittedly, I was trying to push a 1024x576 down into a 720x480 (due to the crap above), but for a minute of video it took like ten minutes -- and this is just straight compression, not any kind of assembly. There's a friggin Core Duo in this thing, and I wasn't using any of the other apps. It's insane.
I have said in the past that using MovieStar was effectively like using WMM; this is not really the case, as that software was freer in many respects, and the constraints that it applied made me a better editor. If I had started with WMM, I would have given the fuck up and junked it, because how anyone can stand working in that kind of self-abusing straightjacket is beyond me.
The final result is that if I have to produce this thing to wmv, I'm going to screenshoot it in CamStudio, transfer the raw file, VDub it down to 800x600, and then try to output as wmv from Magix on my editing station. The upshot is that it adds at least 3 days to the delivery time, but that's because I'm going to Sounds of the Underground tomorrow night, partying all day Saturday, then hitting another fest on Sunday -- no time for anything.
I'm working-and-not-working on about 2 videos right now, but I'm not going to do anything with them until I get all my vinyl capped; there's about 20-30 more LPs I need to digitize for my folks, and then there's the 10 or so tapes that I'm going to route through the record player to similarly render out. Of the two there's one more Waste vid almost exactly like the last two, then a very nonconventional Kreator video. Maybe in the fall I'll get these done; right now it's festival season and with work, shows, and digitization, I doubt that I'll get anything done at all before Wacken. Yes, I'm going back -- this way I can see Amon Amarth tomorrow night, catch Immortal on the world's grandest stage, and not have to drive to fucking New York.
I'm also thinking about doing a remasters series; everything after about video 16 can and probably should be presented at full resolution now that bandwidth has increased so radically. This will be a project for the winter, and as soon as these start being done and replacing the old stuff, they will be announced.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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