JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)

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  • lay thorns on my grave 2006-03-24 08:33:05
    #105 is finally, FINALLY done. Unfortunately, milling it out took all of last night, and I have prior commitments (which can be succinctly summed up as "thrash till the death") tonight, so those last two ops will go in Monday, along with my vitriol at the submission form and the actual video description for #105. The video itself will go up after AniBo if it's competing, earlier if it gets disqualified for ripping on the ideas of the organizers or something.

    I'll probably also get a start on #106 this weekend as well, though finishing it is not likely. No even projected releasedate for this one, but since everything's cut and I don't have to do much bullshit in post the start of April seems reasonable. Following that, #107 will be something fast and heavy...but exactly what I haven't decided yet. I need to look over my to-do list again and find out if I've got a project already slated that'd fit in, and if not, take stock of my anime collection again.

    Having not done a metal video since, really, last summer (#103 doesn't count), I can confidently promise that #107-#109 will all be sworn to the black, or at the least form bands that are. Nonmetal projects are okay, but they need to stop taking so much goddamned time.

    --Kai out

     
  • silent the scream 2006-03-23 08:47:27
    I built a version of #105 last night. It is "a" version because there's only one noticeable error in it, which last for only about 1 frame and might conceivably be attributed by viewers to the contest's encoding situation, and the overall feel is such that I could conceivably send it out to AniBo. Unfortunately, there's also two cuts missing from it (stupid project files) that I need to add back, and I'd very much like to correct that error if possible. So, try again tonight.

    I should have been finished with this a long time ago, and the two remaining ops written, but crummy footage mishandled by an inconsistent editing environment is not the best thing to have an ancient encoder interpolate and upsample.

    All 8 files that had aged out are now back up, thanks to the relative speed here being 4-7 times faster than in Germany. There's demand for some of them, but a couple have just been consistently aging out with no downloads since they were initially posted. Now that I'm back in the states and more able to get webhosting, these will probably go over to direct once I get such set up, and probably not cause so much as a wrinkle in my bandwidth allocation.

    And no, #90 will still remain unhosted under such a scheme. "Technically not illegal" does not mean "free for distribution to whoever".

    --Kai out

     
  • symbol of life 2006-03-22 08:33:06
    Still sick last night, still couldn't get #105 to build right -- it's gotta be something with the original file, but I'll also try a different MPEG encoder, as my build of TMPEG is a couple years out of date. Ops will be up in the near future, depending on how well I feel and how much more bullshit I have to go through to get this damn video milled out.

    There are 8 videos to reupload, which will be proceeding through the rest of the day. Amazingly, there are some Sentenced videos that have not aged out.

    --Kai out

     
  • this is your nightmare 2006-03-20 11:48:27
    Two ops of the four that were left are now up. I'm going to do the other two tonight (barring an unexpected screening of _The Maltese Falcon_ or something) and finish building the con version of #105. I'll accept that AniBo doesn't want to do their own 24->30 fps conversion, but why the hell do they want the audio upsampled to 48KHz? Wouldn't it be easier to just upsample everyone's when demuxing the streams out for DVD encoding? I can't even push a 48KHz stream out of my editor, and nobody's going to use these natively -- we're still mainly on CDs, and those won't get any better than 44.1. Crazy.

    Of course, this will scarcely matter because my entry is going to be accompanied by some extremely inflammatory comments that will likely fence it out from getting shown at all. I'd rather be right than win stuff, and given the likely competition level, #105 probably wouldn't be favored to win anything anyway. The sound and fury will appear in this space once the payload has been launched.

    I'm pretty sure I still want to go ahead with #106, though I don't have a con to aim it at. This will probably just go straight-to-.org, and then I can clean off my work computer, get my personal box back up and upgraded, and then figure out what the hell I'm doing from there.

    --Kai out

     
  • it ain't me 2006-03-16 08:52:17
    Much thanks to all beta testers, but in the end, #105 is going to go out in much the same shape that it was before. I tried last night to tweak a few points, but couldn't manage to do anything that could really be classed as an improvement. I'm not happy about the texting -- there's most of a "page" from the letter that I would rather have cut out -- but messing with any part of that just busted up the timing of the whole. I'm going to mill out a con-spec version tonight, and probably have all ops up Monday; my brother's out of James Bond movies, and I should be able to get some time on Friday.

    This is playing into why I haven't done much of anything, AMV-wise, since getting back to the US; this is a time-intensive, solitary craft, and the amount of solitary time has dropped through the floor. All week I'm at work for 9 to 10 hours a day, then get home and my bro's got some movie or another, and it doesn't get much looser on the weekend. Saturday I was car shopping all day, and then Meg called on Sunday -- and if hanging with your S.O. isn't a higher priority than AMV hacking, you're not going to be having to prioritize such much longer.

    This is exacerbated by living at home, but even when we move out (soon), I don't expect this to change. An apartment staffed by two engineers-by-day, gamers-nerds-metalheads-by-night may well be Castle Geek, but given the *collective* element involved, will make a very poor AMV studio. Once I get #106 finished, I'm not really anticipating much productivity, even once I get editing operations moved back off my work computer. I have to sort out my ideas list and prioritize stuff, but I'm looking at a quick chop for #107, an out-of-character turn for #108 to send to Connichi, and then a Webley Magnum opus for AWA as #109. I may be on hand for AniBo, but that's going to depend on some other people.

    Metalfest and Wacken, though, are certs. Some things matter more than others.

    --Kai out

     
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