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a million follow
2005-10-01 07:55:38
SH105/106:
- Source rip: 12/36 (~complete)
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: next to none
- Clipping: 7/36
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
This work was done on Thursday night; I didn't do much of anything last night due to running all over the place with software installs and machine problems -- stupid glitchy pumps. And I'm probably not going to do anything tomorrow either; the show starts in about 6 hours, and after straggling home sometime around 1 in the morning, I'll be fully occupied with sleeping and getting something to eat before going to Running Wild tomorrow night. It's like a festival weekend, except I'm on call for work right now, which is a buzzkill of unbelievable proportions.
Or would be if Emperor had not reformed. Sure, it's only for a handful of shows next year, but one of them is Wacken, and if I don't go, I might as well just hand my scene credentials right back in. Some people won't understand it, but some will just accept it for what it is: that in some instances it's perfectly reasonable to fly to another continent for a concert. Whether it comes down to trueness, or depth of conviction, or even just simple situational insanity, it is the way it is. No, of course it's not reasonable. But it's even less conceivable to deliberately NOT go to this show in the face of prevailing tendencies.
--Kai out
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one evil comes
2005-09-29 09:50:28
The much-feared "Third Pass" is officially underway. If you have a video that has debuted since the end of April, and is online, in some open format, using a metal artist of virtually any stripe (Metallica and Nightwish are going to be germane on this pass), it is going to get viewed, reviewed, and possibly recced if it's good enough. Letting WMVs in on the initial run of this pass was a bad idea; apologies to Dethmajor, but there is so little good and so much crap in that format that it would make doing exhaustive survey spiritually impossible.
A is going today; once those are sorted through, B will be next, and so on to the end of the alphabet. This will be repeated again probably after the new year. The impetus? Not doing anything last night because I cooked dinner and Mexican doeners are heavy on the stomach. I'm hoping to do work on the video tonight and tomorrown night, but just in case I'd better have videos around to bomb through.
--Kai out
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carved inside
2005-09-28 05:09:46
SH105/106:
- Source rip: 12/36 (~complete)
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: next to none
- Clipping: 6/36
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
I clumped my way through 2 eps last night, making up for doing none on Monday. The print is somewhat better (no rainbows, for one) on the second DVD, making everything go faster. Tonight will probably see another two eps if I don't get bogged down with work -- I didn't get out till after 6 last night, but made up for it by working later on the vid that I'd have done otherwise.
Still a bunch of stuff to do, for work and otherwise, and I do have to gin up a mix of the vids that I had rejected from AMV Hell 3/0 (about half to 3/4 of what I did for 0 made it in, and none of what went for 3), but it's not unrealistic to consider another 4-5 eps cut by the end of the week, and maybe as many as 3 over the weekend. At least one of the videos could conceivably finish before November. *Could*, sure -- they're probably just not going to.
SH104 is currently the highest-rated video in my catalog, so the sick joke is played on me as well, and SH102 is drawing some good interest as well. I really owe Farlo for hosting that one...and #66, #64, #30, and everything else that's online that the .org can't or won't touch. Maybe I should just bag the whole idea of setting up my own full-bore site, join Globocide, and help underwrite the bandwidth. Maybe.
--Kai out
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where chaos set the norm
2005-09-26 06:18:27
SH105/106:
- Source rip: 12/36 (~complete)
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: next to none
- Clipping: 4/36
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
The laptop is a marvelous invention. I can sit on my couch and watch sports and work on videos at the same time. In fact, this is what I did all Sunday, through a lot of tennis, soccer, and a disappointing final in the European basketball championship (Germany lost). And so despite getting through one DVD, I'm technically 3 vobs behind where I would ideally be if I didn't decide that I would rather have a life on Saturday. So it goes; I may or may not pick up the slack over this week, but next weekend is going to be totally off on account of awesome shows.
The Initial D print is even worse than I initially thought. I far underestimated the incidence of scene-change artifacting, and even more the effect of the production shortcuts used to make the camera shake during racing scenes. The trick is basically to animate something statically, then take advantage of the broadcast-safe area to shake the frame around; cropping parameters go to hell, and with the frame moving basically every frame, any interior shots and most exteriors are interlaced beyond any rational hope of repair. Fortunately, I'm using two deathly-slow Bruce Springsteen songs with virtually no parts that will call for fast race action, but it just goes to show the total lack of caring about picture quality on the production end.
Of course, most of Initial D's audience is composed of people like me, who in normal mode do not much care about picture quality or fidelity and just want to watch the damn show. There's a lesson in that somewhere, but the upshot for now is that the print looks like dirt, and there's no chance of getting anything better. However, I screwed up on at least disc 3 and got the trizicked-out track, which Tokyopop *did* clean up a little; hopefully, this won't mess up any of the more subdued non-racing shots that I actually need, and will mean a slightly shorter or less intense filter chain. The current load is 7 fairly complex VDub filters, and the result is a groaning 1-2 fps in production. But I've gotta get the grain and rainbows out somehow.......
--Kai out
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and when the moon doth rise
2005-09-23 04:33:08
SH105/106:
- Source rip: 8/36 (~complete)
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: roughed
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: none
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
I tend to circumlocute a great deal when writing about my video projects, even when it's not necessary. These videos aren't aimed at any blinded contests, and #104 is out, so it's really not necessary now, and I need to work on communicating more clearly.
I'm working with Initial D for this set, and the print is a nightmare. Cleaning up the PAL version of Pokemon for #104 seems like a walk in the park by comparison, because I could smooth the fuck out of it and not worry about losing animation detail. Initial D is full of animation detail, and the print is still faded, rainbowed (though not too badly), and poorly interlaced, making everything I try to do to it walk a very fine line between enhancing and damaging the picture. My current filter chain is going to totally obviate any pretense of speed in clipping, and if it's going really bad -- as I thoroughly expect it to -- I'm going to have to investigate moving some or all of it into the frameserving process, without any idea if this will positively or negatively affect processing time.
This is seriously the worst NTSC print I've dealt with, and I did #94 from bootlegs. The artifacting is not as bad as on #104, but the interlacing is so screwed up as to be in that ballpark if not even worse. It's a good thing I'm limiting myself to the first season, though; the second is even worse, with all kinds of production shortcuts and mixed 30/24 footage. Computer-assisted pans are Teh Suck; can't the producers see that the artificial smoothness of motion breaks up the flow of the animation?
I'm expecting to be able to cover 1 vob per day, 3 per full weekend day not involving work or concert. This puts anticipated date of completion sometime in November, which is what I was pitching beforehand. Since 9 of the 36 vobs are basically half-vobs (since I'm not using the trizicked-out version, just the original), this may go a little faster, but not much. I was able to improve working space to 22 GB, making it more likely that I'll be able to actually author the videos without swapping unused source around, so things are slowly and partially looking somewhat up.
After these two......dunno. Probably another metal video, but whether with The Vision Bleak or something that's actually on the slate already I have no idea.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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