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the chemicals you consume
2005-07-29 06:56:49
SH103:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 3/14 (in progress)
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
Hoping to get this one done before work/picking up the part from the warehouse that they want me to ferry in; my framerates fell through the floor when I tried to resume process after the shift last night.
I was thinking over the volume issues I'm looking at right now, and what they're foreshadowing for HD usage and other stuff I have to deal with. On any more than cursory inspection, the way I cut in advance breaks down as an optimal strategy after about 8-10 episodes. This makes a rough kind of sense, looking at the conditions that it was developed in back in 2001, when nearly everything I was doing was based on 1 tape, a few exceptions ranging as high as 2. It wasn't until #30 that I used even 3 volumes of anything. Now, though, especially lately, that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. This one and the two before it were 13, #100 was about 7 hours of source (~13 eps), #99 was 25; that right there is probably most of the recent laggage in projects, just source volume. If I could bore in on the 4 most necessary eps and apply my current principles rigidly, things would go a lot faster.
Unfortunately, the projects on the slate right now, with the exception o the next one and a couple of those nebulously planned for "Unoriginal Videos Month", are all long, long stretches. SH105 and 106 benefit a little from sharing the same source, but that's still IIRC 28 episodes that need to be cut through, and about 11 minutes of video to be synthesized. The volume issues are scary right now, let alone then -- 9 or so DVDs, that's going to have to be swung through in shifts, and all the junk currently on disk is going to have to clear back to the external dive.
That's not for a while, though, maybe not till the fall (105 and 106 are "fall"-type videos anyways); for now it's festival season, and visitors at the end of the month. August looks to be not only off from work but also off from AMV. We'll see how much of this one gets done before Connichi-expo's deadline....
--Kai out
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bearing the mark of a demon from hell
2005-07-28 07:49:21
SH103:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 2/14 (in progress)
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
This is weird as all hell. Back home I was running ~3fps rendering rate with this filter load, and here at work, decompressing mp3s in Winamp and running Firefox and Outlook (last not my fault) it's going 5-6fps. Bizarre. It's like the A64, like me, needs a little stress to start really kicking ass.
To a certain degree, this video is perfectly in line with the source anime's plot. But then there's the *version* of the song being used, which complicates things. I want to go for a black-humor feel, but am undecided as to whether it's better for effect to do the twists and jokes explicitly in video, or just to play it straight down the line and let the deadpanness of it generate the humor. To a certain degree, this involves estimating the sense of humor of the average AMV viewer, which too much experience and pessimism inevitably suggests ends with OMG FANSERVICE AND HE IS BEATEN! PENIS LOL.
Are there exceptions? Yes, and a lot of them, but I stick this video out as "comedy" -- or "serious" for that matter, and it's going to get a lot of "wtf". Back to "Other" again....just like everything, every time.
--Kai out
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it wasn't all that bad
2005-07-27 14:49:26
SH103:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 1/13
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
- Export: none
I tweaked the filter settings I'm using for this project a little, and also clipped through the first of the pile. I think I have 13 vobs; that may change.
However, despite the fact that I'm going to continue to plug on this video, work is getting a little hot and it's likely that this video will be delayed for a substantial amount of time. I want to finish it, but there are probably going to be a lot of factors getting in the way, mostly work related to some degree -- or related to compensating for missing so much work in August. We'll see how this shakes out, and what effect it'll have on my AMV progress.
Probably more hazardous to my AMVing time is the fact that I blasted out somewhere between 1500 and 2500 words of original short story today, waiting around for some news to come in so I could know what to work on, where to go, next. I can't do a short-length AMV in that time, there is no equivalent of the "small press" for video collage, and in the AMVs that I make, even the ones that I've been doing lately that incorporate avant-garde literary principles or mash narratives around, there is not a tenth or hundredth the original contribution that I throw into even one piece of writing, even this short and knocked out in three hours.
I create stuff originally. It's something I can't stop doing. I write fiction, I've drawn comics in the past, I write, arrange, play and record music when I've got a bass or guitar to hand, and I mix and match samples to weave techno tracks when I don't. There is always something, always something -- I pack a commonplace book on the subway or on airplanes and scribble stuff into it, ideas, outlines, first chapters, random observations to cull for imagery later. AMV is just a small part of this mad wheel, and I'm getting out to the edge where what I can do with the form, that others won't do or have not done, is too complex or time-consuming to serve as a creative outlet in comparison to other stuff.
Maybe I just need to make some more simple, straightforward videos -- but those themselves are obscured by the difficulty and time component of the process. I don't make videos difficult to watch because they're difficult to make, but the mental obstacles to achieving passable source quality do, to a certain degree, raise themselves as obstacles in the video concept, and hence content, meant to be surmounted.
Put simply, it is time to put down the capture card and pick up the bass, to ensure that when I come back to video editing (if I do indeed end up on delay/break), the results will not suck.
--Kai out
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we're the kids from the underground
2005-07-25 07:44:46
Steelplank has been officially taken out of service. So I'm left with Onslaught, and thus little to do on downtime except edit (and play NiBiRu, but I have to restart with that and don't want to go through the initial cutscene). It's a good situation, despite losing the CPU; it's a little easier to manage work stuff from here, and for watching videos the looser resolution is better (and for editing, not that bad).
I've got two scenes left to write for PILU, including one that's going to be fairly long, and then start writing up scene direction. Of course, that'll proceed best after I finish SH103, as I haven't watched Tsukihime in like 4 months and am uncertain on what scenes are available.
Should be working some tonight; work has gone really well recently and despite the magnitude of the task I'm looking at (swapping main controller systems is never fun), we have good enough numbers that it doesn't have to work, and there's always the chance that they won't deliver the system anyway. I'm firmly of the opinion that the switch is a bad idea, but at least this way I don't have to fight anyone about it.
--Kai out
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they just wanna be left alone
2005-07-23 07:30:48
Instead of the video, I've been working on PILU, which is another Tsukihime project, though unfortunately the video editing it involves is probably beyond my capacity for endurance If this project takes off, my sole contribution is going to be the script, and maybe sourcing some of the BGM and such. I've got basically two scenes left to write, and the ADR portion is done; I probably ought to put more staging notes in and renumber the scenes, but a lot of that should be self-evident from the dialogue and existing direction.
I won't be taking part in AWA or Connichi's contest, which gives me a little more time to send stuff in to their Expos by postal mail, which will ofcourse be much less expensive. Not doing Pro is a little disappointing, but it goes to show that while you can do AWA Pro from Europe, and you can do AWA Pro down at the wire, trying to combine the two will lead only to grief. Of course, this doesn't mean that an entry for SH102 is going in the DB real soon; I've got other stuff to take care of and still as yet no place to host the video. (No way would it make the .org.)
Sort of along those lines, I got ICQ (#323-787-443). I'm practically never *ON* ICQ, but it is there and is an option for those who want to skin videos off me that I can't upload to the .org. So geht's.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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