JOURNAL: koronoru (Kevin Oronoru)

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  • Tainted... dirty... used... 2003-02-26 13:36:28 So in class today I had to give a presentation about a paper. The paper I presented was crummy; the authors didn't seem to really understand what they were doing and their experiment wasn't well-designed. Nonetheless, I managed to give such a good presentation about it that I convinced all my classmates that it was the bestest most excitingest paper ever. Was that ethical? I mean, that *was* what the assignment called for - I was specifically told that I ought to make the paper sound as good as possible (because someone else would be presenting the other side, picking out its flaws) but even so.

    I've more or less finished my custom animation for the intro of Mothyre. I actually went back and edited the song again to put back about five seconds of almost-silence I had cut from the intro, because I wanted more time to show off my mad POV-Ray rendered frame action. Pretty soon I'm going to have to make up my mind about the frame rate. 
  • The addiction that is POV-Ray 2003-02-24 10:24:39 I spent much of my weekend, when I was supposed to be doing homework, playing with POV-Ray (persistence of vision ray tracer) generating an opening animation for my Hellsing video. After the troubles I had naming the last one, I decided to think of a name for this one right at the start - also because I don't want to start any actual editing until I have all four DVDs and the last one is still on order.

    I ordered the special edition with the Seras action figure. Does that make me a drooling fanboy? I guess it depends on what I *do* with the action figure, and that's my business, but I can feel myself slipping towards otakudom one stem at a time.

    Anyway, on title: I'm calling it "Mothyre". On POV-Ray: I took an image I found on the Net of Alucard's glove sigil (the one that says "HELLSING * HELLS GATE ARRESTED * GOTT MIT UNS * AND SHINE HEAVEN NOW") and I gussied it up in The GIMP and animated a sort of flyby sequence where it comes spinning up out of a starry background, the camera swoops low across the surface getting most of the bizarrely nonsensical wording just a little too fast to read, and then the sigil goes up in the corner of the screen leaving room along the side for the credits to appear. I'm pleased with the results, but it cost most of a day of editing time and my computer will be busy rendering the final version for several days to come.

    Then I had to do my homework due today in a coffee-fueled rush this morning. Ah, the student life. 
  • Waiting for the source 2003-02-21 14:17:34 Okay, I said I wanted to get started on my next project, and now I can actually do that. As soon as I get out from under this pile of schoolwork, and finish some non-AMV projects that have been on the back burner. My next AMV project is planned to feature Hellsing footage, and "Mother" by Tori Amos. I'm still waiting for the mail-order folks to send me the fourth disc of Hellsing; I think it's officially released already, but they're still saying "expected date unknown".

    While I'm waiting, I can get started on editing the audio. There are a lot of different themes in Hellsing, but the one that most interests me and that I want to focus on is the Seras/Alucard dominance-and-submission relationship. As far as I'm concerned, that's what the series is all about, and the cool fight scenes and whatever else are window dressing. "Mother" seems like the perfect music for that; it's another of these discoveries where after I find it, I think that nothing else could possibly be as good. All this creepy gender-role stuff...

    However, the original song as ripped from the album is seven minutes long, and that, I figure, is at least two minutes more Tori Amos than the typical AMV viewer will tolerate. Also, if I ever did want to enter the result in one of those con competitions, they typically have a five-minute limit. Maybe I'll make a special uncut edition for diehards after I finish the regular one, if I haven't exceeded my *own* patience level by that point, but for now, at least two minutes have to go. I cut the song immediately after the line "cross my legs oh my GOD", after which the lyrics become repetitive. That's 4 minutes 40 seconds into it. Then I cut a chunk out of the intro and added it to the end so that the total was still about 4:40 but it didn't end quite as suddenly. I had to do a fair bit with cross-fades and boosting and fading different sections to make the transitions as seamless as possible, and it's still not perfect. The piano has a lot of sustain, so that by the time one note has finished she's well into the next line of the song, making it hard to do clean cuts, and also the background noise or ambience changes a lot across the song so that the intro clip at the end is in a perceptably different space from the words immediately before it. I think I smoothed the transitions enough, though, and if it ends up aggressively compressed, that will destroy some of the details I'm noticing anyway. The resulting audio has a different "feel" from the original because it ends at a high-energy point instead of trailing off into piano masturbation, but I think even if it sounds different, the result still has a "I meant to do this" sound. I've avoided the "oh, the video director cut it off" thing which I was trying to avoid.

    Timing is the next step. I don't know what Premiere does, but what Cinelerra, my tool of choice, does is it allows me to put "labels" on the time line and use those as anchors for my edits. I also use them as a time reference in my notes - I can't keep accurate time by noting the words in the lyrics, because I've found that it's impossible to guess how long it takes to sing any given word without actually timing it. Sometimes five words will fit into a second; other times, one word takes five seconds. With my two previous videos I put a label on every fourth beat, and that gave me a nice regular time base. Most of my cuts occur on the label boundaries, and the labels seem to fall naturally onto the moments where a cut feels right. In the case of the Boogiepop video my labels were every 42 frames, plus or minus just one frame. The music was probably recorded against a drum machine or a click track. With the Treble Charger track I used in my first video, it was four beats in 50 frames, again nice and regular. (Both were made at the frame rate of the DVD source, which was NTSC almost-30 for Perfect Red and almost-24 for Butterflies Never Laugh.) Well, "Mother" isn't so regular. I'm not sure whether it was recorded without a mechanical reference, or if it *does* have a fixed tempo and just a weird time signature. I think it might be both, because I remember someone complaining that all Tori's songs have weird time signatures (making them hard to play on the piano), but I'm no musician myself and can't tell by listening. If I could find sheet music I might be able to read it well enough to figure out what was going on. Anyway, with very little definite beat, I'm looking for the starts of lines in the lyrics and emphasized notes and words that feel like downbeats, and I'm finding there is a sort of rhythm to the song but it's highly variable. I'm getting one label roughly every 1.8 seconds, but varying from 1.6 to 2.1. I haven't even chosen a frame rate because I don't have all the DVDs yet; for the moment I'm working in milliseconds.

    It's not vital to have all the labels at the cut points before I put in any video, because I'm always free to adjust where the video clips start and end anyway and nothing says they have to start and end on the labels. But it's a big help to have some semi-regular labels to count time from. With the varying rhythm of the song, I have to spend time placing each label instead of just slapping them down every N frames, and that makes it slow going. I've only got about 40% of the (edited-down) song labelled after multiple hours of work. Since I can't do much else until I have all the DVDs, though, I might as well continue plugging away at it. 
  • Butterflies never laugh 2003-02-15 14:12:46 Okay, here it is. No, I didn't get laid last night - I actually tried to upload this yesterday, but it turned out that the CD I had burned it onto was defective, so I had to make a new one.

    Then today my landlord flooded the basement where I live, apparently because of some kind of stupid mistake he made in repairing the plumbing upstairs. Without turning the water off first, of course. The water shut-off is in the basement so he probably figured he didn't want to disturb me to shut off the water. Well, now that it's all flooded, I am a lot more disturbed than that! 
  • Final render 2003-02-13 12:28:02 As I type this, my computer is crunching away on what I hope will be the last render for my Boogiepop Phantom video. I finally managed to think of a name for it - "Butterflies never laugh". Sort of a play on the literal translation of the Japanese name of the series (Boogiepop wa Warawanai - "Boogiepop never laughs") with the butterfly image from the opening which I've used repeatedly.

    I made a bunch of minor timing changes to reduce the suck level. There's no only one clip in there that I have misgivings about, and I decided it was time to just go ahead and put the thing in the can instead of worrying about it more. It'll be interesting to see if anyone else notices that one clip. I want to get started on my next project.

    Expect this video to be posted in the next 48 hours. 
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