- Quick update 2003-02-12 10:14:36 Well, I haven't been able to ferret out the suck in my video and I'm really thinking I'll just go ahead and post it as is on Valentine's Day, or the day after if I get a date Valentine's Day. In other news, dvdsoon.com re-sent me the correct video so I'm sort of happy. And my anonymous email account seems to be working again, for the moment at least, so y'all should email me.
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So, I spoke too soon
2003-02-05 09:46:41
Looks like I jinxed dvdsoon by saying I was pleased with them. Because I bent my MPAA boycott long enough to order a DVD of _The Princess Bride_, and what did they send me? _The Princess Diaries_. No, that isn't close enough.
I am starting to think that my Boogiepop video is not broken and doesn't need to be fixed. Watched it a couple times and the feeling of suck receded. I will still wait until next week when I'm back from mini-vacation, before releasing it, though.
I'm having some trouble with my remailer account, so I hope I haven't missed any mail that people have tried to send me. Nobody's mailed me at this address before anyway, though, so it's not likely that they's start now. But if you did mail me and haven't had a response in more than a week, you could try again. -
The end is near
2003-02-03 11:04:12
I have now got Boogiepop Phantom clips in place for every bar of On the Other Side - that means an actual AMV that I can watch from start to finish without any of my "placeholder" graphics popping up. That's a great feeling. I still feel like there are two or three clips in there that suck, and the problem is, I don't know which ones. I'm going to have to watch the video over and over until I find them, and then probably go watch the whole series again (not exactly a painful ordeal!) to decide how to replace them. I want a 100% suck-free video before I premiere it. In any case, it won't be until next week at the earliest because of things I have happening in the coming days.
Hey, maybe I can premiere it on Valentine's Day. Scratch that, maybe I can entice a young lady to my apartment Valentine's Day, show her the completed video, and premiere it for the rest of you on the 15th. It could happen.
Some guy emailed me all offended that I had translated "gaijin" as "honky" in another online forum. Well, sorry, but that *is* what the word connotes to me: it's a racial slur. Maybe a mild one, maybe often used by people who don't have anything personal or immediate against non-Japanese people... but it is not, as my correspondant claimed, a perfectly neutral descriptive. Not when I have a FOAF whose fiance had to file an essay with the local government explaining why she was marrying gaijin, before their marriage would be legally permitted. If a Japanese person calls me gaijin I'm inclined to react the same way I'd react if a black person called me a honky (okay, due disclosure: my own ancestry is generic mixed-European, i.e. what people tend to call "white"). Which is to say that I'm *not* necessarily insulted, it could be a mere descriptive or even a joke depending on the person and how friendly we are, but I *am* going to notice and evaluate the person's attitude towards me, because it's a word with connotations, and not good ones.
The fact that there isn't any truly polite way to say "gaijin" given the cultural context, says a lot.
There are a lot of things I really like about Japan. There are also some things I very much don't like, and the systemic racism is high on that list. I don't think it's possible to make trivial changes and come up with a new nicer version of Japanese culture that contains the stuff I like but not the other stuff I don't like; I think the same causes create both kinds of stuff. That's also why we in North America can't just simply import the cool things we like about Japan without also importing the general fucked-up-ness of that culture and/or imposing our own. Just look at what happens to anime when it gets re-edited for the general, non-otaku, North American cable television market. Sure, everyone on this world has a lot to learn from everyone else, but it's going to take a long time to sort it all out. In the meantime, we just have to accept that things aren't perfect or even close and we have to love the world anyway.
I suppose that's the teaching of Panalou... -
Generation loss
2003-02-01 12:36:11
Thought experiment. You are the Bush administration. You've made some questionable, okay, some mindbogglingly stupid decisions recently. Nonetheless, you are determined to Have Your Way and damn the consequences. People are paying too much attention to your idiotic blunders; you want them to stop looking at your policy, but still have a lot of sympathy for you and your nation on a personal level. It'd also help a lot if people would feel sympathetic towards Israel. You have no morals. What would be a really convenient thing to have happen right about now?
If that doesn't attract some flamage, nothing will. So anyway, yesterday I tried recompressing the video clip that had been giving me trouble, into an AVI file with JPEG Photo compression at maximum bit rate. In other words: storing a complete image for every frame instead of periodic still frames plus deltas like MPEG. And sure enough, that fixed the decompression bug I'd been having. I think it hurt the image quality noticeably, but this clip only covers half the screen for about a second and a half, and it'll probably be masked by the more intense recompression that will apply to the entire video anyway. An acceptable compromise. I have nine more clips to put in, and about two more to touch up or replace. -
Decompression blues
2003-01-27 10:37:14
So I got masking to work in Cinlerra - kinda, sorta. Trouble is, it doesn't really work, and it fails in an unsightly way.
I have two video channels, one on top of the other. I split the screen with a jagged zig-zag line from upper left to lower right, and one channel has a mask saying "display only on this side of the line" and the other has a mask saying "display only on the other side of the line". So it's your basic split-screen effect, with a fancy-shaped line between the two halves. That's the visual concept. The upper half is mostly orange, and the lower half is mostly blue. The problem is that once every few frames, the blue channel displays over the entire screen instead of just on its own side. Then the next one or two frames it does a sort of chunky dissolve back into the orange channel I intended to display there, and then a few frames later it does it again. This is highly non-optimal.
I think what's going on is that both channels are coming from ripped DVD source in MPEG format (I think that's like what you Windows Premiere people call "frame serving") and there's something wrong in the decompression. MPEG consists of still frames and differences - every so often it spits out an entire frame, then for the next few it just stores "this frame is like the latest still frame except for the following differences". I think that when the orange channel goes looking for a still frame, it takes one from the blue channel instead. Thus the chunky dissolve - the new updated stuff is still being written correctly, and since the actual footage at that point is a pan, the differences are quickly enough to bring it back to correct. Until the next still reference point where it gets totally fucked up again.
So what am I to do? I know there's a new version of Cinelerra out since the version I have, so I guess upgrading should probably be my first step. Unfortunately, it looks like this is a bug in the decompressor or the compositing engine, and the compositing engine isn't mentioned as something they fixed in the upgrade and the decompressor isn't even really part of Cinelerra in the sense of having been written by Mr. Cinelerra Dude, it's just something he linked in from one of those wacky Northern European countries where there's nothing else to do at night than write quasi-legal video codecs. So I fear that the upgrade (and it will be a painful one because I have to fix several of Mr. Cinelerra Dude's, ah, non-optimal design choices, in order to compile it on my system) won't really help.
I could probably change at least one of the channels to a still screen capture instead of a real video clip. That might help, but it means I'd have to sacrifice the ability to have motion in the channel - there wasn't much but I had wanted to have at least a little motion just to keep things feeling "live" (I really want to avoid turning this into a musical slide show, and Boogiepop Phantom isn't exactly the most fast-moving visual anime to begin with). Heck, I could get rid of Cinelerra's broken masking entirely if I were using pure still images - just do the compositing in the GIMP. But it worries me that I have four bars of this in the project. Only one is displaying the problem, I don't see any difference between it and the other three, and if I kill the bug in this one by sacrificing motion, is it going to pop up again later in one of the others? I don't want to make all my split-screens into faked still images, that would suck.
So what I may end up doing is recompressing the clips I want into some other format, maybe Motion JPEG, which doesn't use this reference point and difference compression model. That way, I hope, I can avoid the bug entirely. One problem is that it's a lot of work to do that and I have no way of knowing that it'll work at all; another, less important problem, is that every additional stage of recompression incurs a generation loss.
JOURNAL: koronoru (Kevin Oronoru)
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