-
*thumbs up*
2006-02-04 21:28:36
I'm in a much better mood now. In fact, my "will edit if I have to claw my eyes out" war cry resulted in one of my more successful editing sessions to date and, subsequently, a cheerier outlook on life.
This morning I confirmed that (I think) I only have to pay $10,000 in interest in my loan if I take 15 years to pay it back - which I never intended to do in the first place. If I pay it back within two years, I'll have paid less than $1,500 in interest. Phew.
Total hours:
Prep work: 95
Editing: (I forgot what I was up to!) Add another nine hours, whatever the case.
AMV completed: One track eight seconds long, five tracks 3 seconds long. This does not equal 11 seconds, since I've more fiddling to do with their accompanying tracks.
Dumb moment of the day: I installed my new CS2 Premium Suite, aka Photoshop CS2 for AMVing. There are significant differences in a lot of the presets, which I wasn't paying too much attention to until they jumped up and bit me in the - you know where this is going. So I've spent an hour painstakingly masking out some frames (btw, my alpha channels now work, apparently there WAS something wrong with my other version of PS!) and then import then into Premiere. Goyjo looked rather plump, but I didn't notice it until I overlayed the mask on my target tracks. "What the hell?" I practically shouted. And things had been going soooo well! After switching back and forth between the two programs a dozen times, double-checking all sorts of possible causes of Goyjo's bloated self, I discover that CS2 does not automatically keep the same pixel aspect ratio as the images it imports. It slaps a default on them, in this case a square pixel ratio, and so of course this doesn't work out well in Premiere. I haven't figured out how to alter this default, yet, because I didn't have the time, but at least I know how to whip the Saiyuki boys back into anorexic shape.
Random comment: I spent several hours last night testing out interesting scenarios for the latter part of the intro to my intro. I got together several really nice sequences, but they just didn't accomplish what I needed them to and I had to step back and say, "Let them go, there's got to be a better way. Stay focused on your original plans." With luck, I'll be able to use them elsewhere, because they really are quite good (IMO) - this being good idea-wise, not fancy editing-wise. This is more proof that I need to stick with my AMV outline, because that's what it's there for, and not get caught up in experiments. On the other hand, if an AMV hell comes along that I can participate in, I might have good fodder. -
It got even WORSE
2006-02-02 19:16:37
This place is turning into a blog. Sorry to the future me reading this a few months from now. I'll attempt to keep everything on topic and focused on this rocky ride AMVing is.
I'm really pissed off. Like, I can't even stand to look at my footage in Premiere, pissed off (insert hyphens between words because I'm too pissed off to do it!).
I have no idea what's going to happen now with school. My tempermental side is screaming that I should just pull out completely and go some other route, and my pragmatic side is insisting that this will all blow over and it'll turn out well. My dog has it so easy, I wish I were a dog like her.
Reason for foul temper: #1, my weird situation with starting a course halfway through is not resolved. Apparently a death in the family is keeping my student services advisor away from her desk. She won't be back until Monday, which means I'm languishing here for four days in a state of perpetual pissed-offedness. Further, whatever resolution we come to is not going to be a happy one. #2, I just received the nitty gritty details on my loan - for some reason it's costing me almost as much to take out this loan as it is to pay the college I'm taking out the loan FOR. Why don't I just throw my money in the sewer and save myself a lot of trouble?? This program is costing me more than $22,000 of my nonexistant cash, and so far it's shaping up to be a complete waste of financial resources. #2.5, I'd love to back out completely, but because I've taken one measly class, I now can recoup only 80% of my tuition/loan, which results in a $4,000 loss. I paid less than $9,000 for four years of college (thanks to scholarships etc.), I paid about $3,000 loan-wise for my current car. How the HECK do I wind up paying $4,000 for nothing but colossal aggravation?
??!!??!!
Right, so...this is all negatively affecting the necessary cheery attitude one should have when attempting to create an AMV. And this goes double for me, because my AMV is comedy. The last thing I want to do right now is bend all my creativity towards amusing other people!
Good thing redheads, with their flaming hot tempers, never stay mad long. My ex-boyfriend either never got around to understanding this or he understood it far too well. -_-
All right, I'm going to go attempt to edit for one hour. I don't care if I end up clawing my eyes out, I'm going to do it. /me has pluck! -
uggghhhhh
2006-02-01 09:15:27
The only reason I'm putting this here, in my sick, sad saga of AMVing, is because the tale just got worse. These night classes of mine SUCK (as in, are stupid, poorly managed, irritating, physically depleting and incredibly detrimental to life in general). I completely gave up hope last night of finishing my AMV in time for AB and, worse, finishing it at all. I predict I will be so weary of staring at a computer screen, nevermind various Adobe software, that I can't bear to do it for "fun" anymore.
:(
This first class of mine on color theory apparently involves hands-on lab work in Adobe Illustrator. Um...this is fine for everyone else in the class who has been working with that program for months now, but how about me, who is scheduled to have her first class on it in three weeks??? HELLOOOOO?? Yes I can get around in it, yes I can muddle through the assignments, but it's like pulling teeth and I can just imagine what would happen if someone who'd never worked in digital graphics was in my shoes. I plan to make a nasty phone call to my student services advisor this morning along the lines of: "I attended my first class last night, the one on color theory, and I don't think that should have been the first course on my schedule." "Oh, why?" "Well, all of the assignments and lab work we are expected to do, 8+ hours worth, require that we use Adobe Illustrator, but I haven't had any instruction in that program; that actually is scheduled AFTER this course." As it stands, after I speak with the so-called advisor, I'll be e-mailing the course instructor and advising HIM that I will NOT be using Illustrator for my work, but Photoshop, a program I actually can turn out decent work in.
I KNEW this whole "Oh, you can take the courses in any order, you don't need to take one to do the others," B.S. they tossed at me was going to cause problems. Listen, you jerks, I am paying you thousands of dollars for instruction, not half-assed attempts to lecture on color theory and "free time" on the computers that could be better spent by moi driving the one and a half hours it takes to get home at 10 p.m. Further, what I "learned" last night would be much more efficiently done on my own time, a la real post-secondary education style. Nothing he presented required me to physically be in the same room with him. The instructor apologetically asked us to read 12 pages from a required text, and I have a feeling most people won't. Come on. I was expected to read 600-800 pages from history texts over three days for three different courses in college, plus expound on it intelligently at a moment's notice. And he's worred about 12 pages (which have huge pictures)?!
This is what's going to ruin my AMVing. This, all of this! -
AHAHAHAHAAA!!!
2006-01-31 13:36:28
I got my Adobe Premium CS Creative Suite this afternoon! AHAHAHAHAA!!!! This stuff is sickeningly expensive. $400 for a student package, which is merely a stipulation that I not use the software for commercial purposes. Good thing AMVs don't count. :D
YAY YAY YAY! -
Good grief!
2006-01-30 20:06:26
Look at that, 12 nosy people read my journal in the space of 2 hours or so. Huh. Well, maybe not read... took one look at it, freaked out and quickly returned to the main page where something less wordy resides.
Anyways, the hypocrisy of some anime fans is truly sickening. I feel dirty, yes dirty, simply downloading from a certain fansub group that recently was teetering on the edge of respectibility before they shoved the ethical (if odd) person off the edge so the rest of the group could "save" itself. BLECH BLECH BLECH!! Yeah, said ethical individual wished to stop fansubbing a recently licensed series, but a lot of other people didn't, so they kicked him out and have declared no-holds-barred copyright infringement will be the name of the game from here on out.
I am looking forward to the day the license holder cracks down on them. These are the kind of fansubbers that do far more harm than good to the fansub community - if a series is licensed, you IMMEDIATELY should drop it. Period. No whining, no excuses, no waiting for a cease and desist letter! The license holders for anime in North America would be far, far, FAR less forgiving of fansubbing if every group continued to sub after it became clear their product directly competed with the "official" one. Oh my god...why can't people just be more mature and get a grip on this concept: if it's licensed, STOP SUBBING IT!!!! This fansub group (already not very highly thought of, in the morality department) has about six hours left of quasi-legitimacy, I'd say. After that, they will be completely despised by the anime fans who count - the ones who "get" the licensed=stop thing -, become the poster child for Evil Fansubbers and probably wind up imploding at a far sooner date than they if they'd just stopped subbing this series right now.
I'm referring to Blood+, btw, and this is the end of my grandstanding. What you're probably wondering is, will Drifty keep downloading Blood+ from this group? No, she won't. Though this is pretty hypocrital of me, I'll admit. But in this case, the hypocrisy of the situation should not stand in the way of doing what's right.
Heh, a friend of mine once said that he'd burn his collection of fansubbed anime in the fireplace if he could, but he never did because CDs just don't burn and the smell is nasty. So one day he was feeling righteous and cleaned house, throwing 50+ CDs into the garbage. At the time I wondered if some trash picker searching for Social Security numbers would come across the CDs, pop them in a computer and marvel at the luck of finding the complete Neon Genesis Evangelion his lap. Several years later, however, I found out that my friend had been the one to go dumpster diving when the thought of parting with his precious anime proved too horrendous for him. This explains why I couldn't find the CDs when I rummaged through his garbage that night.
That last paragraph is completely fictional and meant as a weak joke. I swear!
JOURNAL: DriftRoot (Lauren C.)
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