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Half an hour of exquisite pain and suffering...
2005-06-22 12:17:48
That's right... I just sat and watched all the videos competing in EXperience: Spring Showdown, proving to myself that I really must be a masochist. I'm participating myself and thought I'd check out the competition. One of two of them were almost decent. The rest... >_< *shivers*
I'm considering withdrawing from the contest altogether. It's hard to do though, since I believe I have a good shot at winning. However, I'm more excited about some of the *real* AMV contests that are going on at the moment. There are two others I'm considering participating in. It would be fun, since it would be the first time for me and since we hardly have any AMV contests here in Sweden. Of course, I won't be able to be there in person, but it's still cool to know that a bunch of people are sitting down to watch my video in a room somewhere. -
Jerk It Out is finally done!
2005-06-14 11:14:51
It was hard letting go. But now now new video is finally out there in cyberspace for eveyone to see. It's been a couple of hours since I uploaded it, and so far no replies to the announcement post and just three downloads. I'm hoping for more people to download it later tonight, when the evening reaches USA and more of the org users are online.
If you want to read more about the creation of this video than is written on the info page (not likely, but still), go back to March 21st in this journal and start reading... -
Encoding Hell
2005-06-10 07:49:21
Golly gee... My brain has turned to mud. It is now eleven o'clock in the morning, and I've just started encoding the first pass of what I have reason to hope will be the final XviD encode of my new video, "Jerk It Out - An Electric Love Story". This will be something like the tenth or twelfth attempt to compress the damned thing. Except for four solid hours of sleep, I've been at it more or less constantly since around four o'clock yesterday afternoon. It's been an... interesting experience. Partly, it's been interesting because I've learned a lot about using the XviD codec. I'll put that experience in a different journal entry, however, because it's gonna be long.
To account for the hell I went through with this encode, let me tell you about a feature of the video; what with the nature of the music and the way the video had progressed, I at one point thought it would be a neat idea to use the noise filter in Premiere to create a static effect in certain areas. It did turn out really great, in fact, but if I had know what this was going to do with the encode, I might have reconsidered. Anyway, the way the video is now, it uses very heavy static effects in two important places, and semi-heavy in two others.
At some time shortly before midnight yesterday, I decided I was so close to finishing the video that I would be damned if I was gonna go to sleep before it was done. One of the reasons for this was that I'm going to my parents for the weekend, and I felt I just had to get finished before that. Anyway, I start preparing myself for a long night, by taking a walk to the nearest all night convenient store to by the most caffeinated drink they had (this happened to be pepsi, but you can't have everything), and then turning on all the lights in the apartment to keep myself from getting sleepy. I finished up the last bits of the intro and outro and messed around with the exported video until I had the whole thing in one nice lead-heavy avs-file. (Like last time, I had to export the video uncompressed and in small chunks at a time, because Premiere wouldn't let me do it any other way. I used HuffYUV in the beginning until I reached the first extremely noisy part, at which point the codec simply would not take my abusing it anymore and simply shut down Premiere - instantly and neatly without a single trace - after encoding one or two frames.
I had begun experimenting with encoding the video earlier in the day, and now, with everything else completely finished, it was time to get serious. At around three o'clock in the morning, my hopes of getting a good-looking and playable encode out of this monster of visual coolness were reduced to desperate stubbornness, and my brain was, simultaneously, reduced to a sugar-and-caffeine saturated blob of bleary pain and angst.
So I finally gave up and went to bed. However, after a couple of more tries in the morning, I finally got the codec configured in such a way that the encode was both decent to look at and playable without lag. Hallelujah.
That's the story so far. Despite the dangerous levels of stress caused by this experience, it's been a lot of fun. I realized this on my way to the convenient store last night. I'd done little or nothing else except work on the video for more than a week, and the state I was in was almost spiritual. I walked slowly through the warm summer night, breathing in all the new life all around me in big lungfuls. There was a calmness in the air and in me that I hadn't felt since back in my "religious" days. I realized that I was doing something that I truly love doing.
The encode has now been completed and it works. However, I will still have to do it one more time, because I just discovered that you can't splice two XviD-encoded clips together with AviSynth and VirtualDubMod the regular way. The output is not XviD but a huge, probably uncompressed file with the FourCC "YV12". Thus, I can't just splice in the intro and credits like I was going to. I'm gonna have to do a completely new encode with all of it together. Wai. -
I... guess I'm... sort of... done...
2005-06-08 20:54:05
Wow... I'm... I'm done. I'm actually almost completely done. The last two bars that I've been angsting about were finished today. They turned out better than I hoped for. Then I spent the rest of the day making a uncompressed, high-quality copy of the entire vid and working some on the titles and credits. Oh, and I made a new avatar that I'm going to start using once I've uploaded the video.
Not much left to do. I will soon have my life back, such as it is. The people I'm going to work for this summer are a bit hazy on how many clients they will have, so I'm not sure I'll be able to work as much as I'd like. That means I'll have more free time, though, some of which will be spent studying for the analysis course I failed last semester. And a few of my friends will still be in town over the summer, so it'll probably be a decent one this year as well. If I get short on cash, there's still the parents...
It's a little scary, but I've gotten so attached to this video project and so used to working on it that I'm finding it a bit hard to let go. To finally relinquish the child of my creativity and let it out into the wide world (the internet) to be seen and judged by god knows how many strangers. To once and for all let it completely out of my control. And that's the heart of the matter, because if I wasn't a complete raving control freak before I made this video, then I certainly am one now. Letting go of it will be difficult, but healthy. Also, I can't wait to show it off to all my friends... - Another day... 2005-06-05 17:02:44 Did some more editing today. Looking good. Changed the intro so the title looks a bit nicer. Now it has the horn sticking out of Naota's forehead for the "I" in "Jerk It Out". Also, I made and submitted my very first site banner today. It'll probably get rejected, because the text in the logo is a bit hard to read because of what I did to it in PSP. It's a neat idea, though, so I'm still crossing my fingers.
JOURNAL: LenWidleheyt (Linus Lindholm)
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