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through the gates of bitterness
2015-02-19 08:43:41
SH125:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: ripped but not timed or plotted or anything
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 34%
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
Despite the moderately adverse conditions, I got a decent start in on cutting this one, and may be able to get further before the end of the week. The same guarded sense of optimism should be applied to the video as a whole: in some ways it should be less challenging than the last one, but in some ways it's definitely going to be tougher. This one is probably going to need a rather substantial degree of planning, and the fact that I was seriously mulling over swapping the song out last night points to some difficulties and uncertainties with that. Fortunately, I'm not short on time in the near term; the weather has gotten a little better, but I'm still running the team in my boss' absence, and recent events make it a little less justifiable to go thrash to the death as soon as I go off on-call. We'll see how that goes, and how much time I can steal from other commitments over the weekend.
--Kai out
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you have to wake
2015-02-17 09:48:10
SH125:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: ripped but not timed or plotted or anything
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: none
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
As expected, SH124 finished last night, despite the worst possible location for the second wall hit: on the next to last goddamned cut, as I was digging through to try and find a final joke to close out the video, one that worked and that I hadn't used before because the names of cuts did not end up being identical from original cut to recut. That was a pain, but it was the only one, really, in finishing up: searching title card materials took a second and a half, the video worked despite not having done a check build since that 30-second export I took in August, and the mixdown ran overnight without issue, leading to the video that's currently released, and still waiting for confirmation on a title that has been in the db here since last year. Whatever; I'll apply for confirms on all of this shit when the full Flag of Hate is ready to be unfurled.
That may be sooner rather than later; tonight's work is mostly going to be continuing to burn off the SH124 source so I have some elbow room, but it's not impossible that I might start cutting, and while the next two days are not looking good for "time available to do AMV work", the main lesson of this past project is the same as friggin SH111 again: that every frame you cut now is a frame you don't have to cut later. Additionally, there is probably gonna be another snowstorm at the weekend, which is bad for "go out to see Revocation and Fallujah", but good for "sit on the couch and poke cartoons with an editor".
--Kai out
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and the will is weak
2015-02-16 12:41:45
SH124:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: as done as it's getting
- Clipping: complete (and again)
- Edit: 1:27/3:29
- Postproc: none
Since nobody has phoned in an idiot production problem this morning, I've had the opportunity to cut on further, and while it's a pain both to cut closely after a long layoff (or, really, at all) and to manage the headspace of a video that was started six months ago, including a bunch of cuts that ended up duplicated by the recut process, the video is coming together. What's more, if I can keep the hammer down, it will *finish* coming together in about 25 hours' worth of actual work -- that despite the extra time commitment of the recut, and the fact that this was and is a pretty hard thing to put together as an AMV. My time is a lot more constrained now than it was in the past, between work, social life, and looking after myself, but if the average video finishes in 20 hours and I can average 2 hours of work per day -- not entirely unrealistic -- I could be back on a 3 vpm pace.
That's not going to happen, of course -- history is pretty positive about best-case outcomes not happening -- but it's also clear that the difficulty about getting videos done is not that they take a lot of time that I don't have, but because there's a lot of parts in the process that are troublesome bastards and active obstacles to motivation. Doing 3 vpm, a pace not seen since I was young and tireless and literally doing nothing but AMV outside my main education/employment/training commitments, is not going to happen, but 1 vpm, modulo time spent on the road or out of the country, is within the realms of reason. SH124 will probably be out by this time tomorrow; SH125 will be getting a workability check and may even be in process. We'll see how long that particular train can keep on rolling.
--Kai out
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we must be the shield and not the sword
2015-02-11 13:16:15
SH124:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: as done as it's getting
- Clipping: complete/[4/11]
- Edit: 0:35/3:29
- Postproc: none
After getting back into the office, I'm much more sanguine about sitting on my couch cutting video; a full day sitting on the couch poking customers and running test profiles tends to discourage doing more on your own time. I should be able to get in another episode or two tonight, even with the other shit I have to do, and if we end up roflblizzarded over the weekend, I may just be stir-crazy enough at the end of it to finish the recut. Fortunately, this is the last recut I'm going to ever do: it is driving me absolutely spare to have to guess what I've taken already, and what needs backfilled. Do it right the first time, as is coming on the projects after this one, and this is not a problem any more.
Stuff That Is Holding Up Progress:
I cut less than I expected this weekend half because of cabin fever and half because I was watching Toshokan Sensou, which basically shakes out as Production IG trying to do more Patlabor in a world where media culture has surpassed heavy industry as Japan's defining export. There's no lack of Kawai-Kenji-flavored musings on the issues raised, but the characters are neither as appealing nor as well-developed, and the whole work exists in a creative tension between seriously examining censorship and free speech, and the ridiculousness of arguing about content by means of automatic weapons in notoriously gun-free Japan. As inappropriately-armed-cops shows go, it is not on the Patlabor or Jin-Roh level, but much better than noted recent garbage fire Rail Wars, and several orders of magnitude better than any library-type show going back to at least Bungaku Shoujo, but I'm not sure that it's worth a look for anyone besides Patlabor fans irrationally sore about a lack of additional sequels. This is not going into a video of its own anytime soon, hence the notes here.
--Kai out
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the devil is that dream
2015-02-06 11:35:26
SH124:
- Source rip: complete*
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: as done as it's getting
- Clipping: complete/[2/11]
- Edit: 0:35/3:29
- Postproc: none
Having figured out what I was screwing up, I got back rolling on the recut yesterday night; in addition to making the current project a lot more possible, this change probably flags up nearly everything on the idea board that was waiting on a go/no go decision into the 'go' state. Scheduling is another thing entirely; there are two more tuneup videos on the slate after this one, but a maximum of one of them is going to get made if I want to have any chance at finishing the main project before I start picking up travel commitments again in June. Either or both may get dropped: there's a lot of conceptual overlap, and little really teachable beyond "keep the pedal through the floor", which is more about focus than anything technical. We'll see; for the moment, I have to get through the rest of this cut and then start organizing the resulting pieces. Snow on the weekend will help, but after a layoff this long, I can't realistically look at anything closer than the end of the month.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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