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only the dead are smiling
2015-05-26 07:45:51
SH128:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: three beans in an empty can
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
Since I got back from my folks' decently early on Monday night, I picked up with the cut again, and between one thing and another managed to get the cut finished. It's not likely that I'll be able to do more than load the source, get the music timed out, and start sketching up some frame concepts tonight, but that's ok; I'm significantly ahead of where I expected to be, and any time I can steal from other commitments before like Friday is going to be gravy. This is a short song, but the ideas for the treatment that I have rattling around are likely to make the editing process stupidly complex and full of backouts and interim builds; I'm looking at five hours, minimum, in edit, and that's time I just don't have.
Even if I do manage to turn this one around before the weekend, though, public release is likely to be a phased process. Part of this is that, as has become uncomfortably usual over the last couple videos, I'm going to have to add the source anime to the catalog and get it confirmed, but part of it is that doing the cut, I got the idea to do a SH115-style total disassociation of one of the episodes and recompose it, SH101-like, onto even more unnecessarily challenging tech-death. Soreption's "March of the Tyrants" turned out to be too long and incorrectly structured, but Soreption have more than one song, and at some point I want to do something with Defiled as well, though that's probably waiting on a scratched-up, indecipherable VHS tape from a sketchy second-hand store in an alley in Shinsekai rather than something new and digital. If I can get a second song set before I finish crunching SH128 down to distro, getting this amount of lead will allow me to do the recut and make a "descending node" to go with the "ascending node" of the current project. If not, well, it was a second-run idea anyway, it can go to the bottom of the pile until it bubbles back up again.
--Kai out
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not all can hear
2015-05-24 15:06:28
SH128:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 3/12
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 2/12
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
Amazingly, the distro render on SH127 had actually finished by the time I woke up this morning, so I pushed that out to release, cleaned off the source -- ten damn DVDs worth, I need to get a blu-ray writer like, yesterday -- and started in on SH128. Progress has been decent so far, but I need to keep it up and not lose giant chunks of time to unproductive garbage if I want to get it finished before I leave, let alone even think about the currently-slotted SH129. What's in, so far, is not so bad, but the cut is barely started, and I'm already short on time.
--Kai out
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with no one by my side
2015-05-23 17:57:42
SH127:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: done, more or less
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: 5:03/5:28
- Postproc: none
Once dinner finishes baking, I'll be able to get back to it; a full maximum effort last night got me through the last wall hit, and I was able to pick up this morning and grind on for another 25 seconds. There's technically another 25 left, but realistically only about 12 that are going to need close editing before the song starts to trail out. In the process I bled over onto a third cut-tracking sheet, making this the most paper-intensive video since SH111. There's currently 370 cuts in, and I'm projecting to finish around 400 -- not a record, but still a pain and a half to keep track of and battle through. I've already spent more time in edit than in cutting (a record, at least lately), and am really, really ready for this video to be done. It's looking pretty good, but it's been looking pretty good for a month; I want it to look *finished*, and *released*, and *cleared off*, so I can work on things that will be slightly less demanding.
--Kai out
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winter's wet, summer's hot
2015-05-22 10:03:01
SH127:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: done, as far as it goes
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: 3:45/5:28
- Postproc: none
Amazingly, I got through all of my errands, an intense vocab lesson, the traditionally biggest day of the week in terms of new shows dropping, and catching up with the server upgrade discussion here in time to grind through another fifteen seconds...which albeit ended up needing a little tweaking after I watched the nightly build this morning. Tonight will be tough again on all of these axes, but I should be able to get a little more work in and then hit into the long weekend to power through the remainder.
Process-wise, the big lesson coming out of this video is that check builds are essential; in-editor, you're dialed in on a frame of ten seconds at a time, with limited visibility to where those ten seconds came from and only the most nebulous idea of where those ten seconds are going. I *have* to do them here because I can't really see what I'm doing otherwise, but less-complex and/or standard-definition videos will benefit from more checks as well. The smaller lesson is that I have really reached the useful limits of "spc" as a quality metric.
Ever since the beginning, fourteen years ago, I've tracked stats on the length of video covered by the average component cut and though about spc (seconds per clip) as an indicator of pace, attention, source quality, whatever. Through the Flag of Hate, it became clear that there were edge cases that could make the metric look weird; on SH127, where I'm being guided by these check builds into cutting less hard and leaving more frames in per cut added, it's becoming clearer that the spc I'm capable of cutting at has dropped below that required by the music. On the one-measure-per-cut basis, I should be coming in about 1.1 to 1.2 spc (tempo is kind of like 110, maybe as slow as 100); between layering and effects that go in as timeline cuts, I'm on pace for about 0.9.
What this means is that spc is a deeper and more complex metric than it appears on the surface. Spc is about source, and passes in information about what compromises need to be made with the source pool to bring a video from idea to instantiation. If the source needs to be smashed around with triggers, razored small to make up for lack of in-frame motion, or overdriven with effects, spc will drop towards zero. If the source pool is infinitely rich, with an oversupply of suitable source for any point in the video to the point that it can be assembled exactly as the music requires, without the need for bridging or kludging, spc will converge on the smallest practical musical phrase in the source...usually a four-beat measure. This makes it less useful, immediately, as a measure of improvement, but more useful *within* the process: if you have a watch with a sweep second hand and know how to count, you can determine while timing out the song what your spc *ought* to be -- on a per-section basis in case of any tempo changes -- and then use that in the editing process as a fairly *objective* measure of whether you need to cut tighter or let the video breathe more. And if you *can't* push in the direction that the metric says you need to, the problem goes back to the source pool, and should force a re-examination of that part of the process. If the footage is there, you need to cut better in the collection process/do a recut; if it isn't, the idea probably isn't so good and probably ought to be junked or significantly reworked.
I'm still going to track and report this metric despite the change; by luck more than anything else, all of the numbers I decided to track on process when I started in this hobby almost a decade and a half ago are still varying degrees of useful, and I fully expect that I'm going to need the relatively raw data to build new advanced statistics out of, or to interpret in different ways, for as long as I continue doing this -- and with nearly thirty ideas on the board, not all of which will be cancelled before termination, that's not going to be for a while yet, unless I happen to get killed doing something stupid.
--Kai out
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no star in the east
2015-05-20 10:21:05
SH127:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: done, as far as it goes
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: 3:30/5:28
- Postproc: none
As anticipated, I got through the second wall hit, then finished up the backwards sections and got set up for what's probably going to be the most intense stretch in the video, just in time to not work on it at all for several days. I might get some progress in tonight, but between the housekeeping stuff I have to do and the final unit test of the intermediate language course, I'm not holding out a lot of hope. Edit will probably creep to completion over the weekend, video to drop early next week.
The delays involved in getting this out, which are still not over yet, have gotten to the point where it's not realistic to look at doing two projects, or even one involving a 30-episode cut of dirty DIY VHS->DVD conversions that will need cleaned up, before that hard stop in four weeks. This has put kind of a wrench in the prod schedule; with three weeks, I can do one thing that has a short cut and a medium to long song, and then maybe the video idea I kicked around with the unused scraps of the first Kujaku-oh that were surplus to SH126's requirements. There are about five ideas on the slate that fit these requirements, but most of them are kind of weak and/or will need some major work that doesn't precisely come into scope. Fortunately, I'll have the time around burning the source materials for this one off to do the checks, but if I had better-shaped ideas for this limited amount of time, I could be doing lead-in work on a video in that time rather than fumbling around trying to decide what video to start working on.
Sure, I could just start cutting for the VHS->DVD project, and then leave it open while I'm overseas, but the last thing I want to do is to come back from Japan with a pack full of niche boxsets and Macabre Mementos rarities, raring to attack new ideas from forgotten OVAs and drugged-out techslam, and have to get back to work on something that I'd left mostly-cut for two weeks of dodging bears and sleeping in bus shelters on the other side of the planet. That's not good for current or future projects: finish what you start, start something else if and when you come back alive.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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