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remember you came from dust
2015-05-05 07:57:46
SH127:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: working...
- Clipping: 10/11
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
After losing the weekend to outside commitments and a combination of health and anxiety issues that is still not completely resolved, I recovered the tailspin last night at least long enough to get through my major marks and still have the time to chomp through most of the remaining cut. The external pressures are unchanged today, but with only one block remaining, I should be able to finish the cut and get the source pool Magix-prepped tonight, then finalize the planning tomorrow and hopefully get into edit on the weekend. Not "out of edit" -- there's far too much other stuff in the picture for that, and this is a five and a half minute song -- but at least "into", with the intention to get out sooner rather than later. Every project comes with its own set of challenges as regards process complexity and editing pace, but a runtime over five minutes is a guarantee of at least two wall hits and the attendant hair-tearing at the worst possible times.
--Kai out
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you said that god was all around us
2015-04-30 10:11:38
SH127:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 8/11
- Storyboard/planning: working...
- Clipping: 7/11
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
Knock-on effects knock on: work pre-empts housework pre-empts study pre-empts video work. The failure chain propagates, and shit flows downhill. Fortunately, the big meetings are over for the week, so I should probably be able to do some more cutting tonight and, perhaps, get out of the weekend ready to go into edit.
Though the cut is going pretty fast, a significant reason for that is that this is a full-season TV source, and as such has some undesirable characteristics. Shows tend to begin and end with a bang; about half my source gathered so far (by volume) was cut out of the first episode, and I fully expect that the last couple eps will be similarly rich. However, there is a huge drag in the middle of most one-season shows, as the budget stretches and characters talk the plot points of the show out in cuts that are not really useful for an AMV concepted out of the main impression of the series: one that is generated by the setup (first couple eps) and the conclusion (last few). You still have to do this work -- there are several excellent cuts in here that would make the coming video worse by their omission from the source pool -- but it gets depressing scanning through source and not cutting stuff. You question your non-include decisions that much more strongly, you check and recheck that you're still on pace to hit your marks for overage; about the only positive in this is that not cutting stuff does tend to resolve more quickly than cutting stuff, so this will tend to take less time.
I could have potentially done this one differently (the series involved has a condensation movie), but I'm standing by this choice. I'm in good shape to do the video I want to do, and while it's a pain having to grind through non-useful cuts of characters talking to each other with the wrong expressions, or to have to discard literally every mid-range setup as too underdrawn to be any use at all, there is a lot of good content here, and a lot of what I want to take did not make it into the film version. The work is its own reward; hopefully, the video that emerges out of this will be good enough to make that case.
--Kai out
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a collection of failure
2015-04-27 08:42:43
SH127:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 7/11
- Storyboard/planning: working...
- Clipping: 6/11
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
This, apparently, is what happens when I have an on-call weekend at an inflection point in the production cycle and get calls first thing on Saturday morning: two releases, about 15 hours combined work, and here we are halfway through the cut of this video. This one is actually coming together too fast; I'm not sufficiently switched over to the mental settings I need for it, and may actually be done the cut before that happens. To avoid any potential problems, I'm keeping dialed in as hard as I can and questioning the non-inclusion of everything I think I don't want to cut: it is easy to not use stuff that is in the source pool, but much harder to go back and dig around for stuff that you realize only in edit that you were going to want.
That said, this is not going to be coming out real imminently. It's most likely that I finish the cut by the end of Tuesday night, finish the plotting and concept stuff by the end of the week, and then go into edit late Sunday, but work, study, and housekeeping commitments all have higher priority, and this video is likely to run at least ten hours in editing, time that I will not have when I'm not obligated to stay within grabbing distance of my work laptop all day. Despite the large chunk of progress made, it is still damn early days on this video, and far too early to have any kind of definite idea about a completion timeframe.
--Kai out
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keep my weapon hand low
2015-04-26 09:54:30
SH127:
- Source rip: complete*
- Music: none
- Precleaning: none
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: none
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
So SH126 wrapped last night on schedule, and went out for release today rather than tomorrow, along with INSO18, which probably should have been expected, but was unpublicized in case I didn't actually have all the source to make it. SH127 is now on deck, but in the rawest of raw early stages; with the SH126 stuff cleared off, I should be able to do the fidelity check that I need to and at least finish ripping stuff, if not get started cleaning things, by the end of the day. This is going to be faster to finish than the last one -- a cut ten times shorter is definitely not going to take another two months -- but the video is going to be longer and more involved; where for this one I had a lot of latitude to just paste shit around and remember not to overuse the same source too close, SH127 is going to require some deeper thematic plotting and probably an actual effects design, which will be a pain and a half.
-- Kai out
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one chance | to exist
2015-04-25 09:50:47
SH126:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: basically done
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: 1:41/3:55
- Postproc: none
Since I'm on call, rather than getting done the several important things that, abstractly, I needed to get done today, I'm sitting around waiting, likely in vain, for customers to update the boneheaded tickets they've created since last night for stuff that, in each case, could really have waited until the start of the week. Fortunately, I'm getting paid for it, and also it's giving me the chance -- since I can't really do jack-all else -- to work on the video.
http://i62.tinypic.com/6sctqb.png
This is the first wall hit. There are some spoilers for other stuff in it, but the important part is that most of those white and red bricks on the lower tracks are triggered strobes. This is fundamentally a single track video with some rather comprehensive triggering, as has been alluded to before; I just didn't realize how friggin ridiculous it had gotten until I backed off to this degree to do the export.
Based on progress this morning, it's likely that I will finish edit today and render out a distro build overnight for release on Sunday or Monday, TBD pending 1) actually finishing; 2) whether I want to push this straight out the door or do some omake release content; and 3) any interference from on-call commitments in that timeframe. For reasons, mostly involving a source check, SH127 is not real likely to start before the end of next week, so there's not exactly a real hurry on this.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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