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in sorrow of the soul
2015-04-08 08:33:00
SH126:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 17/37
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 43/64
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
Should I happen to come to another block with a missing or damaged index, which is not out of the question among the 20 more that are still unprepared on the stack, I will take the longest open extent of idle time that comes and just render the whole thing out to an editing codec while I'm asleep or at work or something. I have the disc space available, and while doing so won't save that much time in production-tracking terms (the intermediary render would count, and then I still need to cut it up after), it'll save a hell of a lot of frustration. Two hours cutting last night for maybe like ten individual cuts.
Similarly, there's been a couple digital sources lately that I've unexpectedly had to telecide; fortunately, they've cleaned up pretty easy, but this is another occupational hazard of the source pool. Some of these were encoded forever ago, and are crap; others were put together by people who were more interested in the content than the presentation of that content, and others were rescued from flea markets and dumpster diving in the greater Kanto area by people who did not necessarily have a deep understanding of digital video more than what it took to just transfer off the physical format. Anything that can go wrong is wrong, somewhere, in the remaining 20 blocks, sometimes multiples of them at the same time, and discovering what I can fix and how, as well as what I can't fix, and how to hide it, is becoming a significant part of the tail end of the cut. It's definitely arguable that these are stupid, unnecessary, thoroughly niche lessons, but it's still worth learning this stuff; I'm not done with videos from legacy catalog stuff, not by a long shot.
--Kai out
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on your seventh day
2015-04-07 09:25:41
SH126:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 16/37
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 42/64
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
Technically, I've started cutting into the first of the minors, but this was only because I had the feeling, last night and into this morning, that I could scan through a pretty good chunk of it without having to, y'know, actually worry about cutting source. This turned out to be 100% the case, and despite some rather significant indexing issues I was able to plunge on and grind through like a quarter of the source in more or less no time at all.
On the subject of insufficient source, that idea mentioned a couple days ago is now definitely cut off the board. If someone else wants to have a go at working over Violence Jack to Carnivore's "Predator", they will not be in competition with a SH video on that source pool; the intro should edit itself to the opening of the anime, and the fast part can be done pretty much literally on the lyrics, but there is just not enough cannibalism content in the title to hold up the extremely slow second half of the song at that tempo, and cutting that part out is an unsupportable insult to the music. Someone else might be able to pull it off, but too many of the exploded-entrails bits are going to end up in this video for me to really contemplate taking on the project.
--Kai out
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with no conscience
2015-04-06 09:46:58
SH126:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 15/37
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 41/64
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
As it turns out, I had more work to do for less yield in some of the digital majors than I had anticipated. Again, this stuff is old and was in many places encoded in crap formats, so I'm having to use AviSynth to frameserve AVI files that are either too broken or written with old fourCCs to handle otherwise. The upside, though, is that I'm nearly done with this bucket and about to break into the minors either tonight or tomorrow; editing, in real terms, is as far off as ever, but there is less and less that needs to be done and more and more that's already finished.
With probably like 25 GB of source cut (videos in the five-minute range generally mix down to about 3 GB at this screensize in terms of final master), I occasionally get the urge to just blow time on the cut and get into editing already. However, the stuff that's in the pool is in there for a reason, and as I go through I keep finding the cuts that made those keys, and being so impressed by the insane disregard for life and bodily integrity that I have to keep going, to find that one key slice in the next batch, and see how far over the top it's going to go. With the time and effort I've put in so far, it's less of a waste to keep grinding through minor sources than it would be to not do so, and miss out on their potential vital contributions to the final product.
--Kai out
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orders are clear
2015-04-02 10:25:59
SH126:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 13/37
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 39/64
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
Since the language lesson last night ended up being shorter and easier than average (numbers, which are stupid-easy and have zero new characters to learn after doing Chinese last year), I had enough time to pound all the way through the first of the digital majors; maybe not as much content as the DVDs in the stack, but a lot of great stuff that really goes to the heart of what I want to do with this project. Much gore. So nightmare. Wow.
The next one on the stack, though, is probably more interesting from a long-term perspective, because it's going to push an old idea on the board either definitely into "go" or off into oblivion. The source is not in the best condition, and while the idea is decent if stone-simple, being unable to do it all from here would lead to fill-ins with M.D. Geist and Fist of the North Star that reduce its separability from this video and some other ideas in the pile. I don't have the time to go around repeating myself, so if the source yield is subpar, or the cuts I would be looking for in that context don't exist or aren't usable, I can cut bait immediately and concentrate on the ideas that are going to turn into something different.
The possibility of that one getting cut after SH126 drops is still there, though; demos aside, I don't like to reuse source, and if this one ends up gobbling the good parts out of this title, any independent video will have a lot farther to go. If I hadn't done SH073, Maryuu Senki would definitely be in the source pile for this one; it's not, though, because all the good cuts in that title are already in a video, and even at twelve years distance, there's a headspace collision. Nothing in this pool has been previously cut for a SH video: SH079 is technically the "same" as the Kujaku-oh in here, but there are a lot of differences (most noticeably in the budget department) between the second OVA (there) and the first one (here) to the point that despite having both available, I only cut the second one for that video and the first one for here. This is probably going to prevent me using the extremely large source pile to splort out dupes of this video on command with, like, early Bolt Thrower or stuff off Sentenced's first record; I'm still going to save this stuff as a leg up on a certain later project, but the point of doing this video is to do the concept optimally. Doing it over again with different cuts that weren't good enough to go in on the first pass goes back to that stuff about wasted and duplicated effort.
--Kai out
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destroy the peace
2015-04-01 13:05:58
SH126:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 12/37
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 38/64
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
And with that, the DVD portion of the cut is done. I don't expect to get anything done tonight, but looking ahead, cutting through the remaining stuff should be less intense per block - of which there are fewer and mostly smaller - than the DVD portion, further simplified by the fact that this stuff is pretty old and a lot of it, like all of the ones in the "major" pile, are in various AVI formats and can be loaded into VDub directly without needing to deal with AviSynth. This is part of the reason I started with the DVD portion; those titles were needed to set the source pool and establish the feel parameters for the video, and it also makes sense to do all this hard work out in front, when you're not coming back from cutting up easily-accessible encodes, rather than at the end where there's the risk that you're going to burn out on what should be the final stretch. I have what amounts to about six DVDs of stuff to churn through (look at the clipping, there is exactly a 26-episode full-two-coeur equivalent remaining), but it still feels like the downslope, since I've already cut up ten actual DVDs and I know for a fact that nothing I have left needs as much repair, or will be as difficult to repair, as the stuff I've already finished.
In with the final tweaks to the cleanup for the first digital block that I did this morning, I also assigned out codes for everything else on the sheet, and I'm looking, after bycatching a couple titles off trailers on the DVDs, at about 30 total sources. Not all of these may make it into the video (the stuff represented only by trailers is especially hard to see getting in, just on lack of volume), and some may not even have anything good and usable to even cut, but there are labels waiting for everything in the case that they're needed. This bit of planning infrastructure should have been done further out on the front end; it's going to need to be for a future project where two-letter codes are not going to be possible, let alone practical to translate to the actual title. Lessons learned; if I can keep applying experience from actually working on stuff to future projects, I'll be able to do more of them and fewer task-oriented ones.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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