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smashed across the windscreen of the sky
2015-03-05 11:57:22
SH126:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 2/36
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 5/60
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
Things ratchet forward; I was able, at the cost of a little sleep, to finish up the first DVD block and get the cleaning settings in for the second major source. This one needs less smoothing and much less color adjustment, so hopefully cutting will go a little faster. Of course, it's not going to go any faster the next couple nights -- I'm booked solid until Monday, and don't expect to make any progress at all in that timeframe. After near on two years of not working on this one at all, the extra time is negligible, but that doesn't mean I don't still get concerned about the schedule pushing itself out. There are still about 20 more ideas on the board, most of them with pretty extensive cut requirements attached, and not all of them are going to get junked for unworkability.
--Kai out
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squint that fisheye lens
2015-03-04 14:13:27
SH126:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 1/36
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 2/60
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
Eventually, I got tired of waiting and pushed the Flag of Hate out to public release, local upload still to come for the three videos that need their sources approved, and despite other pressures in the start of this week, I was able to get moving and start laying the groundwork for the new video. Given the extremely large source volume (more than I've had to cut for any video since SH091), I had to break this up conceptually; I'm starting on the "DVD-major" sources, the ones that will form the backbone of this project, and yet require a good amount of work to get into shape. The "DVD-minor" ones are too much effort for too little reward, especially without the majors cut and an idea of how the overall source pool is going to go, and doing any of the digitals first would lull me into a false sense of security. Hence this week, and those figures; of late, "precleaning" has been a joke caption, as I've been working off other people's encodes, which generally do not need cleaned up, the dudes who aspire to internet fame by doing such releases getting extra props for a clean product in a reasonable filesize. No more: I spent half an hour doing the settings for one of the thirty-six source volumes to be cleaned, and why? Because this:
http://i59.tinypic.com/2h8degp.png
If you don't know what that is, you are a children, and you can be glad that your era is one that has forgotten such things. If you recognized instantly what that is, and could have spotted it at playback speed without the giant yellow callouts, you are also An Old, and know where this is going. When CPM put out their DVD print of Demon City Shinjuku, they didn't have a DVD master or even an LD master. What they had was a VHS master, probably the same SVHS master they cut their distro VHS off of, and it had a fucking mag fault in this frame. In addition to the the normal frame blending that you get in animation of this brutality and this vintage (budget to animate at 12 fps, still want to make it look like 24), I have to fight against not only DVD telecine but the reality that that DVD telecine is based on a VHS telecine...on a different friggin offset, most of the time. So what's the difference between this and my VHS digitizations later in the source pile? Someone thought they could charge American anime fans $20 for this, and I paid at least $15.
Fortunately, the current A/V tech guide's high-cleaning settings for TDeint are mostly good enough to get this DVD into a workable state, and I can do my own compromises between "looks like blendy garbage" and "has completely lost the oldschool sense of detail that is the entire point of doing this" with VDub filters. The filter chain I'm using right now gets me to a decent output while still delivering 6 fps in render, and will probably not need to be tweaked a whole lot for the remaining DVDs. Probably. That pokiness, next to the speed that I've gone through modern, cleaned, HD source with recently, is a powerful argument in favor of a machine rebuild, but between one thing and another that's probably several months off -- not for this video, and depending on how travel and stuff shakes out, probably not for the next one either.
--Kai out
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i raise the torches
2015-03-02 09:24:32
SH126:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: 0/36
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: 0/60
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
So SH125 wrapped on Saturday after much travail, and is now out at release, an ad for the full FoH thing to come when at least one of these is up on local - this one is eligible without bothering the admins, but kero is predictably not responding to tracert. So it goes; it'll be up eventually.
And obviously, having gotten through the training bit, I plunged on and got all the source ripped for SH126, so those piles of DVDs are off my speakers for the first time in like 18 months. This was a process that required two different ripper versions across three total computers, because the official DVDs here are for the most part old and terrible; my DIY VHS->DVD conversions ripped fine, but there's stuff in the pile from CPM and Streamline at the dawn of the DVD era, and these are not the most consistently accessible. This is only the beginning of the hard part, though; I still have to clean up all that garbage from a time when people generally had neither the money nor the inclination to make an especially clean encode. Some of the dirt will be left in -- that's part of the appeal of the animation from this period -- but I don't have to keep garbage artifacting and color issues that were caused by the DVD encoding process. This will not be easy or fun, but if I can get a good start, I should be able to resolve each source chunk faster as I build a knowledge base.
Stuff That Is Holding Up Progress:
As usual on the weekends, "life" is the main culprit here, but there is little more reliable a source of unplanned breaks in a too-difficult editing session than the promise of sevem minutes of absurd gonfallon derp. I'm speaking, of course, of Agriculture Angel Baraki-chan, a best-of-breed among the dumb mostly-Flash, mostly ONA shows that have been coming out recently to promote internal tourism. It is a formula show, but it is a good formula: Baraki and her familiar show up somewhere in Ibaraki and introduce today's tourist attraction; the Gojappe Bros show up and throw shade, Deigoro chowing down on a local specialty, then get in their mech and cause trouble; Baraki transforms (transformation sequence longer or shorter depending on how much space needs to be filled) and wins the fight, and then they play the chiptune/punkrock version of the unofficial Ibaraki fight song as the credits roll over images of other attractions in the area. For people who do not understand Japanese (seriously, did you think anyone was going to be subbing this?), and have no connection to Ibaraki, it's maybe not the most interesting concept, but my folks spent a decent amount of time in Japan's Iowa over the years, and my Japanese is mostly good enough to follow along and get the hick jokes. And seriously, this week's episode hinged on a Mito Koumon reference, which makes it of course the Best Thing. If you don't know what that is, or why it matters, ignore this show; otherwise, go find it.
--Kai out
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a heart dies
2015-02-25 08:54:55
SH125:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: complete
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: eeeegh
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: 0:23/1:50
- Postproc: none
The good news is that this video is going, that it's going at barely faster than 1 spc, and that I do have 130 unique cuts in the library. The bad news is that it's going wicked slow, my best day in terms of general available time for the next week is already past, and that I'm not feeling the first 23 seconds of this one as much as the first 35 of SH124. The principal work on timing and feel and stuff is done, but this is going to be a long, slow, hard fight through the rest of the song.
Things might improve; there's still time remaining enough to possibly finish this one before the end of the month. However, that will make it virtually certain that there won't be two videos in March: the Flag of Hate selftraining project is already feeling like it's overrunning its endpoints with this video, and unless I get a really, really good feel off the source recheck for the planned fifth one, it's going to get cancelled so I can get hacking on the project this was setting up, finally. I may just be convincing myself to get out of the extra work, but SH124 feels like a finished video instead of an attempt at relearning how to make finished videos: short, highly stylized pieces, as opposed to full-length and fully-developed videos, are likely more harmful than helpful.
--Kai out
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and it's never coming down
2015-02-24 13:53:28
SH125:
- Source rip: complete
- Music: in and tweaked but untimed
- Precleaning: complete
- Storyboard/planning: none
- Clipping: complete
- Edit: none
- Postproc: none
At this point, this video is hovering somewhere between "very hard" and "completely impossible", and shadowed by the beetling threat of a recut, despite having literally just finished the cut last night, under as expanded a set of eligible-source parameters as I could reasonably apply. It's just going to go too fast: I'm not sure that I have even 120 unique cuts for 1.0 spc, and the idea that there's 240 unique non-credit cuts of animation in the source is extremely dubious.
This will all be as it may; some of this will get a little clearer as I actually plot out the audio and start getting into editing tonight, and some of it is going to be fixed via effects and repetition, because effects and their nonhorrible use is the point of this video from the selftraining perspective, and "repeat for effect" has been a core principle in SH videos since forever. If nothing else, the song is definitely going to stay in place - the chop of Beheaded Zombie's "Life Line" that I was idly considering as a swap for about a minute and a half is tenuously booked to something else, and there's enough source with correct lighting that I should be able to fix the badly-lit (and thus still uncut) parts of the source if absolutely necessary. There's hard, and then there's stop-working-on-the-video-for-six-months hard, and this project is a lot more the first than the second.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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