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August 30th, 12:45AM
2002-08-29 12:11:53
Time I should update this thing again.
AMV blog:
Well a couple nights ago I sat down to program a Premiere plugin to do D2V files directly. Basically I'm trying to entirely remove the AVISynth middleman when it comes to importing the video into Premiere. This isn't as hard as it might sound - I simply had to adapt the source code of MPEG2DEC so work with the Premiere interface instead of the AVISynth interface, which I managed to do in a good 5 hours or so. The thing is I didn't have a compiler of any kind so no way to do anything with it. Tom (the guy who helped us program the new AVISynth import plugin) helped me along the way, and I handed my code off to him a couple nights ago to compile and get working. Well he's been working on it since and he apparently got it to compile last night, but Premiere crashes when it tries to load it. :( I'm waiting around for him to get home from work (he's in England so he gets home from work about 3-4AM my time) so I can find out what happened. Hopefully we can get this working.
If we can, it means people can directly open a D2V file in Premiere and work with it there instead of going through AVISynth as a middleman. Hopefully this will provide a speed increase, it also allows us to tell Premiere things like "this stream is progressive" or "this stream has top field first" which is pretty cool.
Anyways - I'm still waiting for my AWA pro tapes to arrive. I don't think it's any small secret I've entered so I don't think taking about that is a bad thing. I won't say which video(s) I entered, of course. From what I've been hearing it's a lot like last year - a few super gems amongst piles of excrement. Honestly some of the stuff I saw last year made my skin crawl it was so bad, this year I'm expecting about the same. I jokingly said to Ian, "The difference between Expo and Pro is that in Expo the crappy people know they suck."
I have all sorts of new great AMV ideas since I came over here and I can't work on any of them. :(
Been drawing some pictures for klinky - various Misato drawings that I'm sure he'll enjoy! :D
Japan blog:
Well on Monday I had a midterm and it was pretty awful. Apparently the sensei who was supposed to be writing it wound up in the hospital so the test we took was written over the weekend. It wasn't a very good test, I'll just put it that way. Anyways we now have a week off so I've been basically lounging around, doing bits of programming and playing a lot of Civ 3. That is until today when I got tired of trying to get together with other people to do it, and just went ahead and went to Shinjuku by myself. Yup, today was my first excursion into the big scary city.
But WHAT a city! Man I only went like 5 blocks from the Shinjuku station (cause I only had four hours I could stay before I needed to head back) and it was just amazing. First off, I must reiterate what I said before - in Tokyo everything grows vertically. I went to a manga store that horizontally was the size of my apartment (actually smaller I think) but it was like 5 floors. I went to an arcade that was _8_ floors! All the Bemani stuff was on the 4th floor, which is where I spent most of my time. 7th Mix baby! Finally. I missed Oni mode so much. I need to find a machine closer to me though. :)
There was one thing in the arcade though I just found so sad - Virtual Horse Racing. Basically all these people sit at terminals infront of a bigass pair of projection TVs right next to each other and watch a computer generated horse race and bet on it. I'm sorry - where's the fun in that? Doesn't that sorta defeat the whole purpose of horse racing when there are NO HORSES? Oh well...
Anyways afterwards I saw this big Virgin Megastore. Their DVD selection downstairs had a tiny Anime section, but they actually had Evangelion Vol. 6 so I bought it since I've been planning on buying it for months and months. I figure if I ever plan on buying anything like that in the future, I should just buy the stupid thing now since it'll be cheaper here in Japan than buying it at some con dealer room at a 200% markup. On the way back I stopped at the Manga store and actually bought something - Groundwork of Evangelion vol. 1 - so now I'm only missing 2 more Eva groundwork books (there are 5 total). After that there are a few more Eva artbooks to collect, the 3 remaining Eva manga I haven't bought and then vol 8 when it comes out, and then find a Laserdisc of Death True. :D The Eva manga is all REALLY well drawn and it's very very cool.
Other than that not much important going on since this week has been all downtime. I'm drinking way too much Diet Pepsi. -
Misty..
2002-08-26 08:29:48
Very sorry to hear about your grandmother. Just know you have my condolences.
I'm not a religious person but I'm not an aetheist either - I'm agnostic. Now there are two kinds of agnostics: Those who don't know or can't decide if there's a God, and those who think it's impossible for ANYONE to know there is a God. I'm the former. I personally need more proof than anything I've seen before to decide whether there's a God or not. Other people think they have enough proof one way or the other, or just follow it blindly because of tradition, or follow it because it makes them feel better.
Ironically I'm in 100% agreement with the speech Loki gives at the start of Dogma:
That poem, "The Walrus and the Carpenter" that's an indictment of organized religion. The walrus, with his girth and his good nature, he obviously represents either Buddha, or...or with his tusk, the Hindu elephant god, Lord Ganesha. That takes care of your Eastern religions. Now the carpenter, which is an obvious reference to Jesus Christ, who was raised a carpenter's son, he represents the Western religions. Now in the poem, what do they do...what do they do? They...They dupe all these oysters into following them and then proceed to shuck and devour the helpless creatures en masse. I don't know what that says to you, but to me it says that following these faiths based on mythological figures ensure the destruction of one's inner-being. Organized religion destroys who we are by inhibiting our actions...by inhibiting our decisions, out of...out of fear of some...some intangible parent figure who...who shakes a finger at us from thousands of years ago and says...and says, "Do it--Do it and I'll fuckin' spank you!"
In a rather strange way that sorta sums up how I feel about religion. I certainly would like to believe I'm an ethical person and that people don't need religion to be ethical and moral. I think religion is a cause of more problems in the world than it is benefits, but then again I've really chosen to stay away from religion except as an academic exercise (and also as research for Evangelion - you wouldn't believe how much reading Revelations helps in understanding the plot). - Return of Rozard... 2002-08-25 02:57:46 It is a film studies class, after all, and so analysis of the films is going to be a big part (what will be graded) and I don't really believe on making analyses of things on partial data (like someone making an analysis of anime based on watching only Pokemon, DBZ, and La Blue Girl, for instance) so I wanted to show things in their entirity.
- Random thought #2 2002-08-25 00:23:45 Rich Lather sounds like something from a Shampoo commercial.
- Rozard... 2002-08-24 15:41:45 You DID see the part about only showing movies or OVAs which are 4 or less episodes? Ranma, even one seasons worth, is LONG. There's no way in HELL I'd recommend showing Ranma, since it would take up half the whole class!
JOURNAL: ErMaC
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