Rendering Pines, Rendering Pines

Well now my video is pretty much done EXCEPT for compressing it into an MPEG2 (which Compressor is doing now for the next twenty minutes) and burning to DVD (which will take at least another twenty minutes). But aside from that I'm pretty happy with it. I MIGHT put it on Youtube just so I can let people preview it, but a lot of the text might be totally illegible then. I went WAY overboard last night and got pretty heavy handed, so I had to take it down a tad this morning. I thought I had to get it to the Mendel at noon today, and then I just got an email saying Wednesday is fine. Aaaaah! Oh well, it's done.

I like it, it's the first time I've made something specifically for installations, so making sure it can loop and still make sense was fun. I'm also going to output a single channel screening copy for festivals. It would be nice to send it to Rendezvous with Madness, which is in Toronto. I've never been to it, but they've shown two of my tapes and send great swag. Maybe this time I can take a trip to Toronto and watch other films on madness.

And the audio isn't too shabby, it's minimalist but that makes sense. And I found a website called FreeSound Project which has downloadable wav and aiff clips of sounds it's members have uploaded. It's so useful, I don't know how I didn't know that site existed. I'm on my mom's computer BTW, which pisses her off. I keep running back and forth between the upstairs computer and the downstairs computer.

I've spent at LEAST 24 hours on rendering and processing this 7 minute video. It's not so bad, that's pretty normal, but it's a reason I like having my own suite. Paying for 24 hours of rendering time would so SUCK! Ugh! At ten bucks an hour that is PRETTY fucking pricey.

I have six more minutes before I can import into DVD Studio, set it up to loop endlessly, and burn it. BURN IT!!!

Editing is weird and fiddly, but I like it. I had to go on the hunt for an errant frame that kept showing up. My mom watched a rough cut with me and suddenly I yelled "Hey! That frame isn't supposed to be there!" She didn't see it though. How can 1/30th of a second be so obvious? But it is. I fixed it and even though she didn't notice it the first time, she thought it was an improvement. There's one thing I wish I had been able to fix, which is the slapping scene. But I think it's fine as it is, I'm just being uber picky because now I've watched this damn thing about 50 times.

And General Error 34 started showing up when I wanted to play full screen in FCP. I know it means I have a corrupted file somewhere, but it's not affecting the video itself, just the program, so I decided to ignore it until I can deal with it later.

I could probably tweak my video for the rest of the week and still not be satisfied. At a certain point I just have to back off.

Ugh, and now I have to re-compress because I didn't like the way it turned out last time.

20 more minutes. Plus another 20 for burning, when I finally get there. So fiddly.

I'm bored of writing about how boring making videos can be. I'm going to go look at stuff while I wait.

I am still itchy. The doctor I saw yesterday said to go back to the dose of Lamictal I was at before the RASH happened. Hopefully that works. I don't think it will get worse. I'm all covered in calamine lotion. And I'm hungry. Wah! Anyway, yes, no death today. I think I will be okay.