The recalcitrance of video editing....
Jun. 25th, 2007 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
recalcitranttoyOn the second day of video, the gods created the time code. The time code ruled all. Without the time code, the digital editor becomes stupid and unable to parse. And it became a rule to never break time code, whether it be by use of the fast forward or by the horror of dropped frames.
Silly me had no idea that my trusty little JVC camera would be guilty of dropping frames, thus violating the ever so strict rule against messing with the time code.
The first inkling that something would go from a quick little 1/2 hour edit to a nightmare of biblical proportions (well, in my mind at least :-)) was when Final Cut Pro kept aborting during video capture. Ut oh. So in I went to the preferences and unchecked that feature, and went back to recapture. Then, during the regular editing, I found that the frame drops were numerous, causing the picture to freeze as the audio went happily on, not noticing that now it was out of sync. Anyone who has chased voice sync around knows it as an elusive creature that causes your videos to look like really bad Chinese Kung Fu movie dubs. I'm sure something lovely and comedic could be done with this, but my job was to have a somewhat readable representation of fight blocking that we could look at and say, "ok, I go over, then under, then step backwards, then pirouette on my left foot while back flipping over this other actor while yelling something incoherent."
Most of Sunday was spent attempting to complete what should have been a tiny little piece of my day, slapping a few clips together, exporting the result to MPEG-4 and uploading it to YouTube. But Nooooooo. The Gremlins of Annoyance prevailed and my OCD kicked in and I thought it just plain silly to have random freezing of action in the wrong places, and that voice thing and otherwise *ack!* So I started chopping. That messed up something else, so I'd fix that. Then something else looked ick and I fixed that. That caused the timing of the audio to be wrong, so I fixed that. Then I couldn't figure out why my ipod wouldn't accept files that AppleTV would, which started another phase of troubleshooting, until I looked up and it was getting dark outside.
Never does video rendering go so long as when one really wants to just get it over with :-). Video conversion usually takes this time to spit forth some ungodly sized file for no apparent reason (and here I thought compression was supposed to make things SMALLER). And then one just figures out that their Kung Fu is weak today, spits out something passable and goes to bed.
And then I had dreams of Tom Baker being old and senile. Noooooo! Wonder if his time code got messed up :-)
Silly me had no idea that my trusty little JVC camera would be guilty of dropping frames, thus violating the ever so strict rule against messing with the time code.
The first inkling that something would go from a quick little 1/2 hour edit to a nightmare of biblical proportions (well, in my mind at least :-)) was when Final Cut Pro kept aborting during video capture. Ut oh. So in I went to the preferences and unchecked that feature, and went back to recapture. Then, during the regular editing, I found that the frame drops were numerous, causing the picture to freeze as the audio went happily on, not noticing that now it was out of sync. Anyone who has chased voice sync around knows it as an elusive creature that causes your videos to look like really bad Chinese Kung Fu movie dubs. I'm sure something lovely and comedic could be done with this, but my job was to have a somewhat readable representation of fight blocking that we could look at and say, "ok, I go over, then under, then step backwards, then pirouette on my left foot while back flipping over this other actor while yelling something incoherent."
Most of Sunday was spent attempting to complete what should have been a tiny little piece of my day, slapping a few clips together, exporting the result to MPEG-4 and uploading it to YouTube. But Nooooooo. The Gremlins of Annoyance prevailed and my OCD kicked in and I thought it just plain silly to have random freezing of action in the wrong places, and that voice thing and otherwise *ack!* So I started chopping. That messed up something else, so I'd fix that. Then something else looked ick and I fixed that. That caused the timing of the audio to be wrong, so I fixed that. Then I couldn't figure out why my ipod wouldn't accept files that AppleTV would, which started another phase of troubleshooting, until I looked up and it was getting dark outside.
Never does video rendering go so long as when one really wants to just get it over with :-). Video conversion usually takes this time to spit forth some ungodly sized file for no apparent reason (and here I thought compression was supposed to make things SMALLER). And then one just figures out that their Kung Fu is weak today, spits out something passable and goes to bed.
And then I had dreams of Tom Baker being old and senile. Noooooo! Wonder if his time code got messed up :-)
