This probably won't be my final post. Or perhaps I'm claiming this because I'm hopeful that by some miracle I'll have more good things to say in a few days. I'm at a low in this "up-and-down" process. Irene detected some funky stuff going on in my project on final cut when we met last week. I scheduled to meet with Tristan, which finally happened after my return from Marseille. The dimensions in my found footage were way off and different from all my other footage. This meant that it would either look stretched, or have a black border around it (to increase its resolution). But all of this is not a problem. At this point, I'm not concerned with making that aesthetic choice, as there are many ways to play around with making these discrepancies unnoticeable. Plus, most of the Riyadh found footage I've used so far are videos of stills. These stills can be moved around through animation in the "old Riyadh" sequence. But anyway the found footage (or stills) I'm using is temporary just to build up the scene. Rendering the found footage every time I edit it is something I should be expecting and it's usually pretty fast. So this is the conclusion Tristan and I reached, right before he detected the actual problem with my project.
Since I'm using so many different types of footage (EA50, Nikon D7100, iPhone, GoPro, YouTube/found footage, Rakan's camera, and the FS100), it's important to make sure all my footage has a unified FPS rate. And of course, this realization had to come now rather than 7 weeks ago. I'm very annoyed with the fact that this wasn't already sorted out while I was going through that logging nightmare. Around 4-5 weeks ago, I went through another nightmare of re-compressing all the iPhone and YouTube footage adding the 48kHz setting. And now, I spent the last couple of days compressing a whole lot of iPhone, YouTube, GoPro, and Nikon footage all over again, setting the frame rate to 29.97 fps. I still have to convert the FS100 footage (Rakan shoots) from 24 fps to 29.97 fps, which hopefully will be sorted tomorrow. So yes, it's been an unanticipated mess. Not the kind of thing I was keen on doing during my last week as I work on my assembly/rough-cut. But I also have to be positive and acknowledge that this needed to be flagged now. And so moving forward, I will be paying extra special attention to all files in my bins to make sure all files have the right frame size and rate, audio sample rate, aspect ratio and so on. Shouldn't I have been doing this already? I'm over the "hate myself" phase and have accepted that this is normal -- and that this or any other technical problem with my project is meant to be addressed during this quarter. It's fine. Fix this, the story will have to wait.. The meeting with Tristan was also helpful in understanding the logic in all the coding/settings. I'm still shocked why this came of late, but I'm using so much different footage and it's been chaotic just to log and organize it correctly.. let alone try to go through it, make selects, and "build scenes."
Apart from this huge technical glitch that has delayed work on my assembly more than I can afford, I can include other developments. Rick Prelinger and I are meeting on Thursday. I'm looking forward to getting advice from him on how I can access footage of Riyadh. Meanwhile I am also communicating with a few people back home, hoping to see what I can get from the High Commission for the Development of ArRiyadh. This will probably take a while, as this is a very busy time of the year, but I'll keep following up during the winter break and beginning of January.
As for my assembly, I'm trying to do whatever I can to copy/follow my outline/scene-structure. I'm not sure how much of that will be achieved by the 18th. I also have to do a lot of writing.
There's some good news from last week that's overshadowed by all the hard-drive maintenance, and I'm pretty sure I told Irene. I was supposed to meet Rakan on skype so he can explain some things about gaming to me. I had been asking so many questions about the JR gaming in my blackberry chats with Rakan, that he suggested to "show" me via skype. I don't know what that means exactly, but of course I know it means I will want to record this "tutorial." It was meant to happen before my trip to Marseille, but we ended up postponing it for after quarter-end. There's way too much on my plate right now, and it doesn't look like it will ease during the winter break.
No comments:
Post a Comment