The light and the end of the tunnel!

ok, so I’ve got the edit together now. Gonna put a little intro screen and end screen as well… sort of a beginning and end to it… then hand it in… then go home and sleep. trying to get the audio sorted was a nightmare, getting anything useful off the net, then trying to edit it, and getting it in sync with the vid took a lot longer than I was planning. Well, I think I’ve got something to hand-in now, which is the main thing.  A lot of things on it could have been better, but I’m not that skilled in 3d, and have had a few glitches along the way. Methinks from now on, I’m going to try and aim for well before the deadline to have things completed, as I’ve put myself through a lot of difficulty by leaving this project for so long before really engaging with it, to the extent that I should have. 

a bomb’s hit!

ok,well not a real one, but it looks like my flat’s been hit by one… due to another metaphorical bomb. I’ve lost my sound editing program.  I’ve torn my flat apart lloking for the cd with it on, but it’s no-where to be found. I’ve looked in all the places it should have been, then in all the places it might have been, then in all the places could have been… and then everywhere else. This is not good timing. I can use that program fluently, and could have had all my sound done in an hour or so – it’s that good. with the re-format I’ve not got it on either of my machines, and I’m going to have to try to use the sound mixer in premiere… something I’ve not done before… I’ve always done my sound in a seperate dedicated program. And to boot, I can’t find any of the sounds that I made in it before, that I was going to re-use in this piece. I think I must have lost them somewhere in the cross-over. How come is it you don’t realise what you’ve not got til you really depend on it? Right, I’m off to wrestle with premiere’s sound editing thing. wish me luck. I’ll need it.

drawing near

Ok well rendering, avi output, and video clip merging complete. time to start seeming it all together… The animation isn’t spectacular… all that wheels do is spin round… and round… and round, but it is 3d animation, and it’s readyto get thrown together.

presumtion is the mother of all…

ok, so maybe I shouldn’t presume so much… premiere doesn’t like flv files! I rather hastily found some free software that converts various types of media for you though. It’s a program called Prism, made by nch software. It was the only one I could find for free on the net – I’m skint, and don’t like buying things over the net yet anyways. The thing is… it all seemed to be going so well, but it doesn’t like converting the files very well.
Right enough, the little windows movie clip thing comes up and you can play the files… but the video and sound aren’t synced…This wouldn’t have been an issue though, as I was thinking about taking the sound out anyway (now I’ll have to!).  This wasn’t an obvious problem at first though, as playing them through  the system’s video player, it simply played the vid correctly at the speed it thought that should go, and the sound continued on after the video had stopped. Premiere however decides to try and sync them back together, and in doing so, jumping and repeating of the video to try and stretch it to the same length as the audio. I thought it may have been a problem converting from flv to avi, I tried outputting to mp4, (to then convert again if Premiere doesn’t like them either) but this had the same problem. Grr. I’ve now got to go through all the clips I’ve got, take the sound out and then go through them frame by frame, find the jumps, find out where they start and stop, and edit each video back together as seamlessly as possible.

When I’ve got all the videos back to the way they’re supposed to be, I’ll then have to look at time scaling and importance of the clip, and edit them all to fit within the piece’s timescale. Just when I thought the end of the woods were in sight as well!

201

Hmm, rendering on my machine (which has only got one gig of ram, and is running vista) is fun. Ok, so I know some others have longer render times, but considering how basic my wheels are, with no effects on them… oh well, as long as they look how they should, that’ll be fine with me.

slight shift

The more I’ve been thinkning about it, the more it seems obvious that this wheel that I’m making is the utter example of the theme that I’m trying to get at in this piece. By creating a digital wheel, I’ve created the very essence of dependancy on the previous technology for the next generation to be possible. It’s somewhat of an irony that I’m deliberately trying to show the fundamental core of all modern technologies by making it virtual, and therefor utterly revoking its place as the most grounded technology, and making it the most fragile. I think I’ll put my wheel at the end of the piece, as opposed to dispersly fading it throughout the piece, as I had intended, and have it as the end result; something so utterly removed from practicality (what’s the practical reason of a 3d dimensional computer generated wheel?) that it confounds reason. 

I think I’ll call my piece Irony!

Hmm

ok, so I’ve realised that I’ve not posted anything about my development of the 3d piece up here in a while, as I’ve been doing most of the ideas and pregressions my workbooks, and anything digital, I’ve not uploaded!  I’ll have to get all the paper notes, sketches and diagrams scanned in, and formatted… and I think I’m out of space on this thing, so I’ll have to host them somewhere else, such as photo-bucket, and then try and link them onto here… Got a lot on atm though, so may be a couple of days yet.

score!

A break through! www.keepvid.com, allows you to capture streaming video from the net… which means I’m able to get hold of the videos on youtube! Result! It saves them in a flv format, but I’m sure premiere will be able to import them for editing! I’ve had to download an flv player to view them, and the qualilty looks good enough to use the the specified resolution.

I want a video recorder… not a vhs!

Well the video search for suitable clips is proving difficult. Out of the ones I’ve got hold of, I think there’s only two that I plan to use. There’s some on youtube, but you’re not able to download from there. The search goes on!

3d trickery

Ok, I’ve got to give a big thanks to Simon on my course.He’s a bit of 3d guru, and has a good understanding of the various programs. I’ve not had much luck figuring-out 3ds Max, and he’s been giving me great assistance and guidance. Without him I’d probably not actually have something 3d to put into my piece… It’s times like this, I really wish we’d been given more tuition on some of the programs we’ve been using. This year, Martin Beck’s been brilliant at teaching us Java, and using JDeveloper to do so, but with this 3d project, we were literally shown 3ds Max, and then we were left to it.
I know that uni’s about self learning, but at least being given a useful place to start off would have been helpful.