Anyone who has been following anything that I say for the past 4 days is probably sick of me talking about this, but I'm in the final throes of the most sleep-deprived, energy-starved, ass-busting weekend of my life.
So, now that it's coming to a close, and my brain has some semblance of solidarity, I will recap the hellacious battle between mac, pc, and Time.
And then I'll shut up about it.
Also, none of the following text is in any way meant to come off as complaining.
I'm going to go into great detail about the work I've put into it, but mostly I just need a place to put it into writing for myself.
I've been working on a project with a Blacksmith. We're making a DVD series.
It's a HUGE deal. It's literally the most important project of my career, thus far.
Because it has presented to me the most opportunity to make creative works,
It is the most promising to continue being a regular thing for a long time,
and it is the highest paying job I've ever done.
It's the perfect springboard for myself as a freelancer, and my client as a Blacksmith.
The success of this project means the success of the both of us.
It has also been incredibly fun and informative in ways I did not expect.
So naturally, I went and screwed it all up.
No, I actually did just about everything right, to the best of my ability.
I adequately planned my shoots, my captures and my edits. I had very few issues with my equipment.
I mean, my microphone died for a bit, and the used tapes started distorting, and I completely lost one fairly important shot.
But that's about 5% of the total work I've done.
We filmed 2 days, and filled a total of 7 tapes (about 15 total hours of filming)
Capturing takes about 3 times the amount of time you have taped (21 hours of capturing. You have to go through the tape, identify the take you want to keep, log the time on the tape it's at, and then import it at real time into the computer[real-time is 1hr. taking 1hr.])
The final video is 1hr. 45min. in length. (That is A LOT of video to make. Feature films hit that kind of length. and for further perspective, my "Dancing with the Athens Stars" video took 2 weeks to make[~40hrs.], and was 1min. 30sec. in length)
This video project also features about 10 animations, which only are about 1min. each, but a handful of them required frame-by-frame animation. (30frames/second, 60seconds/minute = 900frames)
a 1min. animation typically took me 4-5hrs. to complete (so that's 40-50hrs. for 10[we'll call it 45])
That's puts me at 75 hours, without factoring in any editing at all. And honestly, I'm very bad at logging times that I edit, so I cannot in any reasonable certainty make a claim for how long I spent before the apple war.
I lost 8 days of work due to Macs being unfriendly, and Hocking's network randomly exploding.
I gave up trying to make it work Thursday, evening, when I was at the school waiting for the file to transfer to my laptop. It would get to like 80%, then crash for no reason. The file simply forgot where it was going, and a few times, my laptop froze up.
The reason I was doing anything on the macs at all, was because I was about half-way finished with the project, when I took on the responsibility of the Campus Radio Station manager. I get paid for 15 hours/week of work, but I'm putting about 40 into it, because I want to to be awesome.
I have 20hrs./wk. of classes. So, I'm at the school roughly 60hours per week, now. So a fat lot of good it does me to have my PC at home. I wish that my laptop had a firewire port on it, because I likely would have done the entire project on it; I would have been able to avoid the hassle I wound up in.
So I figured, "Hey, if I'm here in the lab, I might as well use final cut to continue working on this! I'll just make the second half right here, then ship it on over!
Well, that consisted of about 3 hours worth of 1080p HD video. So Final Cut exported the video, which came to about 60GB in size. That, alone, took 27 hours. So, I left it overnight. It finished in the morning, and I set it up to transfer over the network, and it failed 4 times at 5hours per attempt. I finally got it on the 6th try. And here's the fun part.
I took it home.
And even though I had recorded in a file format that is SUPPOSED to be cross-platform,
it had an apple-exclusive codec imbedded in it.
Basically, I waited and and waited for Iron Man 3 to come out, bought a ticket, drink, and candy.
I got all cozy in my seat, felt the stickiness of the floor beneath my feet.
Then the opening credits roll!
And the WHOLE GOD DAMN THING IS IN MANDARIN
I DON'T SPEAK CHINESE!
That's what happened inside my computer.
So, this puts me at Thursday night. I recapture my 3 hours of footage (9hours down), and let it do its thing.
Friday morning, I wake up at 8am. I know that I have to get busting on this, stat, and not let up. Because it will literally take every minute of the next few days to make this right again.
To clarify, I had already planned to be working on it on these days. I had it planned out that I could put in about 6 hours of work per day, about 4 days a week.
Easy peasy.
Well, I ended up putting 4 of them during birthweekend.
It wasn't that big of a deal, because of the easiness in which I had scheduled myself.
So, in the 4 days I worked on the macs, I brought myself up to the point I had planned myself to be.
Then those 8 days worth became useless, and the last 4 days of my plan, needed to have that additional 8 days crammed ontop of it.
I completed 12 days of work in 4.
12 energy drinks, 3 beers, and 2 pizzas.
And a few gallons of water so the energy drink didn't give me heart palpitations; however, my ears started hurting, one night.
I was awake for 115 straight hours; 72 of them, working. also handfuls more, waiting on renders to complete. I did take a few breaks, to eat, and shower, and just NOT be at the computer for an hour or so.
All in all, I'd say this project has taken me between 250-300 hours. not bad for a month and a half.
Currently, it is not finished, in its entirety. The video, itself is! but it's being written. 50% at 3hrs. in.
And that's not even burning it to disk, yet. Product ships on Thursday. 100 copies of this video. They are all going to be sold.
As frustrating as this career can be, the fact that I can pour 300 hours onto something, and not even be mad about it, is wonderful. And I've done that on some video games over the course of about a year, but I did this in 6 weeks. And those 100 copies will be seen by 100 people.
It always bewilders and humbles me when I am able to take a minute to breathe, and think about the fact SO many people are able to see my creative works.
And that, friends, is what keeps me doing this. The fact that I make something that I think is awesome, and have that feeling reciprocated, drives me.
What's even better is the fact that this DVD is the FIRST in the series.
And I get better with everything I do.
I can't wait to see what the last installment looks like!
No comments:
Post a Comment