Arrrr! I can be a pirate now! Arrr!

[thistlechaser]

Keep FFXI down for 24 hours, see how many new skills Thistle can learn!

I can now be a software pirate! Arrrr!

In my efforts to make this &R*)$@*&$)!& video, I had to learn how to rip CDs into MP3s! Oh ho ho! You say that's something even little kids can do? Well, um, yeah. But I hadn't known how before now!

With much much help from Sylf (and a little belated tech support good sense on my own part), I finally got around the last problem with Adobe Premier Pro. But that required me finding a new copy of the song I wanted to use! So I googled and googled, but I couldn't find another MP3.

'Ah ha! But I think I have that song on CD!' *hunt*hunt* I did! But then the stupid moviemaking software wouldn't accept the CD's format, so I had to download some eye-patched software to make the CD song into a MP3.

Then I spent four hours (four hours!) trying to put it all together. (But at least the downtime tonight passed quickly!) Unfortunately when I was done the movie was complex enough that it took away from the total effect. So sad, so sad. I had two songs total and a handful of clips in the beginning (to show how cool the cutscene had been!), but one of the songs and the handful of clips had to go. A shame, as I spent more than an hour trying to get all that right... But I think it'll make the movie better in the end. I hope. I've watched the darned thing so often that if I hear the song once more I may kill.

Oh: And so so so much respect to Niala for the quality of her movies. I had fully intended to match the video up with the lyrics (there were parts that would have gone perfectly together!) but I just couldn't pull it off. (I would have had to pull clips and put them out of order and stuff -- seemed dishonest to do that.)

I had wanted to post a link tonight, but the stupid thing is still rendering. It spent a whole hour on the first step of it (and I got excited cause I thought it'd be totally finished in an hour), but then it started the second step and that's going to take another hour and a half. Bah. So maybe I can upload it tomorrow morning...

It's only a little over 3 minutes long, so hopefully the file size won't be too big. This early in the month I don't want to burn through all my bandwidth...

Edit: Bah. It finally finished and I'm watching it to check the quality. Why would all the text (in the chat window, on the macro bars, in the names over the characters' heads) look blurry? All the other video is fine and sharp. Can that be fixed? It's not perfect in the original video, but it's no where near unreadable.

And grrr, though it's only about 3 minutes long, somehow the final version is 27 minutes... 24 minutes of nothing but black. Bah.

Comments

[sylf.livejournal.com]

Did you compress it within Adobe? Don't do that, that's bad. xD You need to use VirtualDub to do that - what you want Adobe to spit out is a HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE .avi file that's uncompressed.

As for the 27 minutes long thing, make sure that your audio and video fields are all trimmed down to the end of the video and that you don't have any .jpgs or whatnot stretching way out too far.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Ah. I did export -> export ... um, whatever the option to make a WMP file is. I didn't use some other program to change its size/type of file.

And here I thought I got away with not having to deal with the big files you had to! :P

[sylf.livejournal.com]

Well, you can do it that way but your quality will probably suffer ^^;;. When I have more time I'll show you how to use VirtualDub. :>

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

No rush at all. I don't want to think about the video for a long while. :P Maybe I'll poke at it more over the weekend or something...

Thanks!

[lokyst.livejournal.com]

Why not edit it to your liking to synch with the lyrics? I've already done the video "documenting" the fight. :)

I know what you mean about it feeling like cheating, but my take on the matter is that so long as there's one ... err ... informative video about the fight, anything else is okay.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was leaning that way but wasn't totally sure. Since mine is only slightly less than 3 minutes out of an 8 minute fight, not's not like it could be fully representitive anyway. Maybe I will, once I can stand looking at the darned thing again!

Thanks!