Back.

[hmpf]

And already - mostly - caught up with LJ! Do I rule or do I rule?!

How was the trip? Mostly, it went thus: drive up to early-medieval slavonic fort; climb remains of fort; walk around top of fort in a circle; clamber down; get back into coach; drive to next fort; rinse and repeat.

Oh, and there was a lot of standing around in little clusters of people in the cold, cold wind, trying to warm each other penguin style by pressing close against each other. (It works!)

Also, on the coach, in between ritualistic fort-circlings, I listened to the Life On Mars soundtrack more than was good for my sanity (discussion to follow), and bred insistent bunnies, both for vids and fic. Eventually I gave in and started to write a fic, so now I have another writing fandom. Yay. Not. The vid bunny, in the meantime, is quite frustrating as it's *extremely* well-developed, but very nearly impossible for me to follow up on since I don't own proper video editing software. I've got a complete script for the vid, though, and would love to make it.

Also on the Life On Mars front: selenak has been gushing eloquently about the show recently, and I was very pleased to find that flurblewig posted this while I was away. It's magnificently disturbing, and exemplifies the kind of fic I sort of wished for last week in this post. If this should turn into a trend, I'll wholeheartedly encourage it! (And yes, my fic bunny is a crazy-ass AU one, as well.)

Comments

Re: Vid

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

What's the reason you can't make the vid? Is it that it requires complex effects? If not, you can pretty much make it with Windows Movie Maker which is a free download. Is it because you can't rip the episodes to make it? That can be solved by yours truly sending you some software. Is it because you're worried about how to actually go about it? There are numerous tutorials available, plus I could give you a hand. I didn't know what I was doing when I started making videos (she says, talking like she's made a million; the actual number is three) and it went mostly okay... You should make this video!

TBRFKASK

Re: Vid

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

The problem is that my Movie Maker keeps crashing, taking all my work with it. It's not much fun working with it if that continues to happen...

Also, I'm not sure it's possible to do really precise editing with it.

Re: Vid

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

I've found the trick with movie maker when it claims to be crashing is just to be patient and quite often it'll sort itself out. Also, if it does crash, nine times out of ten, it'll ask you if you want to retrieve your work when you restart it (having autosaved it). Then again, this could just be *my* WMM considering it's precarious nature.

Re: Really precise editing...it's harder because you can't only cut frames in chunks of either four or seven (depending on your edition), and it's also a little...slippy? Um...as in, what you think your last frame is, isn't always your last frame. So a lot of it is trial and error, rendering and seeing how it plays as a finished movie (which is why it's good to render partially done movies just to see.) Basically, when you can't shave off a single frame, it just means being fiddly - adding *more* to the end of a clip so you can shave off *more* frames, but still cumulatively end up with one fewer. If that even begins to make sense. But yes, I begin to understand your confusion.

So I would like to submit ANOTHER reason Britain beats Australia.

Britain has me, and if you lived here, you could come around and we could geek out and I could help you with WMM issues! We could have vidding geek outs!

Oh, and also, score for Plymouth - I now know where the artsy cinema is. Yay me!

TBRFKASK

Re: Vid

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Damn, I've got the seven frames edition. How crappy is that? :-(

Still, making good progress, sort of. Only I don't know what to do about the ghost frames that keep cropping up. They must be somewhere in the middle of the seven-frames chunks, 'cause I can never see them when I'm freezing the clip, so I can't edit them out. I only see them when the clip's running.

Arrrgh.

There's another reason for Britain, actually:

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Hot British men. *g*

The best reason's still you, though. ;-)

Oh, did I mention the Doctor has arrived? He has a place of honour in my bookcase now, together with the Slitheen (poor Slitheen - no one bothered to tell me its first name!) They arrived just before I left for my study trip, which is why I forgot to mention it earlier.

Re: There's another reason for Britain, actually:

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Blon Felfotch Passimir De Slitheen.

Or at least, that's the girl's name.

Re: Vidding - yeah, the ghost frames suck. I could explain it better to you if I were *there* to show you, but basically, this is what I mean by "slippy". If you notice you have one, what you need to do, basically, is shave off a frame or two. Now, I know that's easier said than done what with the seven frame edition. But say you have a clip that's 88 frames with a ghost frame at the end. You need to to be, like, 83 frames. So *add* ten frames on the other end of the clip, so now it's 98 frames, then shave off 15 frames, and bingo! (And if you actually need 88 frames to fit into the beat, then I suggest...uh...adding more onto the non-ghost-framed-end?)

The way I usually get around having to do this fiddly work is to find the place where I *think* the scene changes, then shave off an extra few frames to be on the safe side.

And yes. I am better than all the hot british men. Go me!

...I need a...not angsty icon.

TBRFKASK

There's nothing...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

wrong with...

... angsty...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

icons.

Also,

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

yay for your icon because it's actually *legible*!!! I hate the fairly recent trend to produce completely illegible icons...

Re: Also,

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Hooray for legible icons! To be fair I do have one illegible icons texty thing (up above). I just liked it for the "the end" text. I don't think the illegible text is for anything other than flavour.

Although I do now have an irrational fear that I'm insulting vast swathes of humanity without my knowledge. Oh wait, I'm a cylon. What do I care about humanity?

TBRFKASK!