gwyn | post-partum and pre-menopausal

OK, the vid is done, and demuxed, and sent to VVC. The first attempt was bad, but since I haven't heard back on the second one, I'm assuming no news is good news and that

keiko_kirin's excellent advice worked. Compressor is not the least bit intuitive for a program. (Well, none of the FC Studio stuff is, but it's pretty confusing as confusing programs go. I understand from others that it is much-loathed.) I spent hours and hours poking around, trying things, making a hash of it. My .mov file is gorgeous, but I think it's saved the wrong way because it's also insanely huge, but I really do not know what to save this thing as -- FCP just has way too many settings. People are paralyzed when they have too many choices! Don't these people know this?

But anyway, the dirgey, angst-fest, poor woobie who dies all the time and loses everyone whinge of a Capt. Jack vid is in the can. I had some trouble with aspect ratios due to the DLs of season 2 eps often being different, and some of the clips have this weird video noise in them that I get sometimes from .avis, but I just didn't have time to worry about that. I've never worked so hard up against a deadlne before, and it freaks me out. I'm just not a procrastinator about timelines; I can't stand the pressure of working close to a due date. And now I have post-partum depression. I always get like this when I finish a vid that's really ... I dunno, important or emotional for me. There's this thing about Jack that I love, this underlying constant sense of grief that we get to see from time to time, that's made me want to vid him from the start. Nowhere was that more evident to me than when he and Gwen are sitting on the cliffside and talking about telling the families of the missing people who've been returned through the rift, and his reaction to when she challenges him that hasn't he ever lost anyone? And it's like that's all he's done, over and over, since being resurrected. And I love that about him, that he still carries on.

Anyways. My misery at trying to understand how to do things technologically that I have trouble understanding how to do is made worse when it's pre-period depression. Right before that time of the month, OMG, I am doom and gloom cubed. Everything makes me want to curl up in a ball and weep for days. I never even really realized what it was until many years ago, my Ex pointed out that I was practically suicidal for a few days every month and so he'd remind me, "Um, maybe it's just your pre-period depression talking?" in this small, terrified voice, because I think he was afraid I'd turn my suicidalness into homicidalness and kill him in his sleep (which I threatened to do on a number of occasions, so it wasn't like he was making that up out of whole cloth).

What's worse is that I've hit those lovely golden years ("That time of year thou mayest in me behold, when autumn leaves, or none, or few do hang...") of perimenopause, where you're still stuck with the effing thing but you get the joys of being menopausal. If this is the before, I really hate to thing of what the after is going to be like. Because my body is wreaking havoc on me without any kind of warning, and the headaches OMG (which I have right now, and it fracking hurts), and I am hoping to go to Cape Town next year but I wonder if my insane body will let me travel. I sleep for ridiculous amounts of time sometimes, and other times can't sleep at all, but I never know when this going to happen.

So of course, something like vidding, where I am frustrated by my lack of ability to grasp technical issues, balloons into this Huge Thing and the hormones just turn it crazy-making. And I don't think the vid is even that good! So it's like expending all this energy into something and sobbing and rending my garments, all for this thing that I want to set on fire. This is why I always say that vidders are insane. We are.

I wanted to work on some other vids but I have that whole post-partum thing going on. It's over, and I don't have to look at it for months, which is good, but OTOH, my baby! It's gone! Oy. Vidding is hard.

Current Mood: gloomy
Current Music: My neighbor's heavy metal and table saw

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

keerawa.livejournal.com

We are insane. No doubt. Llama Encoder keeps dying everyt time I try to encode my Torchwood vid. I've tried SIX formats so far. Last time it teased me by working for 3 seconds before it crashed. *whines*

From:

nagasvoice.livejournal.com

Yay for finishing vids!!
On medical issues, if your bod is going crazy on you re: perimenopause, if you haven't already (( do not wish to assume either way here) it may be time to talk to doctor about doing something, see if any improvements are possible.
Yes, there's good and sufficient medical reasons why some of us want our BC pills which are nobody else's bizness and which do not involve any threat of frustrating sperm cells, just in case the nosy pharmacist was busy having a tiz about religious convictions.

From:

gwyn-r.livejournal.com

I've managed to avoid more than a cursory talk with my doc until this year, but we kind of touched on things and then said we'd talk more next year. I'm just mostly being very avoidy about it, which is silly. The big thing I want to do is make sure everything's bioidentical, but I have a lot of research still to do. And there's the lingering issue of whether to ditch the ovaries, but I guess I'll cross this bridge when I come to it. When I was little, I wanted so badly to be a boy. Now I'm kind of there again!

From:

kirbyfest.livejournal.com

I am SO looking forward to your Jack vid.

No one really tells you how very much changes, physically, as you age. PMS for me is almost entirely different from what it was 10 years ago; can't wait to see what else is in store.

From:

gwyn-r.livejournal.com

You know, I never really have had a beta on it. Only one person has seen the finished vid. If you'd be interested in a beta, I could upload it for you. I probably still could tweak it somewhat; I don't necessarily have to have it match the one at VVC when I release it.

From:

kirbyfest.livejournal.com

I have never betaed a vid... and I'm not sure I'm the best one to do so? I don't often get half the things going on in terms of layers and subtext.

I could certainly comment on flow and pacing and the easy stuff, but those are all things you are very, very good at. :)

From:

destina.livejournal.com

Hey, at least you were able to submit your vid; I actually broke FCE. Yep, broke it. I've had the Mac three weeks, and I somehow screwed up the program so it won't render. So no vid for me. Next time you think you're the most technologically inept person on the planet, just think of me and smile, secure in the knowledge that you aren't.

From:

gwyn-r.livejournal.com

I'm so embarassed it took me so long to reply to this. I am so, so sorry that your vid didn't work out -- after all this cheerleading we did to you for the Mac, and then for that to happen... OMG. I don't think I could ever have gotten anything done at all without Barkley, Killa, Morgan, and Laura S when I was transitioning. It was so awful and confusing. The only reason I probably didn't break anything was solely due to them, and SDWolfpup, who actually came to my house to help me figure out why a transition wasn't working! It's just too fucking hard sometimes.

From:

destina.livejournal.com

Aw, don't be sorry. I get busy, too, and am not able to reply to stuff. :) I did get my vid in!! It takes a village, clearly; it took 90 minutes on the phone with Apple, an extension from VVCtech, some help from Laura, and other stuff to get it done, but I got it done. *g* Barkley had taught me a hell of a lot, but was gone that weekend, so it was just me and my frustration. (And let me tell you, even Apple couldn't solve the problem. I posted about it a bit. So I didn't feel that badly; I stumped the experts. Good times. *g*)

From:

keiko-kirin.livejournal.com

About your ginormous .mov file -- I think that's normal for the DV50 or DVCPRO50 setting. I've been assuming this is the nearly uncompressed .mov output -- as close to uncompressed as the vid can be. Ours was 1.3 GB for a song only slightly over 3 minutes. That size jibes with the .avi's we used to get from Premiere for a vid before we compressed it to a Divx file.

Compressor is one of the worst UIs I've ever seen, and I work with some pretty crappy UIs. But like I was saying to

klia, the problem with Compressor is that when you first open it, it's so opaque and unfriendly and unhelpful that we just assume we're too stupid to understand it. That's *not* what a good interface should do. That UI is a huge WTF was Apple thinking.

From:

sdwolfpup.livejournal.com

ADVENTIVE — Non native plant. Recently introduced and starting to spread into new places.

Gammaverse
"We’ll be ready."

Reena didn’t say anything to that, just turned back to her view from the very edge of the cliff and kept smiling, mysterious and hopeful. But she hadn’t turned him down or away, either, and silence was something Karl could work with. Working with silence was something Karl excelled at; hell, look at Charlie.

Charlie. That perverse bastard probably would have hated being stuck here, too, even though it made Karl’s own world look like even more of a shithole. The sun beat so bright against the tree line they stood above, that the green of it almost hurt his eyes. Karl took a real breath, deep and deep and deeper still, and choked. The air was too full; it felt thick and unfamiliar in his throat. "What is that?" he coughed out.

Reena breathed in; Karl watched her chest expand with it all. On the exhale she said, "our home."

Karl flushed, and moved to stand next to her right at the edge of the cliff, while the expanse of this new world rippled and glittered at his feet. Too many people would come, and they would all take more than they needed, but fighting impossible odds was something else Karl excelled at. He took in another breath.

From:

gwyn-r.livejournal.com

Aaaaaaahhhhh! I can't believe that LJ didn't send me comment notifications on any of the responses to this post, so I didn't even see this till today! I not only missed more joy day, I missed this wonderful gift and you probably thought I was the worst kind of ingrate. I am so sorry for being so rude!

Thank you thank you thank you. This is so lovely. Karl and Reena OTP!!! I would so much have loved to see more of them together in that future. I totally believe they CAN handle it, and make things right.