somniloquence

The Life on Mars vid I've been nattering about is finished and now posted to my site. I'm Immortal (dudes! Stop flailing! It says I'M Immortal, not MY Immortal -- geez Louise, don't you know me better than that?) is largely Sam-focused, even though I think it started out in my mind originally as very Sam and Gene-centric. If anyone's even remotely interested, I could put process notes up later.

It's not beta'd. I normally am all over beta and critique for everything I do, but sometimes, like with Santa Monica, I just am having too much fun and liking what I've done, and I don't want anyone harshing my glow or killing my buzz. It might mean a less successful vid (and people are always, always welcome to send me critique about the vid -- not about me, though), but right now I'm just basking in my new fannish love glow. Except...

This is my first time working from .avi files taken off the Intarwebs, and I think the visual quality in compression has really suffered for it in a way I couldn't see initially. Everything looks loverly in the full quality movie file on large screen, but when I use the same codec and compression settings as I always (successfully) do for a web file, it's becoming highly pixelated in spots that didn't pixelate before.

But! If you view the window at half size, it looks dandy. I'll keep futzing with it. Increasing the size doesn't seem to have a noticeable impact, but I will keep bumping the numbers up and see -- though I'm afraid I might have a 50MB+ file by the time it looks any better. For now, I guess I'd just say, get a DVD from me of our latest disc ;-) or view it in a postage-stamp sized window. Sigh. I can't win at this game, I swear. Maybe I should just -- shudder -- remake the whole vid with a friend's R2 dvds... brrrr. My apologies for being such a technical putz. ETA:I've made a file that's about 10 more MB in size that seems to have smoothed out a lot of the pixelization. I'm sorry for the huge size. Right now I have both options, but the larger one looks a lot better.

I'm Immortal
Artist: The Trash Can Sinatras
File: QT Divx avi, 38 MB
There could be worse things than living in 1973. You could be dead in 2006.

Last night, I dreamt that I was working on my Life on Mars vid. I've dreamed about vidding before, but it wasn't anything hugely specific. This time, because the meds I've been taking lately at the behest of my doctor make my dreams horrifically vivid and always filled with nasty stuff and quite long, the actual work I did in the dream was very clear. Unfortunately, even now, I can only ever remember tiny bits and pieces of my dreams. Most of the time, I can't remember them at all. I try really hard to make mental notes but they always disappear, even if the dream was just as I was getting ready to wake up and start my day. People always natter at me about keeping a journal by the bed, but I can't do that. Once I'm awake enough to write something down (or speak into a recorder), I will never go back to sleep and my chronic insomnia is bad enough without that adding to it.

But this was really interesting. I was stuck on a line at one point, where the singer is repeating the word "Gingerly" a couple times, and I was deciding what clips to put in there. I'll have to go back through the discs but I think I might even be able to find the clips that I was putting in there in the dream -- they were good choices, I think. I hope.

I guess it's a sign to finish off the damn BSG vid for Vividcon premieres and get going on Life on Mars. Maybe this will make it easier. I think I need a LoM icon now. Any place one can find them?

It is already almost in the 90s here this morning. I'm dying. I came hom from hot, sweaty NY to hot, sweaty Seattle: This isn't supposed to happen!!