Tough part is over
UPDATE: When this was first posted, I didn’t stress what a help my teammate Ljubi has been. Without his dedication and work ethic, our film for Hindi would have never been made. Ljubi worked on editing this video for 24 hours straight with no sleep, then went back to the video room with Amit and I after our screening and stayed another few hours before finally going home. He’s the one who also supplied the great cameras we used. A big tip of the hat to him.
It’s been a while. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday was particularly fun. Did the Hindi final exam on Tuesday night, wrapped up short filming segment for the movie, then spent the night writing my report for grid integration. It went well – got a good result. On Wednesday night I met with the social-e team to figure out which teams advance to the 2nd round…it was a tough 3 hour session.
Check out the semi-finalists here.
I met up with Ljubi and Amit who were in the ‘video cave’ working on the Hindi film. Got there around 9:30pm and left at 5:30am. Ljubi had already been at it for 12+ hours. My solar home teammates came over at 10am and we finished our passive solar home project, report, and turned it in. I had a great time working with them.
I jetted over back to the video cave and we hit the ‘render’ button at 5pm…hoping it’d finish in time for class. We got a version of of the movie halfway through class, but it was 320×240 square. Ugh. We shot this nearly 1080i resolution! We showed it anyway and the response was great. After class Amit, Ljubi, and I went back to the video cave to continue making fixes. Amit and I left at 2:30am.
We want to fix some more things before hitting ‘render’ for the last time. We are having difficulty on two key aspects: a) audio cleaning. We have wind noise, airplane noise, etc in several scenes. I’m not comfortable operating in the audio space as I am in the video space, so it’s going to be a challenge to clean that out; and b) determining which export setting will give us what we want. This is an absolute nightmare. We have source footage in one format. We have our Final Cut Pro project settings to be a certain video format, pixel aspect ratio, etc. And we have the various outfile file formats, compression settings, etc to choose when we render the video. We just want the output to appear HD widescreen, but so many times it comes out as a square image when we open in Quicktime. Understanding this video file format mess is something I’ve struggled with before, but now it’s exacerbated because I’m working with HD footage for the first time…intended to be shown widescreen. If anyone has any pointers or people I can talk to, please let me know.
Apologies for the mini-rant, but this explains why you won’t see an upload for another 3 weeks. I want to get a HD high quality version and upload that to Vimeo so you can enjoy this in HD.