editing and walking

Editing
The third day of concentrated editing and my brain is beginning to freeze up. Looking at hours and hours of interviews, and slowly cutting them down, removing the usable segments is very intensive work and even though I’m getting to the end, I’m having to stop more and more often.

I think once I switch (which I will tomorrow) to the more creative side of the edit – assembling the sequences from my raw material, things will be a little easier.

All of this isn’t helped by the fact that the tapes (or actually the capturing of them) seem to be subject to dropout and sync problems which I’m constantly trying to edit around. I’m hoping it’s to do with the capturing rather than my camera. Having switched to capturing with Liquid rather than Premiere, the sync problem seems to have cleared up and the dropout isn’t as bad as before, but the shots now seem to have lots of little jumps – which don’t seem to be there on the original tapes.

It’s possible that the problem has something to do with the slowing down of my main PC (which this morning seems to have completely given up – reporting that “windows can’t be used until it’s registered with Microsoft” and then informing me that it already has been and shutting down.

Not good – but I’ve now shifted pretty much everything to the new machine anyway.

I’ve decided to go on as though the dropouts aren’t there, and then re-capture any sections I eventually use in the finished piece if there are problems. This saves me from having to confront the problem unnecessarily.

New Documentaries
I also managed to do a bit of a test for my new set of documentaries. I bought a quadruped walk cycle from Turbosquid.com.

What the hell’s that?
Well, basically somebody’s animated a four legged skeleton which I’ve bought and tied one of my own models to it so that my animal model is doing the walking.

I managed to do this without too much difficulty, so I’ve proved the idea that I can get someone else to do my complex animations on simple bone structures and then tie them easily to my models (of dinosaurs and such) and finish of the animations, lighting, textures and compositing myself.

This should save me a lot of time and effort – if I can find an animator (probably on elance) who can do the motions for me.

Here’s my animation: