Snapshot, approaching Memorial Day

[bironic]

They Want More is going to show at WisCon this weekend. This will be its third screening, after Escapade and VidUKon. I don't know why it took me until yesterday to realize this, but hey: I made something popular! Cool! One day I may even be in the same room where it is shown.

Also, my Secret Garden vid is going to run in a Vividcon themed show,* which is super-awesome, a) because it's Vividcon and b) because it's not They Want More. No offense to dinosaurs and Elton John, but this one has languished in its shadow.

*This is assuming I can get the %^$*! encoding to work. LlamaEnc, Vividcon's special one-button MPEG (a.k.a. con DVD) encoding assistant, doesn't work on 64-bit computers (a.k.a. those running Windows 7) like the one I now use for vidding, and Adobe Premiere has approximately five thousand export options for MPEG/DVD, none of which appear to produce a correct vid. This may end up involving two computers.

Four times invited, four times I've gotten a little thrill in my chest and done a happy dance in my chair. There isn't much equivalent for fic; people don't generally ask to read your fic at a con or anything. For that, the thrill I get is when an insightful comment comes in. And since I'm a writer through and through for life, it... means more to me. We'll see how the fannish experience progresses.

Next goal is to have a vid accepted that I have submitted to a con for the occasion. *eyes SGA vid that is finally in progress again* *eyes WisCon vids with something to say themed vidshow I just found out about that is focused on social justice and science fiction that that vid would have been perfect for had the deadline not been a month ago* *still going to try to submit Soccer Practice for Club Vivid*

...

Am still valiantly attempting to produce an essay on consent play for the kink_bingo ramp-up to the next round. The trouble is, there is way too much to say about consent play for a single essay, and I haven't settled yet on an angle pulled from my 1,500-word outline/brain dump. Maybe there will be two angles. "Types of consent play you can think about for your story" and "Great tastes that taste great together" (a.k.a. most kinks + consent play = even better), maybe? But then that leaves out "Why consent play works for some people," which is a common question. Arg. Input welcome.

ETA: Maybe answering the "why" could involve ticking through the different kinds of consent/play, thereby taking care of angle one. With fic and occasionally film or TV examples.

...

Um, but also I have real life errands and such to accomplish, so really I shouldn't be writing this or thinking about a fannish essay so much as I should be focused on finding a car to replace my expiring one and preparing for a newly acquired freelance gig, &c &c.

Happy almost long weekend, everyone. (Or ordinary weekend, in which case, sorry.)

Comments

[bitter-crimson.livejournal.com]

I think I used the MPEG2-DVD settings last time when I did this, though I'm not positive. Anyway, select that from the "Format" drop-down in Export Media, and then make the rest of the settings match the settings on the VVC site. One nice thing I discovered about Premiere CS5 is it will do the letterboxing for you. So if you set your TV Standard to NTSC and your PAR to 4:3, and you're working with widescreen footage, it'll add the black bars itself, no need to fret about it. At least for me when I last did this, it kept my actual vid in the right aspect ratio, with the letterboxing. Anyway! Make the bitrate match the settings they give. Have your framerate match what you were editing in, or if you're not editing in either 29.97 or 23.976, then if it's 24 convert to 23.976 probably, and if it's neither of those, idk, choose one. :) If your footage is progressive, keep it progressive, and if it's interlaced select the matching type.

Things I don't recall and it's not mentioned on the VVC web site: the framerate part, whether it has to be progressive or interlaced or it doesn't matter. I guess you could ask them and find out. I leave the other settings alone. IDK what those GOP settings are and iirc I just left them alone. I think I did 2-pass VBR encoding at maximum depth with maximum render quality.

Oh, and up at the top, turn audio off. Here's the part that annoys me. VVC wants your audio in .wav or .aiff. IIRC when I tried using the audio settings ~here~ and setting the bitrate to whatever they wanted (they don't say on their website, which is super-useful, so I can't remember what it is, but I do remember when I submitted to VVC the one time in 2009 they came back to me and said they needed it in a particular bitrate too), I got an m2a or something file. So anyway I exported audio and video separately. So for audio I went to export "Windows Waveform," Uncompressed, 48000 Hz and 32 bit. I couldn't figure out a way to specify bitrate for a wav in Audacity. Trying to remember if I figured it out using any other program. Don't think so. Anywho. That was the issue I had with VVC way back when. Eventually after I fought with it for a while I was like "I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DO THIS," and I think they did it themselves or just used it like that.

But more recently laurashapiro used a vid of mine for VidUKon I think, and there I also used a 48000 Hz 32 bit uncompressed wav, and that was fine. Sooooooo. Maybe that is fine for VVC too now. If not it'd be nice if they put something about that on their web site. Who knows.

(eta: ahhh I remembered that if you select PCM for audio when you're doing the MPEG2-DVD encode, then it will do your audio as a WAV. But you can't control any of the settings and it's at 16 bit. Anywho but idk if that matters, who knows, stuff. I guess you could do it either way, since they accepted my 32 bit also. But don't do 32 bit float!)

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was super super helpful. And... it might have worked? It looks like a 4:3 letterboxed vid, anyway, with most settings matched to either the VVC instructions or your email, and the separate WAV file. I'll send to the mod and see if it's right. Thank you!!

[bitter-crimson.livejournal.com]

Yayyy, fingers crossed! :D :D :D