Legend has it that if you wander the Britney Wastes for ten years you will find Bowieburg
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Editing the intro right now. I just realized, if I open the film with footage of logging into WorldsChat, I can show off my cheeky Philip K Dick username.
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I’m now working on implementing the “special effects” of the film – cropping the WorldsChat HUD out of every shot, placing in the excellent animations that @HOBO made for the film, setting up a reactive visual waveform that will correspond with the interviewee’s speech… It’s turning out to be a rather lengthy process! It’s a little dull, but to be honest it actually feels kind of liberating; all the creative work is done, now I just have to do the gruntwork to make it all hang together.
I realized today that some of my footage got converted to a lossy format some time around 2015, and now it looks like garbage. Luckily I am very careful to back up and preserve all my working files for my films, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to track down the original uncompressed files and replace the lossy stuff.
I keep encountering very weird behaviors in Premiere as it struggles to deal with Techsmith’s crappy Camtasia codecs. Note to anyone out there who wants to do serious filmmaking using screen capture footage: DO NOT USE CAMTASIA. Even when you export uncompressed AVI, it still wraps it up in all this weird proprietary garbage. I had to download two obsolete codecs just to get the videos to open on my current computer.
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there hasn’t been any good reason to use Camtasia for years, it’s totally obsoleted by built in tools, it drives me nuts that it still hangs on
I haven’t been up to date with screen capture stuff in years but back in the day fraps was still king for lossless recording. And absolutely massive files.
Fraps hasn’t really been a thing since all hardware has been able to do built in h264 encoding (so since 2010 or thereabouts) other than for people who are still using Thunderbird and the like because they stopped learning about new software in 2005
Technically there wasn’t an officially sanctioned built in h264 capture solution for Windows (as opposed to Mac OS and Linux which are generally less inclined to let third parties shit all over their platform) until Windows 10 so there was never an obvious alternative to Fraps and Camtasia, and h264 is lossy but if your bitrate is high enough the artifacting isn’t really noticeable for desktop recording the way it would be for eg film
That’s accurate to my experience. The only reason I used Camtasia back then was because I was running Windows 7 and there was no built in screen capture software.
There’s built in screen capture software in Windows 10 but it’s hidden away in the weird Xbox app, and it’s fairly unintuitive to activate. It stores your files in a crappy Xbox interface too. But it does do the job and at least you don’t have to install anything.
I’m still pluggin’ away at this. Today I went to render my sequence in Premiere, and the software gave me a totally vague and mystifying error. Then when I tried to save, it gave me the same error, over and over!
After a brief burst of panic, I realized these errors were happening because the hard drive my project was saved on was totally full. I transferred over to a bigger hard drive and everything went back to normal.
Let this be a lesson to you!
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Good to hear! The horror of hard drive space will forever be etched into my brain, obsessively checking every now and then, likely until I stop using computers. I guess I’m glad most commercial hard drives are a lot better than they used to be, particularly with regards to error correction.
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I have to say, the single biggest failing of my undergraduate film education was the lack of training in After Effects. I’ve managed to get by without it for quite a while, but I have to finally learn it for this film. Luckily all I’m making is a simple waveform effect, so at least I’m not trying to do anything too crazy.
I am, believe it or not, still working on this (now and then). The other day I finally figured out what font to use for the credits – a public domain knockoff of the Chicago font that Apple computers used to use back in the 90’s.
I’m going to display the credits in the little windows Bachelor made.
I’m thinking about having a little cursor move around and click the windows closed before new ones with new credits pop up. Depends on how tough it would be to implement! I wonder if there’s any way to turn my computer cursor into an old school pixelated cursor and screen capture it.
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At that I wonder if it’d be easier to capture a mouse movement and then rotoscope a cursor image in AfterEffects
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I have no idea how to do that but it sounds like a good strategy! I’m actually just beginning to learn After Effects (which is ridiculous of me, having already completed a feature film). I’m going to have to read up on the rotoscoping effect.
Ah, I was thinking – animating a mouse cursor would be pretty easy, but capturing lifelike movement wouldn’t necessarily. But, if you capture desktop footage of clicking on a button, you could load that footage in After Effects and frame-by-frame move a fake cursor sprite to match the footage, then delete your footage layer and bring the clip back to your main movie project.
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I was considering the same thing, re: capturing natural mouse movement instead of animating. I like the way you think! I’m going to capture some regular-ass mouse footage and look into rotoscoping if I can find a good vintage cursor jpeg.
I love hacky solutions!
Or rather, that’s not even a context that applies to film where it’s normally one-and-done, next to games where we always have to worry about reusing every tool. It makes movies feel a lot more spontaneous.
This should be pretty easy to do, I think old mouse cursor skins are available in stock Windows if not macOS. Which OS would you be using?
I’m using Windows 10. It does look like I can set it to use an older version of the Windows cursor. It doesn’t scream “old cursor” but it would do the job.
I’m not trying to directly replicate an old Mac or Windows OS, I’m really more throwing around a lot of incompatible “old software” signifiers to just get a general atmosphere going. I love the windows @HOBO created, they scream old OS, but they have their own interesting aesthetic identity.
NO THEY ARE FROM HYPERCARD AND HYPERCARD IS REAL
I mean, I knew they were in the Hypercard style, but I didn’t think they were exactly standard-issue hypercard windows. Is that little earth icon in the upper left a Hypercard thing?
Felix ITT bolstering my anxieties that big computer dorks would get mad at me not being period accurate in my film.
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