Aomen
Went to Macau over the weekend with CK. It was nice.
The people of Macau seem obsessed with cured meat. There are stalls selling the stuff all over the place, hawking myriad varieties - pork, chicken, beer, wild boar, "squab" - from various parts of the animals' bodies, in the form of square flat sheets.
The casinos are big and illuminated but seem confined to one small area of the city. We didn't go into any, mainly because it was near the end of the month and I therefore was finding it difficult to project an air of affluence.
However, we did go to Mass in ther cathedral (we happened to go in to look at Mass times when an anticipatory Mass was on) - it was in Portuguese, but I followed along well enough thanks to the Missal. CK didn't fare so well, once again proving that it really is worth doing Latin in school.
The churches in Macau are delightfully Iberian in character, with pictures and statues featuring that slightly brooding Lusitanian iconography which, to me, is a little alien but not unappealing. CK and I are now thinking about having our wedding there - it would solve a lot of the hassle of having the ceremony in either one of our home countries. The church of Sao Domingos would be our choice of venue, but unfortunately it is on the Largo do Senado, and it seems less than ideal to emerge from a wedding into a crowded shopping area. The cathedral is not so large as to be silly for a medium-scale wedding, so we're looking into that.
Photos soon.
Tuesday, February 27
Friday, February 2
Today I have been mostly editing videos
Ah, the joys of Premiere. I don't know how many cups of tea I've made today instead of sitting watching a progress bar as Adobe's finest renders the project workspace.
For reasons that I won't explore at this juncture, I have to sort out a bunch of videos in which the child actors were speaking way too fast to be understood by the students who are meant to be watching. The plan is simple - slow down everything by about 20%. The execution is not so simple.
Having brought in my laptop to the office yesterday and fired up Cubase, I had top-quality audio sorted in a matter of minutes. Why am I using music software to slow the audio separately? Because if you slow down the video and audio in Premiere (or whatever it was the original video editors tried to use), the pitch is lowered. And one of these teenage girls had a very low voice already, so it sounded really weird.
Sooo, I stripped out the audio and slowed it down in Cubase, which preserves the pitch. Very handy. But then I have to import the audio back to Premiere and sit around trying to synch up the slowed-down video and audio. That didn't take too long either, truth be told, although when you're trying to sort out lip-synching, an hour feels like... I don't know, two hours.
There's another problem, though. Due to me running Premiere on my work computer (I brought it in on my MP3 player - clever, eh?), which isn't a 'clean' video computer, you get slight problems with the imported file - dropped frames, sudden jumps, etc. At the original speed, that doesn't matter. It's one frame, people don't even notice. But once you slow it down, the errors are clearly visible. So my task today has been hunting down these rogue frames and replacing them - usually with duplicates fo the frames either side. When you're cutting to a close-up of someone speaking, this can make the solution about as bad as the problem.
Still, I'm trying my best. I'm typing this while rendering something slightly ambitious. There's an out of place freeze-frame in one bit that lasts 7 frames, so I'm attempting a fancy dissolve from one clip to the next.
It worked for Marty in Casino, why can't it work in an ELT video for junior high school students?
Ah, the joys of Premiere. I don't know how many cups of tea I've made today instead of sitting watching a progress bar as Adobe's finest renders the project workspace.
For reasons that I won't explore at this juncture, I have to sort out a bunch of videos in which the child actors were speaking way too fast to be understood by the students who are meant to be watching. The plan is simple - slow down everything by about 20%. The execution is not so simple.
Having brought in my laptop to the office yesterday and fired up Cubase, I had top-quality audio sorted in a matter of minutes. Why am I using music software to slow the audio separately? Because if you slow down the video and audio in Premiere (or whatever it was the original video editors tried to use), the pitch is lowered. And one of these teenage girls had a very low voice already, so it sounded really weird.
Sooo, I stripped out the audio and slowed it down in Cubase, which preserves the pitch. Very handy. But then I have to import the audio back to Premiere and sit around trying to synch up the slowed-down video and audio. That didn't take too long either, truth be told, although when you're trying to sort out lip-synching, an hour feels like... I don't know, two hours.
There's another problem, though. Due to me running Premiere on my work computer (I brought it in on my MP3 player - clever, eh?), which isn't a 'clean' video computer, you get slight problems with the imported file - dropped frames, sudden jumps, etc. At the original speed, that doesn't matter. It's one frame, people don't even notice. But once you slow it down, the errors are clearly visible. So my task today has been hunting down these rogue frames and replacing them - usually with duplicates fo the frames either side. When you're cutting to a close-up of someone speaking, this can make the solution about as bad as the problem.
Still, I'm trying my best. I'm typing this while rendering something slightly ambitious. There's an out of place freeze-frame in one bit that lasts 7 frames, so I'm attempting a fancy dissolve from one clip to the next.
It worked for Marty in Casino, why can't it work in an ELT video for junior high school students?
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