(no subject)

I am just going to lie in a broken mass of ennui-laden limbs on the floor all day today. That's my tentative plan.

I am an idiot, I admit this. I spent, oh, like a week solid working on the footage for the doubleheader roller derby bout we did. It took me for-fucking ever, and I was having visions of gold and silver booty shorts in my sleep. It was awful, actually. I mean, it was satisfying, in that I was creating, sure, but it was maddening. I am terrible at video and it is extremely detail-oriented work, which I am bad at, and there is absolutely 0 room for artistic expression in this sort of thing-- unlike, say, a highlight reel, where you get to sort of pick what happens, I'm bound by just showing the facts, just the facts, in order, not sped up or slowed down or nothin'. It got a little crazy-making.

So I finished it, and couldn't bring myself to do the last bit of work.
What last bit of work?
Burning it.

I burned one copy of one of the bout movies, but not a whole full-on DVD-- it was just the bout, not quite done being edited (I had to add a little info at the end, I think, since I'm trying to make these into official records). Just so the team I gave it to got to watch it to learn from strategically. (I found out last night that they not only didn't watch it, they also didn't tell the team they had it, so the rest of the team was a bit confused when I asked how they'd liked it. FRUSTRATING, as I'd fucking killed myself to get that thing to them before the last bout, but WHATEVER.)

But other than that, i didn't do the final bit of work. I have to take the project in iMovie, you see, save it to a digital video (~30-45 min), transfer that file to the computer that has a DVD burner (30-60 min. with external drive, or 4 hours with wireless file transfer), and then import it into the DVD burning software, which recompresses it (about 4 hours). Then I have to import the highlight reels into the DVD burning software (probably about 30 min). Then I have to make a disc image (about 3 hours). From that disc image, which I will preserve forever enshrined on the external hard drive I keep all the roller derby video stuff on, I can "easily" (ha) burn as many copies as anyone wants. But to start with, I burn two copies for each team.
Each copy takes me about 30 minutes to burn, so that's a further four hours.
THEN I DO IT ALL AGAIN, because there were TWO BOUTS in that double-header game.

So when I said I was "done", I really had... *does the math*... twenty-six more hours' worth of work.

Do you see why I kind of couldn't face it?

But I have to do it now, since I have the next bout to work on and oh! don't have room on any of my hard drives until I get this all tidily packaged up into a disc image, which is probably all I'll save. There just isn't room for anything else. I've deleted so much stuff off my hard drive already... I'm like, my sister can just re-send me all those photos of my nephew... Pff.
Anyway.

Neither of the two bouts will save properly. The Alley Kats one saves with errors, which don't show up until I transfer the file; yesterday I spent 5 hours transferring the file wirelessly only to have it fail at the last second. Then I spent another 2 trying to get it onto the external hard drive.
Last night I gave up and saved the Hamilton one instead. I went to sleep with it still ticking over. I woke up this morning to it done, hurrah, and opened it up (Thank CHRIST I looked at it), only to discover that after 20 minutes of it being exactly as it should be, it abruptly goes to all-gray. And then the rest of the entire bout is just a blank gray screen.

I don't know why.

So I can't get either file out of iMovie into a digital video file.
There's no reason for it.
There's nothing I'm doing wrong.
I just can't do it.

(I also can't even delete the erroneous version of the Alley Kats file, i don't know why. It claims to still be in use, even though it shouldn't have let me put it into the Trash if that were the case.)

This is a fucking nightmare. Also I don't have detailed stats for the new bout I'm doing the footage of, so I am re-creating them by hand, by watching the fucking thing over and over, because what else can I do? IT'S NOT LIKE I CAN GET THE OTHER BOUT OFF MY FUCKING DESKTOP ALREADY.

So you see, I am extremely frustrated and now don't know whether the 30 or so hours of labor I had already put into this will be in vain or not. WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING. I DON'T KNOW.

Which is why last night when J asked who wants to take over the PR committee, and looked at me, I laughed out loud. Dude I can't hold my OWN shit together!! I cannot attempt to hold together the shit of the most heavily in-demand committee on this league. I tried for two years and if you go back and read my journal entries from that time period it actually literally drove me insane. I cannot do that.
I ESPECIALLY cannot do that when I have more than a full-time job in trying to do the bout DVDs.

There's a hole in the bucket.

For your consideration, a song I learned as a child.

HENRY: There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza
There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole.
( the lyrics, in their entirety. Do you really know them? )

Welcome to my life.

I have two bouts all assembled from laboriously hand-cut clips. Both are in iMovie. Both are complete.
To get them onto a DVD I need them to be a .dv file.
I can export to .dv from iMovie.
Bout 1 exports happily, plays fine, has an error at the end after the movie is over. Weird, I know. Because of this error, I cannot get the file to go onto the external hard drive, or onto the other computer.
A complicating factor I must mention is that the external hard drive is formatted in FAT32, which is the only disk format that plays nice with both Windows and Mac. Why is this necessary? Aha, the guy with the cameras is a Windows-only kind of Philistine. His external hard drive has disc errors in it, which is why a jam is missing from the Icebreaker footage-- disc error. (THAT drove me NUTS trying to figure out, I might mention.) So we have to use ours, which meant we had to reformat it.
No biggie, EXCEPT: FAT32 cannot accomodate files larger than 2 GB.
2 GB is laughably tiny when working with video.
So Z had to make this sparsebundle thing shortcut, which I have to mount like a separate drive, and I can save large files to it-- it chops them up into 8-MB sections. Labor-intensive, and prone to errors, but Z promises it's fine.
Fine.
Except I can't drag the file to the disk because there are errors in it.

So I open it up in MPEG Streamclip, and just chop the last few seconds off. Boom-- errors gone!
BUT WAIT. I cannot now save it. Why? Because MPEG Streamclip cannot save over a file-- it always creates a new one. There's no Save, only Save As.
I don't have an extra 9 GB, not even for a few seconds. It can't save over the error-full file. I can't delete the old file until the new one is done writing. There isn't room for the new one to write.
I can't save the new one to the external, because it's more than 2 GB, and the sparsebundle shortcut doesn't work as an option in MPEG Streamclip for some reason.
I can't drag the old one to the external to make room for the new one, BECAUSE THERE'S AN ERROR IN THE FILE WHICH IS WHY I'M DOING ALL THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE.

I've spent two days on this so far, you realize.

victory is miiiiiine

Ha!
1) the reason the files were getting errors when i saved directly to the external in method like umpty-zillion that I tried was that Z had made a mistake in setting up the workaround thingy to save files over 4 GB to the external. But then he fixed it and it worked. One of the two worked, anyway. So I am in the process of recompressing and then I can burn that as a DVD. Maybeish. Probably. Anyway, 30-40% chance I can get it done by tomorrow.

2) I won two free tickets to DC tomorrow in the drawing they did! Yes!!! I didn't know how many people entered so I don't know what the odds were, but I had decided not to go, and then had realized that I need to have meetings with like everyone who's going to be on the bus so if I went I could get way more done, so basically I needed to go, even though I'd decided I was way too tired, too broke, and too busy. So winning tickets at least meant that the broke part is taken care of, and the meetings I'm going to have will help with the too busy. I'm going to bring a power strip and work the whole way down with the head ref on reverse-engineering the jam stats from the last bout, which they didn't write down during the bout-- I know, WTF?????-- but i won't complain too much because I feel like our refs are really working super-hard this season and making great progress. I just don't grok how they have so many people and yet can't write down stats! It seems weird. But I suppose they just finally have enough people to man the outside fully-- it does take a lot of folks-- and not so many with time for pencils. Anyway. So we're going to figure it out looking at the video.
Hopefully I will also have time to bang through a bunch of the stuff for the next bout's raw footage, while I'm at it. Because that's what I need to do this weekend and if I can get it done while on a stupid-long car ride, so much the better. I need some sort of talisman against motion sickness.

So I am victorious.
Z needed to get out of the house so we went to dinner tonight at our favorite place. It was busy. I had a beer. Then we went to the grocery store to pick up some travelin' snacks. By the time we got to the pop aisle I was leaning on the cart handle. I have been literally stammering with weariness all the way home. I need to sleep NOW.
I guess I'm packing tomorrow. Here's hoping I don't oversleep or I'll be going nude to DC.

But anyway-- victory!! huzzah!!!

supposed to be asleep

I have to be up in mm, three hours. W-evs.
I just wanted to post about this, as I've seen it mentioned a lot by local peeps but don't know if any of y'alls who aren't from around here know this.

So last week a commuter plane with 49 people on it crashed into a house in a suburb of the city where I live, killing the father of the small family that lived there.
It was pretty upsetting. There were no survivors. The mother of the family got out with her kids, but the house was destroyed. Firefighters responding to the scene were unable to approach it because there were 5,000 pounds of fuel onboard the plane when it hit, and the wreckage remained too hot to approach for hours.
They say it was caused by ice on the wings of the plane. It was mostly local people onboard, returning home from business trips.

The Westboro Baptist Church plans to picket the memorial for the crash, the funeral of one of the victims, and the funeral of the pilot.

I don't know why; their reasoning is pretty incoherent. But apparently they believe that funerals are wrong and memorial services worship the dead? That's all that they can, apparently, come up with.

Yeah. Just wanted to mention that.