Rendering Hell

flix

I don’t have my laptop for the next few days; I feel so naked.

I’m currently editing Alan Dunkel’s music video for “The Waiting Game,” and the Hella Fresh feature film “Devious, Inc.” (A Samantha Sullivan Production directed by xuxE). Both are shot in HD on Sony XDCAM EX media.

So I’m rendering both down… initially rendering Devious on the G5 was going to take 6 days. That means I wouldn’t be able to edit this weekend; it would be ready to edit late Tuesday night. I moved it to render on my laptop, taking a paltry 3 days. So it’s sitting at home. Sad.

Office Coffee and Sustainability

stardate

Second day at work.

There’s this insane coffee machine from Flavia which is on a pod system. Not only is the machine a huge hulk the size of a small beer refrigerator, it’s also accompanied by a giant caddy of all the different drink flavors. Each flavor pack comes in a plastic pouch with a plastic nozzle on the top. You put the entire pouch in the machine and it accumulates the used, empty pouches.

Some drinks take two pouches.   Example: to make a cappuccino you select cappucino, then the door opens, and you put in the creamy topping pouch.  The machine closes and makes the foam.  Then the door opens again and you put in the coffee pouch of your choice.  There’s also a Milky Way topping, which I initially screwed up because I didn’t understand it was a topping and not a drink.  Anyway, it’s a lot of garbage for a coffee.

On top of the superautomatic espresso machine are a bunch of little earthenware pots, which coworkers use for drinking espresso. They look suspiciously like the yogurt pots that St Benoit comes in. The cups have La Fermiere and “www.cermer.com” on them. So… yes. They are yogurt pots. No one here seemed to know this. Whatever. At least we’re reusing something. Although in real life you’re supposed to take those pots back to the store…

The Passion of Joan of Arc

looky

I’m watching The Passion of Joan of Arc, durected by Carl Theodor Dreyer. It’s a silent movie from 1928 and obviously all in black and white.

St. Joan is pretty weird lookin in this one. Played by Maria Falconetti (aka Renée Jeanne Falconetti), she’s described as “haunting” in the dust jacket, and I’d have to go with that. Many of her shots are from below, and she has a giant round face. She has very short hair that makes her look like an androgynous man. Her eyes are glazed over with a manic, spacey look that makes her seem like a cult victim. Which I guess arguably she was. They eye-light every shot of her, which gives her eyes a glossy and watery look.

This film has a history – it was heavily censored, and then entirely lost, while the director was still alive. That must have been terrible. He died thinking his movie was gone forever; he tried to cut together another copy made from alternate takes, basically from scraps. Come to think of it, that would be pretty awesome to see also. It could be the lost lost film.

Anyway, recently in 1981 someone found a copy in a closet in a mental institution in Oslo. Uh yeah. The skeptic in me wonders whether this is really the original, since no one alive is around who could tell the diffference.

One nice thing about this release – it has a soundtrack, which is awesome, since obviously the original was lost. The one that comes with the movie is Richard Einhorn’s 1994 “Voices of Light”. However something that is kind of crazy: there are at least two other “soundtracks” for this movie, including two different versions by electronica groups “The Nursery” and “Ugress.” I’m not sure if they’d fit directly with the movie or not.

SimpleTech by Fabrik sucks

stardate

I just bought a 1TB external hard drive from SimpleTech / Fabrik, and it is the worst piece of garbage imaginable.

Firstly, the drive comes pre-formatted for PC, which ordinarily wouldn’t be a problem, but it’s formatted read-only, so to use it for ANYTHING I have to completely erase the drive.

Secondly, when attempting to erase the drive with Disk Utility, something about the drive makes the erase operation fail. I tried MS-DOS FAT, which seemed to work, before giving me an error upon trying to use it. Formatting to Mac Extended gives an error immediately.

I’m just considering myself fortunate that I don’t need this in the next few hours.

UPDATE: oddly, someone from SimpleTech saw my posting and sent me a personal email. She apologized for my experience and I sent her some notes. Apparently there is a separate product line that the same company makes which is meant for Mac called G-Technology.

I ended up getting something on special from Fry’s mail order, a 1TB “FreeAgent Pro” from Seagate. The funny thing about this one is it has a glowing bar on it that serves absolutely no purpose other than looking like a prop from a 1980’s sci-fi movie. It does not have a Firewire 800 interface (the SimpleTech one did), which is a bummer, but I’ll take what I can get at this point.

My files are copying now; it’s around 400GB which will take something like 6 hours to duplicate.

Z Channel notes

looky

I saw “Z Channel – A Magnificent Obsession,” which was pretty cool. I wonder if there are copies of the magazine Z Channel used to put out, floating around on ebay?

Here’s a list of movies mentioned in “Z Channel” that sounded interesting.

  • A Safe Place (Jack Nicholson)
  • Images (Altman)
  • Welcome to LA (1976)
  • Madchen in Uniform (1931)
  • 400 Blows
  • Dance of the Vampires
  • Overlord (1975) – Stuart Cooper
  • Fingers (Harvey Keitel)
  • (Andrei Rublev)
  • Heaven’s Gate (1980)
  • Decline of Western Civilization
  • Bad Timing (1980)
  • The Important Thing Is to Love (Main thing?)
  • McCabe & Mrs. Miller
  • Le Magnefique
  • Berlin Alexanderplatz (it’s 12 hours!)
  • 1900 (5 1/2 hours!)
  • (director Sam Peckinpah)
  • (director Claude Chabrol)
  • Once Upon A Time In America
  • Wife Mistress
  • Lady on the Bus
  • Turkish Delight (Verhoven)
  • The 4th Man (Verhoven)
  • Soldier of Orange (Verhoven)
  • Flesh & Blood (Verhoven)
  • Spetters (Verhoven)
  • Katie Tippel (Verhoven – Kaetje?)
  • Salvadore (James Woods)
  • Something of Value (1957)

UPDATE: Looks like Wikipedia has a page with a more complete list

Enka 8-track Transcription

music

This 8-track tape belonged to my grandparents.
It’s Enka; I can’t really read it.
I ripped it to mp3, and transcribed the titles and artists for future analysis.

It’s titled
“トップスターによる心にこる大演歌”

It was released by Nippon-Columbia – 8WY-1021

TRACK 1

TRACK 2

TRACK 3

TRACK 4

Truffault Makes Me Violent

looky

I’m watching Day For Night and maybe it’s just too French for me. If someone asked me, earnestly and without irony, if “women are magic,” I think I’d have to punch him straight in the face.

YOUNG ACTOR: Doom?
BRAIN: What, dammit.
YOUNG ACTOR: Are women magic?
*chud!*

Pretentious emo fuckwit.

Also, while they are filming this giant movie, they haven’t even finished the script yet, which seems implausbibly irresponsible. Maybe I’m just naive.

Truffault himself is very inspiring, however: he started making films when he was 25, and set out to make 30 films before he retired. He averaged something like one film a year until he died from brain cancer at age 52, five short of his goal. He packed a lot of living into a short amount of time.