A bit of a slow day today. I'm getting tired of video work and want to complete Burn of God but the task seems difficult. Why? The solution is to calculate the steps needed and divide them into smaller steps. Any job, even putting man on the moon, can be accomplished by one man if the steps are small enough and there is enough time.
First I added a year's worth of sales to the sound effects I sell on the Scirra website. I created a spreadsheet to help with this, but it did involve typing 71 sales' worth of discounts, dates, durations. This took over an hour, but the monotony and memory training was good.
Then my ordered time-lapse intervalometer arrived (a weird word!) - it's simply a camera shutter button with a clock built in, so I set up the camera to take a series of photos of the sunset at one frame per second. We've had some great skies here recently (sadly, this might be due to the Australian fires which are raging at the moment, particulates in the atmosphere causing beauty; echoes of the Tambora eruption). The results were excellent, far better than with my Brinno camera. Here's a still:
Of course, with all of these things, the scene itself is key. The nice clouds today were all north, this is a south view, and there's always a bit of luck in the way clouds move. There are so many birds that the scene flickers with their black pepper. This was a good test, and helped gauge the file sizes. My camera can photograph at 1920x1280, which is a good size for film. Any bigger would take up too much space. This film of 01:25 takes up about 1Gb of space for its frames, which is a lot. Converting the images to HD (1280x720) but png makes the file sizes about 25% bigger. It might even reduce quality, as a later jpg which is shrunk for the film might look better than a png at that size (I guess that it won't though, as the reduction to a lossless format should preserve quality better than a reduction to the final format, but I would imagine the differences would be so negligible to be as good as none existent).
I've also edited the guitars on my Skeletons song. I need to get working on the album now. I can't call myself an artist unless I'm making art. Sometime art is about working on procedures, slow learning, practice, but the goal of art is creation, not research. Nobody remembers Mozart for his research days... yet, even he had to practice.
The creative war is one of patience vs. impatience.
