Video work yesterday. I decided to revisit a list of possible old music videos... a lot of my albums have hardly any music videos. Last December (I think) I worked on a whole pile of music videos and was slightly overwhelmed by the quantity and workload.
A lot of videos seem to lend themselves to Argus use, but there are so many that I'm struggling to focus on any one. I started with one of the simplest; remaking the old Jarre's Party video. This is essentially about 14 photographs set to appear at specific frames. For Argus, I simply made this full-screen sprite switch frame at the correct time and the whole process took a couple of hours, far faster than by using AviSynth, but it seems that even these 14 mere images are too slow to load. My hopes of using Argus for full-screen animation are dashed (I didn't run out of memory, but it took about 10 secs to load these large-ish files every time I wanted to preview the film).
The old video used a one-minute edit of the tune, this one uses the full album version, which is my main reason for making it. There are lots of pretty tunes on Bites of Greatness that could use videos but the music is all rather lacking in meaning and identity, it's an album of intense melodies and happy moods. For years I've wanted a video for Pandora, or Jellyfish, or Trax.
Today I've started a few video tests but found a minor bug in Argus and decided to add a few more features at the same time. Work is frustratingly slow. I barely feel like and artist and keep wanting to reset. Breaks are not in my nature, I've never had any, so perhaps some change or training in other areas will help. After months of working on music and programming it's bound to take a few days to start to think visually again. We don't have to do everything in one day, just one tiny step in the right direction. Drop by drop the bucket will fill. Time has immense power. A small but consistent change each day is worth far more than juddering leaps in short periods.
I still dislike this new Blogger, particularly the Home/End key use which now jumps to the start/end of a paragraph rather than the line, and also an auto-indent for HTML tags which can't be turned off. Facebook has also changed recently for the worse with several bugs and distractions, far more false or unwanted notifications. These technoligical changes have affected my mood to an unusual degree.
