Welcome back!
Another day with no video upload, and the more I think about it, the more I’m thinking that’s probably ok. The main point of the vlog updates was to post some progress and work on my delivery and video editing skills, but that doesn’t really need to be an every day thing. For the time being the video editing takes *way* too long, even though I am improving, and the thing about practice and progress is that it is freaking slow. By design. So there won’t always be something worth showing off.
So, that being said, I think I’m going to shift up my approach. I’m kind of thinking that instead of trying to do “most” days, I’m instead going to do (hopefully) all days in blog form, and only major milestone days in vlog form. So I’m pretty much aiming for 1, 5, 10, 15, etc. Every five days. And yeah, I know, it’s day 5, but I just did a video yesterday, so you’re just going to have to wait to see my smiling mug again.
That being said, I totally did a video today. Not one I’m going to be posting. After the debacle that was the video for Day 3, followed up by the wreck that was Day 4, I realized I needed to do some experimentation. Some quick reading showed that most films are actually shot in 24 frames per second, rather than the HD camcorder / video game style of 60. And since 24 frames is a lot easier to work with than 60 anyway, I opted for a more “Hollywood” look for my vlog entries. So I found a new camera app for the phone that would let me specify the FPS, went for a good 24 frames a second, and did about a minute and a half of test footage just to see if I could clear up my audio syncing problems in the Blender VSE. (Video Sequence Editor)
Unfortunately the app only *tries* to get to 24 fps. What it actually spat out was 23.87 fps, which caused Blender to freak out on the audio again. The problem is that it rightly treats the audio and video tracks differently. The audio, since it’s just audio, is a specific length of time, measured in straight seconds. The video, being a series of still pictures, is just measured in frames. If you play it back at the right FPS the two will match up, if you don’t, they won’t. But Blender has a few built in FPS settings that it likes to use when building its video output, and 23.87 isn’t one of them. In theory you can set it to whatever you want, but I couldn’t seem to get that to work, unfortunately.
Fortunately, I found a solution. It’s a bit of a hack, but it will have to do, and should eliminate any future issues with audio syncing. Blender has a speed control effects strip that you can add to your video, technically for the purpose of doing slow motion and high speed manipulations on your video tracks. But it can also be set to stretch the video track exactly to the length of your audio. So if I get the starting frame rate fairly close, say 23.87fps, a quick adjustment with the speed strip should get me to exactly where I need to be. Going forward I’m planning to just start with that for all future video editing, should save myself a ton of time.
As for progress on the 30/30 drawing challenge, today I chose to spend some more time working on my pet WIP, the Space Monster piece. As before, I’m saving this one until it’s “finished”, so I don’t have anything to actually show off in the blog, but I’m still going to update the meter, since I spent about an hour adding texture to that sucker today.