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William Matheson's Journal
Mar. 23rd, 2008
12:12 pm - Artifact
Artifact is now fully deployed on willmatheson.com and YouTube.
I had hoped to get it up on Google Video too, but Google Video was belligerent. The in-browser upload form wouldn't work at all, and the uploading program would work sometimes - but when it did work (about 50% of the time), the uploaded videos wouldn't appear in my account. I even made up a new Google account and tried doing everything again in the most proper ways, waited several hours, and it still didn't work. I've been trying to get Artifact and the Seven Years featurette onto Google Video since Thursday - Google Video has a higher potential for quality, since it will theoretically accept uploads that are both larger than 100MB and longer than ten minutes - but now I officially give up.
That being said, the movie is uploaded to willmatheson.com, where it's available for download. (Windows Media, 844Mb) There's also a 100Mb version, and downloads and YouTube windows of the other features - it's all at the new mini-website. You can even poke the download links into Windows Media Player if you'd prefer to stream them (use the "Open URL..." command), and this can shorten your wait time a little bit since you can watch the beginning before you finish downloading the end.
The downloadable versions are of much higher higher quality than their YouTube counterparts (they're barely distinguishable from the DVD versions), and they're highly recommended if you want to sit back and really enjoy the movie.
And that's the note I'd like to end on. Enjoy!
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pleasedMar. 20th, 2008
11:10 pm - good news, bad news
Okay, I've got good news and bad news.
The good news is that Artifact and its accompanying featurettes are up on YouTube. You'll want to start with Artifact and move on to the rest later.
The bad news is that I intended to showcase the Google Video version of Artifact, not the YouTube version (the upload it's based on was constrained to 100MB, so the quality isn't great). I hope to run new uploads (if necessary) while I'm at work tomorrow, and tonight I'm going to upload the downloadable files to my website as I sleep, so check around willmatheson.com over the next two days for updates.
For tomorrow, there's another complicating factor - all of my updates originate from LiveJournal. It just so happens that there's a content strike planned for tomorrow, so if and when I do get everything up and running, I won't really be able to tell anyone about it until Saturday, unless I write a Facebook note or something. So I'll see you guys again sometime after Saturday!
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tiredMar. 17th, 2008
11:31 pm - Artifact Thursday
It's coming...
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
on YouTube, Google Video and willmatheson.com
See photos from the new production.
tiredMar. 11th, 2008
12:12 am - Life After Y2K (2007)
I've just switched web hosts, so if you notice something wonky, drop me a line and let me know. I've gotten the e-mail accounts going, but only me and w_matheson and not the catch-all, so don't try to get too creative about contacting me until I sort that out. Like don't try heyithinkimetyoulastsummeratuniversitesa
Back in December while I was making web-friendly prints of Artifact (which I will be uploading within the next two weeks, after I get the supporting webpages ready to go), I figured I might as well make a new copy of Life After Y2K that could go on YouTube.
What I ended up doing was making a whole new cut. It's based on the already-extant MPEG, so the quality isn't on the same level as the Artifact transfer. However, given that ... egad ... the camera clock was recording what it thought was the current time to the camera for some of the scenes, and the fact that ANY edit of this movie would have to be based off the flattened final cut anyway, there's not a lot of point in digging through dusty boxes looking for a better copy and then finding or renting the equipment necessary to digitize it effectively.
Anyway, since I was directing, it counts as my first video (that certainly shows!) and I hope you find it a worthwhile diversion. Of course I didn't do this alone - it's quite unlike my later mini-movies where I worked autonomously. Calum MacLeod wrote a very funny script (that tragically wasn't filmed until after the Y2K he was prophesizing and/or lampooning), the actors had all kinds of great ideas, Ashlee Starratt found us clothes... the list goes on.
This video, and others, are also available for high-quality download at willmatheson.com.
tiredDec. 27th, 2007
01:32 am - shuttle, Artifact, optical media, CPA night, don't make your papers too perfect
Okay, Christmas is over. Time to sit back with a glass of Rickard’s and take stock of things.
I wrote those two sentences in a coil-back notebook. Also, one of the Christmas gifts I received was a hardbound paper journal with a magnetic cover. But I just can’t bring myself to use either most of the time. When faced with the choice between chicken-scratching on the couch in the sunroom or typing in Word on Uncle Shane’s desktop computer, the computer usually wins. In Ukraine I wrote by hand a lot, but that was only because I didn’t have access to a computer very often; in most cases, I really only had time to type posts as opposed to composing them.
So here I am on the computer again.
I’m in Souris now, and staying with my aunt and uncle for two nights. Getting here on the shuttle was the usual torture – we had the crazy driver (but I’m used to him now, and he’s a friendly fellow), I kept nodding off and bumping into my seatmates every time we rounded a corner (he wasn’t particularly smooth going into and definitely not smooth coming out of turns), and the guy on my right had the zarking SMUflu and was sniffling the whole godda -shdarned trip. I don’t feel myself getting sick though, so maybe no harm was done. But the sound of his breathing through his nose drove me up the wall.
And to top it all off, we rush and tear and beat the band only to be dropped off earlier than our ongoing rides expect us to be, and so we wait in the cold in front of the Burger King for an extra twenty minutes or more.
The shuttle is also crowded, there’s little legroom, and forget about congenial space to work on anything, or even to take off your coat (I had mine on until Oxford!) And then there’s the whole dichotomy of public and private space; you’re riding in a van (a private sort of space) with total strangers (so it’s a public space). You’re sitting so close to people that it’s impossible not to acknowledge their presence (unlike the usual situation in a full-size transit or coachline bus), and yet you have to remain strangers – you can’t make small-talk (trust me, I’ve tried), and you have to ride out the hours in stony silence. God, it’s awkward.
So at least one thing is settled: when I make my fortune and come back here for the holidays in the future, I’m darn well renting a car for the month. But the shuttle isn’t all bad. The owners gave us a “Happy Holidays” note, chocolate, and a discount coupon. Well, it’s only valid for January, so I won’t be able to use it, but it’s the thought that counts. =)
* * *
I’m happy to tell you that Artifact has now been completed and is currently being distributed on DVD to cast members (the ones I could find at the CPA reunion – more on that in a moment), fans, and a few others who are connected with it. I made less than thirty copies, but I have the ISO, so I can always make more. Further to this, it’s easy to duplicate the discs already in circulation – I included no copy protection, and anyone with a DVD writer and a few gigs of hard disk space should be able to copy the movie bit for bit. I unofficially encourage this, since it’s a heck of a lot less work and trouble on my end. I only have a notebook DVD burner, and getting jewelcases for the discs is a pain in the butt.
Let’s take a moment to talk about DVD. DVD sucks. In this day and age when we can carry 2-4GB on a $25 wafer in our pockets, DVD isn't quite so magical anymore. Remember when CDs seemed limitlessly HUGE? Whatever happened to those days, and will something like that ever happen again?
That being said, Artifact on DVD is quite okay. Or at least the main feature is. I had to compress the crap out of the featurettes to get everything to fit. And don’t ask about how I discovered that you pretty much have to route the paths between your menu buttons manually, lest the user’s cursor wander into a no-man’s land (not an issue when you’re watching DVDs on your computer and have the mouse cursor, but a serious issue when you’re using a standalone player – you can quite literally get stuck and have to restart the player!).
Still, that can easily be fixed, and in my case, it was. But the larger issue remains: 4.7 gigs just ain't enough. (Dual-layer is prohibitively expensive and not really an option (and then there's the bloody layer pause); it would have been better to just publish on two discs, but I couldn't bring myself to the extra work that would have been.) Or, more accurately, it’s not enough for consumers such as myself. We don’t have access to the fancy high-end media encoders that the Hollywood studios use, nor the time to painstakingly manage the whole encoding process on even a scene-by-scene basis.
HD-DVD (17GB) and Blu-ray’s (25GB) extra capacity will be nice, but even they will still require the use of compression, although Artifact could fit onto a single-layer BD-ROM with only intraframe compression, so it would still be pretty darned pristine. But that’s just standard def! What we really need is a cheap format capable of carrying at least two hours of uncompressed 1080p video. It’s time to be talking in fractions of terabytes. Wake me when we get there.
(And, yes, HD-DVD and Blu-ray are also dual-layer capable, but as with DVD you are dramatically increasing the cost of the media, significantly decreasing your recording speed, and you’re subject to the whims of how DVD/BD player manufacturers engineer their players to handle layer pause. No thanks.)
Artifact has also been converted to both high-bitrate / quality (for Google Video) and 100MB (for YouTube) WMV versions, and will be available on those services and willmatheson.com sometime in January. I’ve still got some web space issues to work out before it happens; I don’t want to upload to Google or YouTube before I have the new webpages and media (such as photographs) to support the release. A lot may also depend on when I get internet access in my Japanese apartment.
(Hey, wait a second. Why should YouTube be dictating how I chose to encode my movies? Who do they think they are, when other services like Google Video operate without any time or filesize limits? They’re just making me go through a whole heckuva lot of extra work because as anyone knows, 100MB is enough for an hour of watchable video (thanks to the magic of QuickTime for Macs and the suprising utility of WMV in Windows Movie Maker), but not an hour of clear, fullscreen video. I’ve spent hours and hours encoding and reencoding my videos, and those are hours I would have gladly spent doing other things. Man.)
Oh, and last night while I was clearing up my render files and other junk from Artifact (but I’ll keep the raw footage and edit decision files; I’m not crazy!), I started playing around with something, and let’s just say that there will be a little low-fi bonus surprise that I’ll release to YouTube, Facebook, and willmatheson.com the day before Artifact.
Anyway, if you’d like a copy of Artifact, call me sometime on the 28th – 31st, and you can come by and pick one up or (preferably for me) get one burned onto your blank disc. You can also come to my going away party, since I'll have a few copies there.
* * *
Here's food for thought: It turns out that DVD-R and DVD+R aren't equal. I had known that there were drives out there (like on older Macs) that could only write DVD-R, and as recently as a few days ago I encountered a DVD-ROM that could read -R discs but not +R discs. But I didn't know why.
DVD+R is technically superior to DVD-R, with superior error correction, speed compatibility, and read/write efficiency. But I burned Artifact on -R, and now I'm glad that I have, for the simple reason that -R has (wow) a five-year head start on +R, and is therefore playable on a wider range of devices.
So use -R for wide distribution, and +R for your personal archiving, such as your photos.
* * *
Oh, yeah, the CPA (high school mini-reunion / Christmas) party. It stunk. There were a few people I knew there, but none I could call more than the casualest of friends. (Don’t get me wrong; I was happy to see them. But it’s hard to spend a whole night drifting among casual acquaintances.) The crowd was also young. It would seem that our time has passed, and while I won’t say that I’ll never go again, I can safely say that I’ll never go out of my way to go again.
The part that I hated the most was waiting for the 6am bus to go back to Bedford. I went down to Saint Mary’s (it being Christmas Eve morning, I was the only one in the McNally East computer labs – I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before) with the intention of blogging about the night in order to kill time, but I wasn’t able to get my password correct on the first few tries, and so I got locked out of my network account. I could do nothing but lean over the table and doze, and hope that the security people wouldn’t throw me out. That wasn’t much fun.
But it wasn’t over yet. Once I made it to Bedford, I had to wait at the Tim Hortons for almost two hours for a ride (I would have walked, but it was pouring rain) because Mom felt that our street was too slick to drive on. And then she wanted to wait for the Sun to rise fully so that she could see better.
Ah, crap. That wasn’t much fun, either.
Why can’t we just have 24-hour bus service? I mean, really. While still at the Palace, I came very close to giving in and dumping the $40+ on a cab ride home. But it offends me that I have to pay so much for the “privilege” of sleeping in my own bed. Crap crap crap.
Man, I’m going to be so happy to be living within a real city, within walking distance of everything, OMG like REALLY.
And I have my passport and visa now, so everything will be above board. Then again, so were Heinrich Himmler’s papers – true, a person the world doesn’t miss, but mentioned here because it’s the most famous case I can recall of someone arousing suspicion because their papers were too perfect. There are no guarantees in life, not for students, nor for officers who had been in charge of concentration camps and death squads who are attempting to escape prosecution, and thank goodness for that.
tiredDec. 3rd, 2007
11:41 am - Artifact Teaser Trailer + NSCAD goodies
- A Russian outfit purchased LJ yesterday. No, seriously.
- I have new respect for the people who make trailers. This trailer was fun to make, but it took more than a day! On the plus side, between doing this and organizing the captured footage into a chronological assembly edit, navigating the two hours of raw footage is now easy for me.
- Tip: Make backups of your project file often. They're only a few megabytes, so don't worry about them taking up tons of space - all they really are is a list of your editing decisions. I very nearly learned this the hard way, as my computer crashed while the project file was being accessed (which is pretty much all the time when you're editing). When I rebooted, the file was corrupted. Adobe Premiere has a "Save a Copy..." command, and you'd better use it. If I hadn't, I would have lost three days' work! (I wouldn't have lost the footage, of course, just its organization.)
- I'll have a downloadable version of this trailer available on my website as soon as I can strongarm Cedrick. =) Meanwhile, it's also on Facebook, where it looks quite a bit better even though I uploaded the same file.
- OH! I totally forgot; here are some MP3s from my brief sojourn at NSCAD in 2005:
Bear Attack - 0:02:00 (My second Basic Sound project, made with the help of Pro Tools. The first project was a live mix that won't see the light of day. =)
Audiophilia - 2:42:13 (Our after-midnight end-of-term radio show at CKDU.)
tiredNov. 22nd, 2007
02:49 am - Artifact news, new articles on the Nova fiasco
Man. It’s only been twelve hours since I sent my computer away for a new screen and a new optical drive, and I miss it already. I have everything backed up onto my external hard drive, but having that is still not the same as having your own computer. I’m totally raring to edit Artifact now, but it’ll have to wait at least a week.
Yep, that all went well! I now have virtually everything from the Artifact shoots digitized. It was shot on Video 8, so finding a capable camera to bridge to a modern DV camcorder (used to digitize the video; the digital stream goes from the camcorder to my computer via Firewire) was no easy task. On a recommendation from the Multimedia guys back at NSCAD, I ended up going to the Centre for Art Tapes to rent theirs (for a very-reasonable $7, as nobody uses this technology anymore).
Then we had to find the source tapes. Mike had a whole box of Video 8 and Hi8 cassettes, and while we found one easily, the other three were a challenge. On the other hand, we took a fantastic journey down memory lane. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff even if I told you! Mike has a museum’s-worth of footage in that box.
Of course, what you’re looking for is always in the last place you look, and we spent hours looking at Video 8 tapes from the mid-to-late 1990’s and 2000-01 before finding what we were looking for: Three Hi8 cassettes with the mastered versions of early Film and Video productions from Fall 1998. The cassettes probably came from Mr. Savage, and we had been recording on the space left on the tapes. These tapes were also being used for video yearbook purposes: “William Matheson’s ‘The Artifact’ will be continued on another tape. We now bring you some video yearbook footage of… indoor girl’s field hockey.”
The video itself is, well, OK. There are lots of little defects and idiosyncrasies here and there, and even some tracking lines. Still, it’s far better than the VHS final cut, and the original video is not cropped, and preserves the original stereo sound. It’s a lot livelier, and it’ll be fun to work with. Colour looks fantastic, too – Sony was making some really nice Hi8 units in the mid-to-late 1990s. Also, Mike made a lot of really good shots, and his work in getting this movie from script to screening in less than three weeks has been underappreciated.
I even have the effects editing by Chris Spencer. I wasn’t worried about doing the people appearing and vanishing again (that’s a now-easy crossfade, although at the time it actually amazed people that we had the capability to do it) – I’m actually going to do it from scratch anyway and use different kinds of appearances and vanishings for different situations. I was worried about the fireball sequence (documented here), but I worry no more – I have it.
Here’s a little bit of what you can expect in the new Artifact:
- Shorter running time. Entire subplots are at risk of being severely trimmed if not outrightly cut. If something makes me cringe but isn’t funny or at least bitterly ironic, it’ll be tossed. The goal here will be to preserve and showcase the best of the film, which means dodging enough of the confusing material to be watchable. (The original cut will remain available.) I don’t think I’m going to be changing much, though – after the re-release, no one will have to say “Brooke shot first.”
- All the benefits of non-linear editing, which are too numerous to list. (Editing the entire feature on computer wasn’t feasible at the time – in that era, the height of technology was Premiere on a G3 with puny disc space – if you had ten gigs to play with, it was considered a blessing.)
- A musical “score,” as was originally intended. At the time of the original production I did not possess the intended CDs, just some downloaded MP3s that I had no way to get off my computer since we were without a burner or high-speed internet at the time. (Man, those were the dark ages.)
- Fullscreen presentation with stereo sound. The original cut was mastered on VHS, essentially in mono, with added letterboxes – portions of the image were cropped to create a widescreen presentation. We had this in mind when we were shooting, and the letterboxes mercifully excised a lot of garbage that ended up in our frame. But the shots seem to come to life in fullscreen, and there’s a lot of visual information available that adds to the school atmosphere. By going with fullscreen (keep in mind it was shot in fullscreen), things will have a more casual look, and I’m okay with that. The change will introduce new problems that I'll have to work around, so when you see 24-esque split-screen scenes, it’ll be because I’m trying to crop out things that shouldn’t be in the frame!
So stay tuned for news on the new Artifact, coming to Internet and DVD sometime in early 2008.
* * *
Japan approaches, like some sort of crippled ghoul or zombie that slowly and inexorably creeps up your driveway, approaching the abandoned mansion that you’ve holed yourself up in to survive the onslaught. Don’t get me wrong; I’m excited to be going to Japan. I’m only vaguely apprehensive. By all indications, this will be a terrific situation, but that first day at the school is still going to be a doozy. I mean, getting dropped into a new country and then attending some sort of “camp” (like in CWY) is one thing. Getting dropped into a new country and reporting for work the next day is something else!
R. at SMU invited me and a future co-worker to lunch next week, where we’ll, among other things, sign our contracts. After the Nova “schools” fiasco, I’ll be happy to be putting ink to paper before some freshly-unemployed ESL teacher beats me to my own job.
And, just in case you thought these two stories didn’t have anything to do with each other, Ashlee Starratt, who plays a lead role in Artifact, was interviewed in the Daily News – she moved to Japan and worked for Nova, but they paid her only about as much as we paid her to be in The Artifact. =)
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nostalgic