Ellard

The USA version of ShowbagHD has bogged down into trench warfare as the main programme refuses to be encoded. I’ve spent every spare moment this week (hah) loading the AVI into some encoder or other, changing settings and waiting 8 hours for the results. It’s not as bad as sending Super-8 film off to be developed but it’s damn reminiscent.

Here’s the story:

The original clip is 720p25. That is, PAL frame rate. I placed that into Adobe Media Encoder, cranked it up to 50fps and let ‘er rip. Success – but the quality was poor until I made it take 2 passes. The first pass warns the encoder about rough patches and means that very difficult sections are still decently handled. Build the BD and wacko.

OK, so now for NTSC land. Time stretch the video to 59.94fps. Load that into AME, let ‘er rip. End result – as before, quality could be better. Switch to 2 pass, and Encore doesn’t accept it as a useable file. Arse. So I let Encore do the transcode directly. Fails – the file lacks ‘SEI timing’. I try a different encoder. Fails. You need to multiply each stage of this by 8 hours to feel the annoyance. Yes, after a while I started to do little sections and the results are in – 2 pass means fail if you are using a converted NTSC source.

But if I take my 2-pass file and mux it with open source software it plays as a BD just fine and it looks great. There’s just NO WAY to have Encore accept it as a real source. No Encore means no menus and so on.

Help from the Adobe forum was – the error is probably a confusion between a progressive and an interlaced frame. That is, somewhere in the standards conversion it’s (something like) creating a single field and Encore can’t figure out the field dominance. But there’s no way to find that one 60th of a second in 60 minutes of video – 216,000 images. I also can’t really trust this explanation because I’m using all kinds of test footage now with the same outcome.

The writer has advised me – use MPEG-2 instead. OK, so I just did a minute of 2-pass M2v and it works. I am going to have to crank the bit rate up much higher, and that means dropping some of the other stuff on the disc… maybe just one thing. Oh shit, hang on a second I didn’t test something

… OK it does build. Phew!

Choices: (a) make it 24 fps. Looks nice but songs are slow. I don’t like. (b) Single pass M4V. No, it craps out when it hits some sections. (c) Go with 50fps. Would love to do that but I doubt it would work. (d) Buy some other software. Sure the University would love that after I hounded them for this. (e) Do what the guy says. I’ll do what the guy says.

I’m hating this.

I am also particularly pissed off about the federal election. No need for analysis as every journalist has already had a twit and a wipe over it. But I had to see John fucking Howard again. I had 10 years of that prick and I thought it had been dumped down a well and the well cemented over. Anyone who had a hand in bringing John Howard back to political life is a criminal. Christ wasn’t over TEN YEARS of John Howard enough? And I saw him on the street the other day it was just horrible. Enough.

Labor, for fucks sake get yourselves together. It wasn’t a wipe out, but how did you go from most popular prime minister to feather duster in one year? Get your Bolshie back on. Look at the Greens, totally useless but adorable. Get some of that action. Sure, Rudd was a wind up toy, but you could have taught him how to speak English as well as his native Mandarin. You didn’t have to put him in hospital. No, get Latham and put him in a sack, add some bricks, sort it out. Now get Julia off the women’s mags, and get her a crow bar. She’s a fighting woman not a damn pillow.

Do I have to tell you everything?

As it is there’s the distinct chance our next prime minister is a man unsure whether someone is his son without a DNA test.