The short videos above are test composites of my daily ritual recordings from October. I like the motion of these composites, but it is clear from initial comments that some of the context is missing. It’s not clear to me what question this calendar is asking or answering. These videos present the process of meditating (albeit briefly) each day. I want the video to be true to the outcome of that process. Maybe part of the difficulty here is that I’m not sure what the outcome was just yet.
I engaged in this ritual exercise to satisfy an assignment, but also to find a way to keep praying — as a meditation. I’m interested in the pattern of words I was attracted to during the exercise, but I haven’t yet been able to see all of the words at a glance. Maybe I need to just write them out on a grid and see what happens. That’s the next easiest thing I can do to push forward.
The backstory:
Last night I reconverted all of my .wmv files back to DV-NTSC files so Final Cut Pro would be able to import them. To summarize, Robert advised me to either use DV-NTSC encoding or MJPEG (motion jpeg) B in order to work on the Mac.
I hunkered down in the AV lab this afternoon to try my hand at video again. A big thank you again to Robert Moon for helping me get off the ground with Final Cut Pro and After Effects.
A short list of things to remember:
- Whether in FCP or AfterEffects, the first thing to do is to decide on and setup the output format (resolution, aspect ratio, square pixels, etc.)
- When layering tracks in FCP or AfterEffects, the topmost is visible.
- In AfterEffects, the “0″ key tells the program to render to RAM — meaning it will composite the video tracks and playback the selected video in the “Work Area”
- In AfterEffects, it is possible to select a specific portion of the “Work Area.” This affects both render to RAM as well as exporting. If the whole composition is selected, rendering (at least for 28 clips) will take a very long time.