I mentioned in the previous post how long some of these take to put together, and decided to break it off into a separate post. So here’s the deal.<\/p>\n
The first part is fairly easy now, which is the photos – I can generally have a dozen of them cropped, resized, and ready to go within ten minutes or so. Unless I decided to do an animated gif (pronounced, “GIM-ee-sum-LUV-en,”) in which case I have to overlay several frames together, crop and resize them while stacked, select the frame delay, run the test animations, all before finalizing it. This one was worse, in that I had accidentally had Auto White Balance set on the camera, leftover from some experiments, and the abundance of green in the frame caused the camera to muck up the color a bit, so each frame had to be corrected by the same degree<\/em>, plus I’d shot them handheld at high magnification so my camera motion caused the frames to misalign a little, and thus they had to be re-aligned;<\/strong> it wasn’t perfect, but good enough to show what I needed.<\/p>\n And then the video:<\/strong> two clips of a minute each, no biggie, right? Except that the title images had to be done, and a little trimming, and then the voiceover, recorded as the prepped clips played to sync them. Twice, because I didn’t like the first. Then that cleaned up and edited, laid into the video clips, relative volumes adjusted, and a little more trimming and shifting so the syncing was consistent. I didn’t check times, but all that took well over an hour I believe. Look good? Then set it to render, which takes many times the actual length of the video to accomplish.<\/p>\n Nope, not done yet. Now that<\/em> has to be uploaded to Vimeo, with various details added and settings tinkered with, including selecting a frame for a thumbnail. The easy part, really, is embedding that into the post, since it’s just a line of script that Vimeo produces.<\/p>\n The text of the post went pretty quickly all told, but there are always multiple drafts as I save frequently, monitor the flow and make sure that I’m not missing anything (not always perfectly,) clean up typos and smooth out the sentence structure a bit (not always, or perhaps ever, perfectly.) While doing this, though, I realized that one of the photos that I’d edited for the post I’d somehow never saved, and thus had to re-open GIMP and redo the photo. I also shamelessly sidetracked myself, twice, in trying to find a)<\/em> a method to correct a silly issue (that a lot of people have been having) with Kdenlive, my video editing software, and b)<\/em> a better ‘theme’ for GIMP that didn’t hide some key menu functions in low-contrast graphics;<\/strong> I was successful with the former, not yet with the latter. It might seem like a lack of discipline to get sidetracked, but I’ve found that if I set the issue aside until I’m done with some task, I probably won’t return, and the issue will still be affecting things when I get involved in the next<\/em> project that I’m trying to get done – better to take care of it now.<\/p>\n So what I initially thought would be a quick illustrative post turned out to take hours<\/em>, and while I understand why<\/em>, I just don’t want it to take that long. So at the very least, go watch that video five or six more times and drive my stats up a bit…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I mentioned in the previous post how long some of these take to put together, and decided to break it off into a separate post. So here’s the deal. The first part is fairly easy now, which is the photos – I can generally have a dozen of them cropped, resized, and ready to go […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[7313,7315,3406,7314],"class_list":["post-34929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random","category-rant","tag-just-dont-ask-why","tag-still-beats-all-social-media","tag-tldr","tag-unappreciated-in-my-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}