Damn you Safari 3!

Trouble!

 

My PowerMac was fine for a few days – and now it seems worse!  *deep breaths*  Hopefully money will be coming through soon, then the hunt for a second hand computer starts – a dual G5 replacement will do for now until I get the big loan for my Mac Pro.

Chasing up work at the moment, whilst lagging ungracefully behind on other jobs.  Blues Brothers project is almost done, which will be handy to have finally finished.

The football show continues, lumbering along at best.  The last few episodes I have felt to be beneath the normal standard I have set for the work, and that makes me sad.  But the time constraints at the moment, as well as the other work we’re taking, is being a real killer.  Corporate sponsors seem to be jumping on it though, so we can expect to be paid well for next year, and perhaps beyond!  This may just be the beginning of a big thing.

Blues Brothers edit is waiting however, and must be done ready for tomorrow.

I’m going to try and get back into posting here regularly.  Safari 3 beta has slowed me down thanks to the lack of formatting it does…everything comes out as one big paragraph…very frustrating.

 

Justin

Work work work work work – break? Nah! Work!

Short and brief again

 

Blues Brothers Project is happening, but slowly still.  Other work keep pushing it back, and whilst it is just a DVD burned here, a funeral there, its been relegated so much to the backburner that I’ve virtually done no work on it until now.  Today I was supposed to work on that and only that, but once again extra little things to do pushed it so far back all I’ve done today is capture the three tapes of the footage.  Not a great start I don’t think, personally.

I was away in Ballarat for a week shooting for Apex.  That was interesting, but hard work!  Long hours, plus my gear is all pretty heavy.  It was fun nonetheless, and Apex seem to really have their act together as far as pushing themselves forward and helping out communities.

The football show saw the worst side of it however, as seven days away ate into the time for the Premier League show.  Handily I was able to get each of them out on time, but as far as I’m concerned Episode 6 was a bit of a wreck, hurried together in only one day, whereas I much prefer three full days to ensure everything fits together properly.  It was a bit of a testament to how far we’ve come though, as previously a full episode in one day would have been so unreasonably unrealistic that it would have been impossible.  Also, episodes 4 and 5 have simultaneously made their way onto the net, with Episode 6 to follow ON TIME this time.

 

Other than that, I am seriously overworked.  I took yesterday off (against the will of my superiors) because I haven’t had a day off in over three weeks (by my count).  After the Blues Brothers, I’ll get stuck into Nigel’s base concert, and help Stefano with his funeral catch up.

The RAID is full – with just under 50Gb free of its 550Gb might, I have finally outgrown the usefulness of a 500Gb RAID.  I’ll have a new RAID soon, FireWire 800, 1Tb.  Hopefully that’ll last me some time.  Either way, if the G5 PowerMac dies, I have a G4 PowerBook to fall back on, and the FireWire 800 drive can come along with it.  G5 is still most likely in my future, but it’d be tough if I could somehow afford a Mac Pro.  I’m not holding my breath though.

 

J

Episode 5 early, off to Ballarat tomorrow

Damn.  Working on the fifth episode of the Premier League show.  This one has to be finished a day early, so that’s a real challenge.  Actually, the real challenge is the absolute wealth of other work that I’ve had to do at the same time.

In other news – off to work in Ballarat for a week tomorrow (Monday the 16th).  Not 100% sure what I’m shooting, excepting that there will be junior debates, and its for the Apex foundation.

Whilst I’m away, I’ll aslo be making use of my free time to edit the Blues Brothers project, which is getting quite overdue.  Starting from scratch, I’ll edit the entire thing.  I’m hoping to pick up a laptop while I’m away, if things go super well, it’ll be a 17″ MacBook Pro with 4 years interest free.  If things don’t go super well, there may be a PowerBook G4 1.25GHz 15″, which can at least run Final Cut Studio 2 and is therefore leaps and bounds ahead of my current PowerBook.

It has just been work work work lately and as a result I’ve had no time to update here.  The bonus being that I’ve gotten a big chunk of one project finished, and that is basically down to the level of cleaning up now.  Still have a fair amount on the back burner, but its all pretty much cooling down now.  The week away in Ballarat will certainly help things along too…it’ll be good to spend some time away from the computer.

On computer side of things, crashes have become super frequent, now averaging six a day.  No word on the G5 in a while now.  But since I was going to have almost $3000 set aside for the G5, I’m now considering changing direction and going for a shiny new Mac Pro.  I wont get the 23″ display (which will be a bugger) but I will have a *current* computer, with SATA2, FB-DIMM DDR2, PCIe, all that good stuff.  Oh, and four cores spread across two physical CPUs.  It’ll only be stock configuration, but at the moment stock config is certainly going to be better than my poor old PowerMac G4 standing on its last legs.

 

Anyways, back to work.  Episode 5 is close to completion, only the most arduous section is left – the music beds have to be inserted.

 

J

Episode 4 done, Episode 3 uploading…

Just a quick update…  Safari 3 and WordPress still don’t get along.Going to Ballarat for a week to shoot for Apex Australia.Lots of work on, almost too much to keep up with. Gotta get back to it.Justin 

Missing tape uncovered by archeologists!

Back at it – mostly duplication at the moment.  Still have a funeral on the backburner, and a new fashion show that needs to be out ASAP.  Blues Brothers Project is also coming to the frontline, and the edit should start early next week.

Also, in much better news – the missing tape has turned up – so that’s golf claps all ’round.  Excellent news.  I’ll get started on that edit as soon as humanly possible as well.

Still no word on my new computer – and things are getting tight.  Had an actual Kernel Panic the other day – although that may have been caused by the Safari 3.0 beta.  Crashes have become less frequent – but the most crashes usually happen when working on the Premier League Football Show – which is super unfortunate.  I’m still aiming for a minimum Dual 2.5GHz G5, but I may have to settle for a dual 2GHz.  Should come into a large amount of money soonish – back pay for some old jobs – so if my current deal falls through I’ll be able to hunt eBay for a machine.

I still haven’t had a chance to fix up the youtube version of Episode 2 of the Premier League Football Show.  I’ll build episode 3 tonight ready for upload – when I do that I’ll attempt to repair episode 2 part 2 again.

Off to town this afternoon, then back here to work some more.

 

J

Episode 3 done…

Episode 3 of the Tasmanian Premier League Football Show was done. Not with time to spare however, but it did get finished in the end, and that made me a happy happy chappy. It had a higher level of polish too, compared with the dismally rushed episode 2, and hardly had any problems in production. There was one big spanner in the works, and unfortunately its issues seem to be expanding, rather than settling down. My work machine seems to deem it necessary to now crash an average of three times a day, which is incredibly frustrating and embarrasing. We had our media correspondant and voiceover writer in, and during recording (ironically, when we had left the computer to speak, so it was doing nothing) it hung. Just died, right there. The worst thing is – nothing is provoking it – it seems as if it isn’t software. Final Cut Pro is always open when it hangs, however, and always resets itself when I restart, but since the problem has come across from Final Cut Pro 5.1.4 and continues to burden me in 6.0.1 I’m guessing it is hardware issues (most likely RAM, but potentially my RAID). Looks like its diskwarrior time, but beyond that I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the old G4 is on its last legs. I’m looking to get a second hand G5 (so its in my price range) and keep the G4 around as a backup machine (in the event of an awfully fun sounding G5 coolant leak, or similar).
Aside from that, the tape still hasn’t resurfaced (yay), another edit I’m doing just seems to be going very slowly, the work has piled up again (always does around Football Show time) and my computer crashing is cutting my productivity down (like it needed to go down!). But this is just for now. I think I’ll always be able to maintain my sanity by thinking that some day I’ll probably be editing in reasonable work hours, shooting occasionally, and having some free time…as crazy as that all sounds. But you have to have some kind of goal to work towards.

This week the meeting is being held where we put forward our budget recommendation to the Football Federation, and they decide what they want to do with their sponsorship dollars. The biggest upside – I’ll be able to upgrade my machine easier since I’ll be getting paid for the work I’m doing.
Everything else has been slow slow slow. Episode 2 of the Football show went live on YouTube, but Episode 2 part 2 refuses to comply (and I think that it is just downright rude!). Gotta work out what’s causing the problem, a rerender didn’t fix it, and I used the same CODEC for all the others. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow now however, I have three projects that will have to be rendered out to MPEG-2 tonight…& that’s with me hoping that it doesn’t crash whilst I sleep…

Well, back onto this concert. Have to have it tight enough to be picked up by tomorrow, and it’s about 50% done (well, as far as I’m concerned it is anyways).

Justin