Endgame Viable

A reference for myself of common tasks I do in video editors.

I do basically the exact same video editing tasks every time I edit a game video.

First, I try not to edit video at all, and use the raw recorded video as-is. That’s the best-case scenario and works 90% of the time for my game videos.

Second, if I can, I use Avidemux to trim the start and end of videos, or cut out sections in the middle. If you cut on keyframe boundaries, you don’t have to re-render the video, and it’s instantaneous. Second-best-case scenario.

But when I need to open an honest-to-gosh video editor, I’ve used Sony-now-Magick Movie Studio Platinum for years and years. It works like an audio editor, so it’s very intuitive to me, a person who is very comfortable editing audio waveforms.

Unfortunately it’s also slow and antiquated. So I’ve been working to migrate to DaVinci Resolve in the hopes that I can use it for everyday video editing. It’s a bit of a bear to use, one of those “it’s intentionally so complicated that it’s a marketable job skill to know how to use it” kind of applications, like all those Adobe products I abhor, but it’s a snappy interface. Mostly.

Anyway, here’s a list of the common tasks I do in Movie Studio Platinum and the equivalent process in DaVinci Resolve, at least what I’ve worked out so far.

This is probably going to be an ongoing list, updated from time to time. (It isn’t yet complete.)

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 13. More posts.

P.S. Yeah, it’s another last-second, “oh crap I forgot to write anything for Blaugust today and now it’s late and I’d rather play a game than write a post” scramble for anything that might look anywhere close to finished in the drafts folder, kind of post.

Okay, yes, fine, I downloaded Dwarf Fortress again.

First I tried to play RimWorld again. I played the heck out of RimWorld in December of 2018, recording tons of videos which I still think are among my most interesting to date. Now? I barely remember how to play, and completely forgot why I liked it. So I couldn’t get into it, even with the new Royalty and Ideologies expansions (which honestly don’t change the game very much anyway). It just takes sooooo long for anything fun to start happening. I forgot all the settings I used to use to get games moving quickly.

I thought about my time in Dwarf Fortress fondly, which I played after RimWorld, in early 2019. I re-watched some of the old videos I recorded of Dwarf Fortress and found them quite entertaining. (That was an epic video production process for me at the time, stitching together video clips and overlaying background music with automated scripting tools so I didn’t have to spend hours at a video editor.) Dwarf Fortress is the pinnacle gold standard of that genre, at least the engine of it.

Then I discovered Dwarf Fortress had a Steam page, and it’s “coming soon” (which could be this fall or next year or maybe never), and the graphics and UI depicted on Steam look amazing and I can’t wait to try it.

I think because I added Dwarf Fortress to my wishlist, I was shown a game called KeeperRL, which looked a lot like Dwarf Fortress, except it has an approachable UI and you’re playing the goblins instead of the dwarves. I tried it out. It’s okay, but it’s not the same. Most notably, I don’t like the turn-based manual combat, and I don’t like that I never encountered any existential threats to my base. I had all the time in the world to just sit around digging tunnels underground and nothing bad ever happened. Not very satisfying.

I looked at a bunch of other similar types of games in this genre on Steam and found nothing that looked like it would even come close to a Dwarf Fortress experience.

Then I just went ahead and downloaded Dwarf Fortress again.

*sigh* I mean what choice do I have really pic.twitter.com/46GsjdZeQG

It’s a different version from the one I played in 2019, but it works the same–like editing source code in VI. If you’ve never done that, it’s not a pleasant experience, unless you’re one of those people who swears by VI as a text editor for some inexplicable reason. (The only reason I learned some basics of VI in the last year is that you have to use it if you’re stuck on a Linux ssh terminal.)

Anyway, I’m trying to set everything up again. Even with the Lazy Newb thingys, there’s still some work to be done. I’m trying to find and install the custom Soundsense audio files I recorded back in 2019, because of course I recorded custom voiceovers for a custom Soundsense pack back in 2019. The default Soundsense pack uses a bunch of movie sound bites or something which are extremely off-putting and break every bit of immersion in the game.

But first I had to stop and write this post real quick before it gets too late. My posts have devolved so far down into banality this month that they’re simply reporting what I previously said in a much better way on Twitter.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 12. More posts.

P.S. It’s a really good blogging day when you can just insert a link to a previously-processed-and-uploaded picture into your post.

P.P.S. It’s funny reading over what I previously wrote about Dwarf Fortress. “It’s terrible.” Followed by ten more posts.

Here’s something I didn’t expect to be writing about today.

Speaking of wild animals…

This morning I happened to look outside in the front yard and saw an … animal … by the road at the corner of the property. I stared at it for quite a while, not recognizing what it was. At first I thought it was a deer (a common sight), but the proportions were wrong, then I thought it was a stray dog, but a completely unrecognizable breed. I ran for the camera.

What the holy bejebus is THAT pic.twitter.com/LrV07rIpZj

When I got back and started taking pictures, it was walking up to yellow stray cat, who was flattened out in the front yard near the porch, a place he likes to hang out so he can watch the neighborhood.

I’ve never seen an animal like this before.

It looked like a small, extremely emaciated or mangy dog of a breed that I couldn’t possibly fathom, but it walked purposefully and gracefully, not like it was sick. It had huge paws and a rat-like tail with a white tuft on the end. But it didn’t appear aggressive, it was approaching the cat more out curiosity. Then it sat down.

After snapping some pictures it finally dawned on me that my cat might be in danger, so I opened the front door, and the animal trotted away into the woods when it heard the noise.

After some Internet queries it seems this might have been a young coyote. I’ve never seen one before, and had no idea they lived anywhere on the East Coast, but apparently there have been increased sightings of them around my area this year. The more you know.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 11. More posts.

Herein I will attempt to summarize the main story of Final Fantasy XV, so that I remember how insane it was, years from now.

Hey neat, I found another mostly-finished draft post for Blaugust, and this time I had a picture, too.

Prince Noctis is sent from the capital city of Insomnia by his father, The King, to wed Lady Lunafreya, The Oracle. Noctis and Luna haven’t seen each other since they were kids, but somehow they have that fairy tale bond of being soul mates, or something. It’s all predestined and preordained and all that.

Shortly after this road trip in a classic car begins, The Empire attacks and destroys Insomnia (offscreen, in a cut scene with no sound effects), and The King dies. A heretofore-unmentioned Crystal is stolen by The Empire. The wedding is off. The King probably knew it was going to happen, though it’s not really clear how or why.

Prince Noctis makes his way to Altissa to meet/rescue Lunafreya, who is hiding/waiting/working/imprisoned there. The details of this are extremely unclear. There’s a lot of driving involved, and fighting random Empire troops that drop from flying ships, and finding weapons in ancient tombs. There’s also a fist fight with Titan, which is physically impossible, because Titan is a thousand feet tall, and Noctis isn’t. But Noctis wins anyway, which is Important, for reasons.

In Altissa, Lunafreya is calling Leviathan, a very large beast/diety, in order to establish A Covenant, so the gods will help the people, maybe. She’s an Oracle, so she can do that, apparently. It’s not entirely clear why the people need help from the gods at this particular time.

Luna’s also the only person who can annoint The New King, so she’s supposed to bestow The Ring to Prince Noctis. I don’t know why she has The Ring. It seems like The Old King should have had it. Maybe she had The Spare Ring. Or maybe a Different Oracle bestowed a Different Ring to The Old King.

Anyway, Ardyn, the Chancellor of the Empire, an immortal demon or something who pops in and out of the story at will, shows up and stabs Lunafreya. I don’t know why. Anyway it’s a shocking twist and very dramatic.

But Prince Noctis defeats Leviathan anyway with Magic Powers, The Covenant with Leviathan is completed, and Lunafreya bestows The Ring to Prince Noctis before she dies. Oh, and Ignis, one of his retinue, loses his eyesight.

Prince Noctis mopes around for a bit because Lady Lunafreya is dead and he never really got a chance to talk to her and they were soul mates or something. But one of his retinue yells at him to get it together, so then he puts on The Ring and accepts his role as The New King, because that’s how easy it is to snap out of a depression apparently.

The Prince And Friends take a train back to the capital, and on the way they’re attacked by demons and the land is plunged into eternal night and Ardyn shows up and Shiva tells them stories and they wreck their car and other stuff that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but it looks kind of cool.

Also, Prompto is kidnapped by Ardyn and taken to the capital. I don’t know why. Ardyn just appears and does stuff for no apparent reason throughout the story, as previously mentioned. He’s voiced by Darin Du Paul, though, so it’s fine.

The Prince and friends rescue Prompto, and we learn the shocking twist reveal that Prompto has been an Empire Magitek Robot all along. Or something like that. I didn’t really understand it at all. But it was definitely a shocking twist that nobody saw coming. That’s the important part. But Noctis and friends say it’s okay that Prompto is a robot and they accept him anyway and The Power Of Friendship, Bros Forever, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Anyway, Prince Noctis and Friends fight their way to The Crystal. On the way, they kill The Emperor, who is a demon, or something. We’ve barely seen or heard anything about The Emperor before. He just kind of shows up and turns into a demon, then he’s dead and gone.

Instead of taking the Crystal, Prince Noctis is absorbed into The Crystal, part of a shockingly surprising trap set by Ardyn, or something. Noctis talks to Bahamut. Ten years pass in the void. I don’t know why. It made no sense whatsoever. Anyway The Prince returns, but now he has longer hair and a little beard, so he’s old in Japanese culture apparently. It’s still eternal night and demons roam the land. Well, Final Fantasy demons, which are mostly adorable.

Anyway, the band gets back together and Prince Noctis And Friends go back to Insomnia, the capital, to reclaim the throne and save the world. They fight various demons, then they fight Cerberus, then they fight Ifrit, then they fight three other bosses and yay the power of friendship or whatever, then Noctis fights Ardyn and wins back the throne. Dawn finally returns to The Land.

But it’s still not over because Noctis has to make the ultimate sacrifice and absorb the power of all the old kings (including his own father) to finally defeat Ardyn once and for all (out in space, or something), which I think kills him, but I’m not really sure, because he and Lunafreya sit togther on the throne again at the end, even though they’re both dead maybe, so it might be a dream, or heaven, or maybe real, or maybe it’s all a metaphor or something, and then a cover of Stand By Me plays over the credits, and I honestly have no idea what any of it means because none of it makes any sense because I’m almost positive it was completely mistranslated.

The End.

Anyway there are some great moments and scenes in the game, the music and imagery is pretty awesome, but the connective tissue between the moments is completely missing so there’s almost no context for anything. It all just sort of washes over you like a fever dream.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 10. More posts.

A stylish but ultimately very frustrating experience.

Editor’s Note: With time running out before bed tonight and zero desire to write something new for Blaugust, I was very pleased to stumble over this mostly-finished, never-before-seen draft.

It occurred to me that I never wrote a blog post about Code Vein. It seems like I should at least write one post about the video series I put on YouTube.

I first played a demo of Code Vein on the PS4, and liked it well enough to make a mental note to buy it for PC someday in a sale. That day was earlier this year.

Code Vein is a Souls-like game, except it’s missing most of the things that make Souls combat satisfying. Instead, they went with random button-mashing nonsense combat, and a “blood code” system that is largely unnecessary.

In the first half of the game, it’s not a detriment. In the beginning, the game iss quite fun, actually. The story and game world is fairly interesting and the art style is cool.

The second half of the game, unfortunately, is mostly a repetitious grind through forgettable areas and annoying boss fights.

By the second half of the game, it’s obvious that every zone is the same: You find your way through a maze of hallways, fighting enemies along the way, until you get to the boss at the end. The only difference is the color scheme. Even the enemies are mostly the same throughout the game. It’s so dull and lifeless it might as well have been procedurally generated.

The story also falls off a cliff and loses most of its appeal around the halfway point.

Toward the end, the boss fights are of a kind where luck is a pretty big factor in getting through them. You’d think that having an AI companion would make them easier, but it doesn’t.

You’re expected to grind a lot and unlock armor and skills and weapons and try all kinds of combinations to find the magic bullets, but I reject such methodologies and use only my wits in these kinds of games, which makes Code Vein ridiculously hard and annoying by the end.

If the grinding were fun, maybe I would have done that, but it’s not, so I didn’t.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 9. More posts.

In the dream I saw a cicada scuttling across the parking lot. It looked wise, so I asked it, “Is there such a thing as fate?”

“Indeed there is. You need only check the dictionary.”

I sighed. This cicada fancied itself a prankster. “By which I mean the concept of fate.”

“Of course. It is a human construct, so of course it exists. That which is imagined is real.”

“I see. You’re saying fate is imaginary, which implies there’s no such thing. Everything is random. Life is just an endless series of chaotic occurrences that add up to nothing.”

“I did not say that. I said whatever you imagine is real. All things are real, from our viewpoint. From a certain point of view, as some old Jedi once said.”

“If I imagine a snake, the snake doesn’t become real.”

The cicada rubbed its wings in some imitation of laughter. “It’s real that you imagined it. Look, there is no fate but what we make.”

“I’ve seen that movie too.”

The cicada chirped happily. “I love that song.”

Finally, the kind of question I was hoping for pic.twitter.com/BXWKdnjIZE

Yeah, I know, the numbering is all messed up now. Image source: A photo of a cicada, believe it or not.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 8. More posts.

I’m already sick of my Blaugust project, so I’m writing something else. This is about Amazon Web Services and Nginx config files, mainstream topics everyone can enjoy.

I’ve been hosting my blog on AWS (Amazon Web Services) for a while now, and it’s been costing me somewhere between $1 and $2 a month. Somewhat more than the $0/month I was aiming for, but still less than the $5/month of a typical shared Linux hosting plan from the days of yore.

But then I went and looked at my AWS monthly cost during Blaugust and found it had gone way, way up, and that’s when I realized that my 12 months of introductory free AWS services had expired and I had entered the “now you’re paying for reals” phase of usage. So my bill shot up from $2/month to about $30/month. Almost all of that cost is in running an EC2 application server instance which serves up my blog.

The sudden cost spike and the Blaugust activity blitz inspired me to dig into the blog infrastructure again and make some changes, which are now active:

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 7. More posts.

In the dream I wandered into a vaccination facility. I stopped the first person I saw and whispered, “When is okay to give up on a bit?”

Everyone turned to look. The buzz and din of the room silenced. Somewhere, a wolf bayed.

I grimaced. “It’s just that it’s been almost a week now and I feel like this bit has exhausted itself. It’s harder to dream on weekends, too, have you noticed? I didn’t even want to go to sleep at all, really. I was busy doing other things, watching a Netflix documentary about Three Mile Island, actually. But I had this nagging feeling I was supposed to enter this dream again.”

One of the people standing in line asked, “What’s Three Mile Island?” He looked like he was in his twenties.

“It’s a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. There was an accident there in 1979. Made a lot of headlines at the time. I don’t know if anyone really remembers it. Chernobyl took up all the nuclear disaster oxygen about seven years later. Even Fukushima didn’t supplant it.”

“Oh. How’s the documentary?”

“It’s okay. One of the ones that does dramatic recreations with bad actors. Except in this case, every dramatic scene is someone looking up into the middle distance when they hear an alarm or a siren. Most people might, you know, run when they hear an alarm, but not these people. They just stare at the alarm for what seems like hours while the camera registers the angst and indecision on their face.

“The documentary I saw earlier on Woodstock ‘99 was much better. Lots of human animalism. Like an average day on social media before there was social media.”

“So whatever happened to philosophy?”

“I didn’t get any good questions today, even though I rolled twice. I think I’m going to try a different web site.”

Image source: That’s a picture I took of the National Guard-organized vaccination center I went to in 2021. Mixed with string, like you do.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 6. More posts.

In the dream, I encountered a fellow standing by the road with a tadpole for a head. I asked him, “How do we know what is art and what isn’t?”

The fellow chuckled. “This is an easy one, mate: Art is creation. Anything that’s created is art, get it?”

“What about photographs?”

“You think a photograph can’t be art because someone pressed a button and captured some light? You don’t think anything was created?”

“What about human life? Or galaxies, or The Big Bang?”

The fellow blinked his large fishy eyes. “Okay, mate: Art is whatever makes us happy. Like a clever joke.”

“That can’t be right. Sometimes I read a book or watch a movie that makes me sad, and those are definitely art. And suppose the joke is hurtful. Surely that can’t be art.”

“Look, mate, I have to go. The bottom line is there’s no arbiter of art out there, deciding what is and isn’t art, it’s up to every individual to figure out what sparks their imagination, to decide what they like and don’t like.”

I called after the fellow as he started down the road. “Then what?”

The fellow didn’t turn as he shouted back jovially, “Then you make damn sure nobody else is allowed to have anything you don’t like!”

what is an art pic.twitter.com/0jBZhz0ykB

I’ve done some editing of the prompt question. :) Incidentally, if it isn’t clear by now, these posts, for me, are an exercise in brevity, dialog attribution, and characterization through word choice. Actually answering the prompt questions is somewhat irrelevant. Image source: This is a screenshot from my randomized Elden Ring playthrough. Deep Dream Generator did particularly well with Elden Ring screenshots.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 5. More posts.

In the dream I saw a woman floating in the sea. I asked her, “What would love look like if it had a creative dimension?”

“The question, my dear, is this: What does love look like normally, with no additional dimensions at all?”

I pondered this riddle, then a thought occurred to me. “Why are you in the sea?”

“It’s a dream, silly.”

“Am I in the sea, too?”

“Maybe. You’re avoiding the question.”

“I came to the dream for answers, not questions.”

“There are no answers in the dream, my dear. Only riddles. What is mine but only you can have?”

I pondered this new riddle warily. “A sea cucumber?”

“My heart, silly.”

“So creative love is a series of riddles, then.”

The woman smiled. “Try not to drown.”

Hrm. Well at least it isn't about animals again. pic.twitter.com/FK8m4LkItJ

I’m not sure I’d classify these questions so far as “philosophical.” I was hoping more for easy ones like, “why do bad things happen to good people?” Also, four days into this and I’m pretty sure this web site of questions was itself generated by an AI. Image source: Of course it’s Lunafreya from Final Fantasy XV, from a scene that already looked like a Deep Dream Generator image before I tried to alter it.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 4. More posts.