November 27, 2006
EN: Project on Ice
or under Ice and it might get crushed completely.
why? i am sick of running behind the latest greatest most expensive hardware to still have jittery compressed lowres video showing up on screen that I spend zillions of hours preparing in a 8x quality.
why else? I am sick of crashing uncomplete programms that are so overly complicated that someone who is very profficient (read using computer daily since he is 8 (now almost 30) and video and moving image applications since 16 years) has trouble understanding it all and that one has to relearn the "instrument" with every .0x release and that incorparate geeky technology that make it even more complicated and only 1% of the user MIGHT use. Programm that are supporting more and more collage technologies but donīt have a single though on how to make a montage in a vj context.
ConclusionMeans for the foreseable future Kalkin: Revelation is on ice on backup harddrive in my storage room and will not be shown or presented. If and when technological things are stable in this field I might come back to it if normal jobs have not taken my full attention until then.
Sorry to say that but this whole things pisses me off to no end. I am waiting since 6 years for something that can make live visuals in a good enough quality without fuss and jitter and crash. Something reliable stable that is professional and portable. Here we are in the next millenium and there is still no way to sufficently manage trigger and mix 3 video streams in normal SD resolution with at least 4:2:2. I know that most vjs just donīt care or carry around huge amounts of gear to achive this or whatever. I want it portable I want it stable and I want it cheap enough to justify an investment into a sector that pays you shit for tons of work. I donīt spend my live working so I can give all the money to kapitalistic fuckshit companies that pile up billions of dollars - a certain fruit company comes to mind.
I perfectly happy with my current laptop for anything but vjing/livecinema. A new setup (nearly 5000 euros for 2 lappies) would just barely get me to jitterfree 2x3 channel mixing with the guarantee that with the next OS update or the next visual eyecandy plugins that can do even more to destroy your picture this generation is again too slow to make a good jitterfree performance.
So you can also take out this blog from your RSS feeds as there will be no more updates to it until maybe I decide so in another six years or such...
PS: the theory is also NOT going to be published..... No time to correct errors and no motivation to work on it in general.
oh my god, i cannot believe this, you have had inviestigated so much energy in this great idea, so many friends helped you, i was expecting you try to do the best with the sources you have. that there will be limits is for shure u cannot tell me that you did not know, so what i want to tell you is that i dont understand this action and i am very disappointed, i was expecting a presentation on the avit->C23, i wish you think about it twice, because wasting energy is very much destructive.
I am just doing schadensbegrenzung... The project is about 10% done if even that. To make it 100% (or even 70% were it would finally reveal the story) would take me about another 3 month of postproduction - if I can ONLY work on this - if its only parttime its more closely to 6 month. So I would need to dedicate 6 month of my live doing nothing else then postproducing this thing. Hey I was absolutely up for it otherwise I would not even have started the project at all. But the reasons above have so utterly destroyed my faith that there will ever be a hardware software combination to perform this on that is a) afordable b) speedy enough c) usable that I am not committed to spend this amount of time on the project - not even talking about the money I would need to invest into it to make it perform AT ALL even in its current state. At the first presentation I had 5-10 fps and a crash after 10 minutes - and that was on my desktop computer - the laptops that I can use are about 1/10th the speed the newest laptops from apple are about on par in speed. Really thats neither fun nor worth doing because it defies the underlying idea to get the vj thing out of its pixelmash that nobody wants to look at for more then 2 minutes.
I really thought long and hard about what to do had sleepless nights and all but I neither see the hardware big enough to justify an investment in that size nor do I see a software on the horizon that would let me do what is needed. Sadly the software developers that I worked together with are not able to see beyond the VJ geek performance that is only based on collage but montage is not even an afterthought. Since that is the only program even worth considering (the others I have used are even less suitable for what I want to do) its the final nail in that coffin. Really I donīt earn any real money with this - its a total hobby and I canīt afford it anymore neither in terms of time nor in terms of money nor in terms of my peace of mind.
If two of the three problems are solved I might consider popping the harddrive back into the computer. But seeing that Apple is targeting the middle field of computer users in the laptop arena and leaving the pro users completely out in the dust I see two problem not beeing solved until 2008, with the software - well as long as geeks programm these and design the interfaces for these I have no faith that there will ever be a tool that is not a toy (stable, thought out interface, geared toward filmmakers, stable, stable, stable, fast). I have no control over either side of the problems I was not able to make my case with the developers at all (read pure rejection except for the very most obvious things that also help in a "traditional vj performance") and with apple - well nobody has any influence in this arena - they are out to make big money and they should it just doesnīt give me any option at the moment.
so now i understand you better, thanks for the elaborately statement. but to sad that all the work iss going to rotten on your harddrive and nobody will have a chance to see it and of course the great idia of live cinema will going to sleep to.
wahtever, see ya!