Good At Other People's Work, Lousy At My Own

School is nothing less than overwhelming. It truly, truly sucks, and I don't want to go back. Ever. Not to the junior college I'm at now, not to film school, not to a P.T.A. meeting if I ever have kids. None of it. I'm through.

On a lighter note, I'm getting really good with some of the utilities I downloaded from Doom9, and have been putting together little snippets of this and that in an attempt to find humor, though the snippets of First Blood are still easily my favorite.

*begin hardcore tech-jargon*

I'm using SmartRipper 2.41 for DVD extraction and on-the-fly DeCSS work, followed up by the version of DVD2AVI that's included in the AutoGK (Gordian Knot) software pack, because it's not as temperamental as the other version of DVD2AVI I tried, in that it actually extracts audio properly, and the stereo separations are absolutely fantastic. So I'm using that for conversion, using the current Xvid MPEG-4 codec, and it's basically doing the conversion on my machine at about a real-time ratio of 24 to 30 frames per second at 720 by 480 (that 1.5 to 1 anamorphic bitch ratio for which I cannot find the 16:9 cure) for most features.

I'm not entirely sure why, but Final Fantasy X rips at 704 by 480 (using ffx2mov version 2.11). I haven't gotten Final Fantasy X-2 to rip yet, but that's because the program for doing it is undocumented and I'm just a retarded monkey when it comes to undocumented software. Actually, I shouldn't be that disappointed, since the vast majority of the FFX-2 cutscenes were done in-engine, and so I wouldn't be able to use them anyway.

Regardless, what I really want is to score a copy of Final Fantasy VIII, because it had the best cinematics of the series. That's a qualitative opinion, by the way, because in terms of polygons and video quality, FFX has it beat by a landslide, but just put Squall up against Crybaby ... er, Tidus, and see which one you'd rather work with in a video.

I think this all started with a game called Driver for the PC, and I think it got ported to the Playstation. Anyway, Driver was about being a getaway driver (but you were actually a cop, so it's all okay for sale to kids). The game wasn't that great. But, after you were done driving around, you could save the replay and then cut it together using the in-game camera and editing tools. It usually took me about two hours to cut together a three-or-so minute chase scene to whatever music happened to have the same duration. That game was a fucking blast for that one and only reason. Driver 2 and its upcoming installment Driv3r (which wins the L33T Title of the Year award) have no such editing tools, and therefore they suck ass.

So tomorrow I'll finish cutting my first video to a bootleg of an Evanescence cover of the Smashing Pumpkins song 'Zero.' Actually, I think I'll dig out my copy of 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness' and use the Smashing Pumpkins version, if only because it's a crisper sound. I thought about going with something off of Rob Dougan's 'Furious Angels' CD, and then realized that would've been terribly boring. Great music, but doesn't make good video, unless you start running everything backwards, which I'm not about to spend the CPU cycles to do.

Anyway. It's time for me to go to bed and sit through a day at school tomorrow and wish that someone would just beat me into a coma with a large non-lethal blunt object. And then it's off to the diner to work on my Poli-Sci paper for about ten minutes, upon conclusion of which will occur writer's block, followed by writing more of my script, as I tend to do during these times when I hate being me. Lizzi would be so proud and yet, at the same time, so angry.

AIM: therbmcc71