State of Video Rendering Tonight

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My state of rendering tonight - 26 layers, right now at 50% so I can see if it'll work. It takes nearly 3 hours each time to render so that I can watch it. I edited the prosepoem posted earlier for possible inclusion, as an audio recording, but I don't know if I'll add it or not. Jose Travieso's piano solo is so amazing, I don't want to disturb it with spoken words. If I do add the prosepoem, it'll be at the very end, and will push the video to about 9 minutes. As a boring art video, probably an extra minute or so won't matter, but I'll see. I just spent a few hours making a mini movie of two layers so that I could import it into this video and crop it to cover a thermostat, a crop that changes with all the colour variations of the video through its duration so you'll never know the thermostat was there. It is I who has to be satisfied, ultimately. I don't expect much feedback on this video, or high view counts.

Instead, I focus on making the best video I can given my level of expertise, my aesthetic standards and the material I have chosen to work with.

Creating takes time, and I accept that video-making, especially for someone like me who creates the palettes of the moving image as one would a painting, is a long and careful process. 

                                                        

Rendering, rendering...

Rendering, oh my life is rendering... what you see here only a small bit -  2 hours before I can watch it 'to see.' I hover over my work like a worrisome hen. And only at 50% resolution (any higher resolution and I'd be waiting days for every little bit to render).

What I'm working on has taken days, and will take days to render when it's finished, something like 30 hours, and the videopoem is sooooo boring! Oh, not the music. The solo piano of Jose Travieso is incredible. I decided not to interrupt his ecstatic playing with voice but to have words you can't quite read float over the screen. Of course I'll tell you what they are when I upload the video, if, if that day ever comes! The footage of me dancercizing in the living room leaves a lot to be desired, for sure. Originally I liked the funk of the ordinariness of it. My house shorts, dog-walking Summer clothes, baggy, unglamorous. But it all bores me now. My apartment is small and overstuffed. I've layered way too many filters. I am finickity, perfectionist, long, long hours without stopping. What is this strange obsession to finish what is dull?

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Stills from 'Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones'

An unplanned video -are they ever any other way?- thought I'd set the camera up while painting, yes at night, I know, silly, only I got talking, you know how it is. Thought it way too dark to consider for anything, but a filter on FinalCut Express, which is what I use to edit video, brought the light out. It's nearly 7½ minutes long, was over 8GB in a Quicktime .mov, but with a bit of fiddling, and I hope the quality is alright when it's finished uploading, I got it down to 1.6GB -under the 2GB limit at YouTube.

It's a 6 hour upload, I know, marathon. Should be up by tomorrow. A few stills... (click for larger)

Later now and it's up: Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones