It’s starting to look like we’re expecting…

…a baby horse next year. Here, what’d you think I was gonna say? 😛 Raquina’s huge. With a capital H and a capital UGE. She’s either going to have a baby, or she’s eaten one and we just haven’t noticed which one is missing yet. When the ultrasound was done, her breeding seemed not to have “taken,” and we just kinda threw our arms up in the air and said “oh well, there’s always next year.”
I’m really down because my Slightly Extended Weekend is almost over. It’s nigh-on-impossible for me to wind up with a three-day weekend without being deathly ill throughout the whole thing, so I’ve enjoyed it tremendously. I’ve slept a lot, because by golly, I’ve needed to catch up on sleep. I’m unashamed to say that, Friday and Saturday, I got 10+ hours of sleep each day. Because I’ve been freakin’ exhausted.
Some awesome eBay finds tonight, including one which is a real doozie, and one which is something I’ve literally wanted for almost 20 years. Some stuff is Avid-related. I’ll do the customary show-and-tell when it all gets here.
I’ve been doing some Avid stuff when I haven’t been asleep or at the farm. Mainly video for the site, catching up on PDF demo videos and starting to crank out the first few Pixel Fiction demo videos. (I think there’s been one already, for Katamari, so maybe that’s a misnomer.) Now, I’ve been asked a couple of times, “Surely, with all of that power in your hands, you’ve not just going to crank out game demo videos for the site, or make Olivia blow Daleks up, or do spaceship animations.”
And that’s correct. That’s not all I’m going to do. The game videos are something I’m behind on (and that directly affects the WordPressification of Phosphor Dot Fossils), and I’m also working on more Toybox video segments, for those items that have some component to them that’s best seen in action, like the RC Daleks. (There won’t be a video for every single wave of action figures, for example, though rare items like the B5 Shadow Sentient may be exceptions.)
As for the long, involved animations: that’s as much about me trying to climb back onto the 3-D animation horse as it is about the Avid – moreso, really, since the bulk of producing an animation is on the PC I’m using to render, not on the Avid itself, which simply chews on the sequentially numbered frames for about ten minutes before spitting it out and making it look about a zillion times better than I ever envisioned when I was putting it all together. The stuff I’ve been turning out here is so far removed from the primitive animation stuff I used to do in Lightwave ten years ago that it’s scary.
I have a mental checklist of “experiments” to try out, stuff that I haven’t done or been able to do on the Avid at work, so I can see if something is do-able, and if so, how long it takes to render, and if not, why not. This gives me a good idea of how involved a certain process is so I can know what to charge for it, say, in the event I quit the station and go into business for myself. Some of the experiments have worked (the Olivia vs. Dalek video was about five effects experiments in one, and the trippy Burchuss lightning in space piece was two experiements), some have required a somewhat bewildered rethink (needless to say, you haven’t gotten to see those). The stuff you’ve seen so far, those have been the serendipitous successes. There have even been a few you haven’t seen. I cooked up some bitchin’ FMV loops for DVD menus the other night.
Also, in recent weeks, I’ve been putting in 10-12 hour days at work on average. I don’t think it’s even remotely an exaggeration to say I’ve been a little bit Avid’ed out. (On the other hand, it’s such a relief to come home to a machine that’s in peak condition because other people aren’t leaving way too much crap on it and never deleting anything out properly. There’s a built-in utility for this sort of thing, people – how frakking hard can it be!?) But I don’t feel guilty about some of these days, where the extent of my home editing consists of setting up, rendering, and Flashing another game video. Because it’s not like we had to take out a home equity loan to get this setup. It’s paid for, and overall, thus far, even with the motherboard replacement, one dead SCSI card (a little heart attack that happened about a week ago, but fortunately there’s a redundancy in place), and some extra stuff we’ve gotten for it, less has been spent on this video editing suite than some folks put into an average semester’s worth of college textbooks. I spent more on the camera last year, and guess what? It’s paid for too. None of it’s sitting around accumulating 57% interest on a credit card if I happen not to touch it for 24 hours.
I’m not taking anyone to task for asking “Is that all?”, because it’s a perfectly natural question. I’m just saying that there’s more going on here than you might expect, and it’s not costing me money – the money’s already spent. Which is a great, great thing. And, y’know, if the best-case scenario plays out and I wind up landing a new job that makes me much happier and brings in more money, then this thing becomes another part of the all-encompassing, Borg-like entity that I just call The Hobby these days (I’ve given up trying to claim having several hobbies, because they’re all so interlocked). How many web sites out there, especially of this size, have an Avid to produce video segments on? Not a whole bloody lot of ’em, I’d imagine, and I can still make a buck on the side with it – at my own pace, and on my own schedule.