Monthly Archive for November, 2008

I twittered about this earlier, but felt the need to go more in depth, so here’s my rant.

My laptop’s video processor died this week, just as we were about to record the riffs for the upcoming “Rocky King: Detective” episode of The Idiot Box. I’ve spent most of the past couple days offloading as much as I can over the LAN to my desktop computer, and trying to do the editing there.

My laptop was designed with video and multimedia in mind. The desktop was not. As a result, I was already pissed at renderings that took 3=5x as long when editing video. Then I had this new roadblock thrown in my path.

This is how I would usually produce an Idiot Box episode: I’d edit the video of the show-within-the-show in Corel VideoStudio, usually to speed up its pacing, take out video glitches, and make it fit into the window available for it better. I’d record the guys doing their riffs while watching the edited video on our TiVo straight into Adobe Audition. Then, I’d import the video into Audition and use its multi-tracking capabilities to match up the riffs properly with both auditory and visual cues. Often I’d also clean up and rebalance the original audio while I was at it.

With this done, I’d mix down the audio and import it into VideoStudio. I’d split off the original audio track and overlay the new one, creating a standalone riffed version of the show-within. Then I’d import the raw footage from the host segment recording sessions into VideoStudio to edit, color correct, add effects, etc. Then I’d import THAT footage into Audition to overlay ambient sound effects and/or “commercial” audio, and if need be clean up the audio from the host segments as much as possible. I’d mix THAT down and do the same thing with it that I did with the riff track for the show-within. Then I’d edit the two together into a final master for the episodes. Then when the time came to release it, I’d add in the breaks and billboards in VideoStudio and render the three release versions for each episode.

The main thing? I would do this all in MPEG-2 for the highest quality possible, degrading as little as possible each time through. Remember that I learned editing on VHS and SVHS, where a generation meant significant degradation, so I’m a little gun shy when it comes to intermediate generations. Also, less re-rendering would need to be done with VideoStudio 12′s “MPEG Optimization” mode, where it would just pass-through as much video as possible.

The catch: the version of Adobe Audition on the laptop was version 1.5. The version on the desktop was the same 2.0 I used to use for producing The Pab Sungenis Project. Having upgraded to Vista 64-bit a while back, I found myself also needing to upgrade Audition to work properly with the new operating system.

Between versions, Adobe took support for MPEG-2 video out of Audition! If you want to match audio up with video for timing purposes in Audition 3, you have to use AVI.

AVI LOOKS LIKE SHIT. AND IT’S LOSSY AS FUCK, WHICH MEANS IT DEGRADES EVERY GENERATION JUST LIKE ANALOG TAPE DOES.

I cannot use AVI for my editing process, but now I have to if I’m going to use Audition for my audio work. This means an extra set of renderings for both riff tracks and audio correction, which with a 30 minute show on this slow desktop could mean an extra 5-6 hours of rendering, JUST TO CREATE AN AVI VERSION I WILL USE FOR NOTHING BUT MATCHING UP VISUAL CUES.

Thanks a fucking lot, Adobe. This is the reason I don’t use Photshop. Or Premiere. Or anything else you touch. If you hadn’t bought my favorite audio editing program years ago, I wouldn’t use ANYTHING of yours at all. There is no fucking excuse for an “upgraded” version to actually take away a feature from the version you are upgrading from.