Blue Star Episode 3 - Progress Report (December 13, 2018) (Patreon)

So, first of all, if you missed it, I posted the final trailer for Blue Star Episode 3 (alt link) on Tumblr (and linked it on Twitter) on the 11th. Go watch it, if you haven't yet!

With that out of the way: All of the rendering is done! Yay!

The above image is the combined size of all the raw footage. Just shy of 70GB of harddrive space, being lovingly consumed for all of you lovely people to watch the resultant 28+ minute video it will all come together to create.

The finalization of the render and the release of the trailer were really the highlights of the week's progress. Here is my current planned schedule. As always, I can't promise that things will go like this, but I will do my best to stick to it!

• Saturday, December 15 - Finish all of the raw-SFM mixing. This is mixing all of the soundtracks I had placed in SFM itself, so things like dialogue and anything that involves two objects interacting (fingers on keyboards, fingers on cock, stuff like that). This includes exporting out all of the audio tracks, which I am going to actually cheat on. Classically, it takes 30 minutes per export. There's anywhere from 5 to 8 tracks per part to be exported, and 4 parts. So I'm looking at 10+ hours of just exporting audio. I am going to try just recording my desktop audio and play back the parts live to get that time cut down significantly - each part is only 6 minutes long (roughly), so it'd be a time reduction of about 5x (30 minutes to export, 6 minutes to play back).
• Monday, December 17 - I'll be spending most of Monday with my family.
• Tuesday, December 18 - I will try to have all of the mixing done, and be ready to export the final video, prepped and ready to upload.
• Thursday, December 20 - Patreon Early Access release! Woo!
• Tuesday, December 25 - Public release! WOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! I'M FINALLY FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! Ahem. Sorry.

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Beyond that, I have ditched Adobe Premiere as my video editor of choice, and am currently field-testing Avid Media Composer for editing the final Episode 3.

The trailer was made in Premiere, and I spent more time trying to get Premiere to just fucking work correctly than I spent actually editing. What should have been an hour-long venture ended up taking two days, between the unexpectedly long times it took for exporting the audio to quickly mix, and all the problems Premiere gave me.

A channel I follow on YouTube, This Guy Edits, often features Avid. It is the industry standard for blockbuster films and for high-quality television like HBO, and I figured that if it's stable enough for them, it is hopefully stable enough for me.

It took a bit of getting used to it (so much Googling), and some experimenting with the different versions (it has a free version, but it's neutered in really subtle ways), but I am feeling pretty comfortable with it after spending an afternoon with it. I have managed to get all of the Intro sequence mixed down, with the exception of music (I do music after everything else is mixed).

I am decidedly really liking Avid. The only thing I wish it had was live nesting. Premiere has it, and it allows you to take a sequence X with multiple audio tracks, and stick it inside another sequence Y. In sequence Y, sequence X would only take up one audio track - but if you make any changes to X, then those changes would be made in Y as well.

Avid does not have that. "Nesting" doesn't really exist - you just copy the contents from sequence X over to sequence Y, and that's it. You can mix audio down to a single track, but that is an irreversible operation, and is unlinked - if you make any changes to the original audio before the mix, you have to redo the mix.

OTHER THAN THAT, THOUGH, I am absolutely loving Avid. It actually plays back immediately in realtime (Premiere had a delay of upwards of 7 seconds between me hitting "Play" and it actually playing), I find the UI clean and intuitive (once you learn where everything is), and in a lot of ways it is actually closer to SFM than Premiere in terms of how it handles clips.

But what I love most about Avid right now is its reverb capabilities. Premiere's reverb efforts are, in my opinion, absolutely worthless. The presets in Premiere have trash names, but more importantly, whenever I tried to apply them, it ruined playback - the audio would play back slowed down, and would chop and stutter horribly. It was so bad that, for every project I've done since Phazon Experiment A, I actually did all of the reverb in Audacity, before importing the audio into Premiere.

Avid, in comparison, has reverb that works exactly like you'd expect. No slowdown, no delays. It Just Works. And, even better, its reverb works exactly identically to Audacity's, down to the preset names. So all the work I've done with reverb in Audacity, to make up for Premiere's shortcomings, translates seamlessly. On top of all of that, Avid even allows you to save custom project-specific presets for reverb, to quickly apply on a clip-by-clip basis. So I have a different reverb profile for every scene in Blue Star Episode 3 - I only have to set up the reverb for each scene once, and then I just drag-and-drop for the rest of the video. It doesn't get much easier.

A final plus side to using Avid is, having experience with the program gives me an edge in potentially moving into the formal entertainment industry as an editor, some time in the future. I don't have plans to do that, but I don't expect this porn business to sustain me forever, and it's good to have an eye on alternatives.

That's all for now! Next Thursday's post will either be an Early Access release, or will be me weeping my eyeballs out for having missed the deadline. Let's hope for the former!

See you all next week!