Digital Video Delay

Putting together a DVD or two collecting our films has been a priority of mine for so long that it might as well never have been a priority to begin with. I think I bought a DVD burner for the specific purpose of producing one about three years ago... so much for that! Still, the bug's been there, and as I write this I'm in mid-production on two DVDs: An anthology of our short films and related material, and a disc specifically collecting season one of The Depths of Addiction.

The main hurdle has always been getting the digital elements together - all of this material is most conveniently collected in small, compressed files easily digestible online (a lot of it only in WMV format - barf). To get it all together in high-quality MPEG is a heavy task. After re-ripping the DV masters back from their miniDV prisons, however, I have everything necessary to move forward. A nice bonus to waiting this long is that the DVD can include a couple of Peaches Valentine teasers.

As far as the DoA collection goes, I never did meaningfully export the master project files from Adobe Premiere, so it all exists in the original (50+ gigabyte) Premiere project itself. I'm currently parsing it all and getting it exported back out into a DVD-ready format. In the process, I'm cleaning it up here and there. While I can't do much about the audio noise and interlacing problems endemic to the camera used to film the series, I can improve the titling and fix up a few editing and audio errors here and there. This may just be after-the-fact fussing, but screw it, I want this DVD to be as shiny as possible.

Part of me wants to go in with scissors blazing a second time (given how much better the "director's cut" versions are than the originals), but I think I'll leave that for whenever I decide to go through with cutting the episodes down into a single, 45-minute feature.

Astral Projection

Getting Noukon Studios properly re-launched is tricky business. That little thing called real life with its meandering obstacles like jobs and social responsibilities and such can be fairly pesky. Planning out any kind of film production these days is nearly impossible (and is why you haven't seen anything of substance in... wow, three and a half years now!). Let's take a look at my road map through the current haze, shall we?

If this group had an ingredient list, ambition would be at the top. This, in most ways, is a bad thing - it leaves less room for substance and feasibility. While I always have larger projects on the backburner, I've realized that cycling in some smaller, easier productions into the forefront would help us to actually get something done.

Shadow Age may be my pet project, but it will need lots of development time and production capital. While it stews, there are plenty of ways to create content. Peaches Valentine is now, I think, back at the forefront of our docket, and I've pushed in a couple of short film projects that are "weekend filmable" (this includes a simplified version of A Clockwork Baptism, a project I've been wanting to do for some time).

To drive this, I'm setting a personal goal (backed up by time taken off from work to get it accomplished): Film something by the end of 2008. It doesn't have to be complete, it just has to be in the can.

We can only go up from there.