Ah, would you look at that date? Yes, indeed, this fabled “Other Side” is indeed real. Or maybe I’m now a fig­ment of my own imag­i­na­tion and I still have exams to go. Whoa, recursive.

Busi­ness was good, but for one ques­tion, the details of which I don’t exactly recall (23 c), which was so poorly writ­ten only BS teach­ers could man­age it. It depresses me to think there are peo­ple that can spend that much of their life pro­fes­sion­ally apply­ing buzz­words and doing absolutely noth­ing. Your mother was a hamp­ster and your father smelt of elder­ber­ries! Now go away, or I shall taunt you a sec­ond time!

And they did. The won­ders of Monty Python!

So, today, I plan to spend some time doing stuff with Tori because she’s about to fly away for… a long time… and then when I get home/before I go out play with Cinel­erra, which, mirac­u­lously, I finally have work­ing well. The secret is to ignore the stu­pid DEB and go straight for the RPMs with alien, which makes the expe­ri­ence remark­ably pain­less. Err… in a totally non-abducted-by-aliens kind of way.

ANYWAY! My biggest qualm with it is its render/batch ren­der thing, not because it’s slow (it is, kind of, but that’s mostly just the way I’ve got this com­puter setup), but because it seems impos­si­ble to export in a for­mat that every­thing likes (aside from straight raw DV, which I haven’t tried because I need to put another hard disk in this com­puter. I would have, but I’m out of IDE chan­nels and really need to think about how to store things properly.)

At the minute, I’m gen­er­ally ren­der­ing in MPEG-4 (ffm­peg) and then effec­tively transcod­ing back to MPEG-4 using mplayer to make it more player-friendly. I take it the codec is exactly the same, it’s just that Cinel­erra seems to have some quirk that means only mplayer can read the ren­dered file, whilst xine and VLC fall over and promptly die.

Shrug. I’ve just been edit­ing video sequences, though, so at least I haven’t had to deal with audio as well. One would pre­sume that would be rather less pain­less — it’s not, at least not in terms of set­ting up Cinel­erra for audio playback/NLE stuff. Despite hav­ing both ALSA and esound out­put options, ALSA would just make it crash (this seems widely doc­u­mented with no fix avail­able), and esound wouldn’t work because… well… I don’t think my local esound server has a port open, and Cinel­erra, being some broadcast-quality high-and-mighty piece of crap, decides that talk­ing to a local sound server is beneath it. Iron­i­cally, the sim­plest of the lot, OSS, worked with­out any dif­fi­cul­ties… but that of course means I can only have one sound stream going simul­ta­ne­ously. Which, admit­tedly, isn’t a huge prob­lem when you’re try­ing to work in Cinel­erra (it’s hardly as though you want other sounds going on whilst you’re try­ing to edit audio), but dis­abling the server, etc, can be a lit­tle bit of a pain.