TwelveColonies: So long, and thanks for all the fun.

[beccatoria]

Hey guys, just a heads up to let anyone who cares know that I've left twelvecolonies. I had a great time playing through two challenges with you guys, and while I promise I'm not personally beating myself up over our incredibly close loss, (though please, feel free to blame me if it will help you not blame yourselves! :p), the fact that I had neither the time nor inclination to participate in as many challenges as I should have done is why I'm leaving.

That classic breakup line, but nonetheless true, IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME!

Basically my real life is weird and messed up right now, and for a while twelvecolonies was a fabulous distraction, but changing circumstances and changing me means that I can no longer give it the attention it requires or deserves, so I'm bowing out.

I wish you all nothing but the best, and be damn sure you post all your entries for the vidding challenge to your LJs once the challenge is over! (And you know, if anyone is thinking about dipping their toes into vidding for the first time and wants help wrangling WMM, that offer always stands.)

So anyway, so long twelvecolonies and teambasestar, and thanks for all the fun.

(In other news, I'm really sorry I haven't been posting much lately; see above for real weird life and my varying responses to it on any given month. In other news, I liked this week's Fringe.)

Comments

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree, I always thought Dr Warren was going to be as Astrid-type assistant too, except, like, probably even more assistant-like than Astrid who is at least part of the FBI. I'm not sure she had three doctorates specifically but she had three "advanced physics degrees" at least one of which must have been a doctorate. Pretty impressive stuff and I Really loved that she got to be religious without being a kook.

I also completely understand the simultaneous desire and inability to give them the benefit of the doubt re: Peter's importance. They haven't failed yet but I'm just...I don't know. I have a horrible sense of waiting. And I feel if I give up my cynicism, I'll be let down even more badly, or will justify things that aren't worth justifying, but if I hold onto my cynicism, I'm being unfair to the story since they haven't, strictly, earned that cynicism from me? OH WELL. I guess we'll have to wait and see...

As to Olivia's avoidance, I'm not certain but I got the impression it was a very short time later. Her words about not knowing yet if she was going to tell Broyles suggested to me that she hadn't seen Broyles yet or decided anything which would be a bit weird if they had been working cases with this big elephant in the room - not to mention Peter. The trailer for next week looks like it starts to deal with that kind of thing so my assumption is that this episode occurred very shortly afterwards. Although since Walter was trying to get in touch with her if I had to put a time frame on it I'd guess at the following evening or something?

WMM! Unfortunately I can't help with the DVD ripping issue since I'm not an expert on that and I don't know what program you're using anyway. :( But I'm glad that my explanation at least made sense!

As to the overlays, you can get a custom plugin for WMM that lets you do overlays. The problem is that because it's not a two-track setup, the overlays are basically done as transitions, which means that during the transition, you just...see both tracks at once. The plugin offers a variety of opacity levels as different transitions. The problem therein is that the overlay clip just cuts in immediately rather than fading in which often looks very abrupt.

The only way I found around that was to:

1) choose the clip onto which you want to put an overlay.

2) render that clip with an overlay, being careful to note the timestamps.

3) reimport the clip with the overlay. Put it on the timeline next to the original clip. Fade between the original clip and the clip with the overlay, making sure you're fading between "identical" points in the clip.

i.e. if the original clip is 1.00 seconds long, you could cut the first 0.10 seconds off the front of the overlay clip, then overlap the two from 0.10 seconds into the original clip. So in effect, you're fading between the exact same frames in each instance, except, one has an overlay, so this gives the illusion of fading in and out of an overlay.

As you can see, even if that made sense to you (again, words + vidding = argh!), it's incredibly fiddly which is why I never bothered much. But it is possible.

I wrote up some stuff I learned warring with WMM including some stuff about places you can get custom effects/plugins for it here:

http://beccatoria.livejournal.com/68259.html#cutid4

In case any of that's useful. :)

[emmiere.livejournal.com]

Thanks for correcting my memory on the degree question, 3 doctorates seemed um, a wee bit excessive. :p And the non-kooky religious character is a huge type of mine, plus the fact that 'assistant' didn't seem to define much of what she did and knew, which was apparently everything Walter did.

I'm kind of at the point where I feel slightly ridiculous for the nail-biting over an episode that Peter wasn't even in (as Joshua Jackson anyway). And for the fact that he is actually one of the three leads and just balancing the arcs dictates that he will probably have more to do in the future and, as a best case, might even make a better character of him that I wouldn't rather ignore or find amusingly useless. Yet I already resent the probable potential encroachment on Olivia's storyline. Usurper!

And no, I don't think it was so long that they were working cases in silence, and I can sort of buy that there would be a small overlap between the time Olivia needs to process alone and the point where Walter's anxiety would make him come find her (though I kind of think Peter might have made it there first unless there were off-screen shenanigans, so there's a bit of a gap for me. Which meant that they could make it Walter's story only, so who am I to complain really). But I suppose Olivia has never struck me as the type that needs less information to process, and even though the basic facts were probably enough for her to guess at most of the story, the only way I can see her not going to find Walter herself is the legitimate fear that she'll have to face up with Peter before she's decided anything. Which...ok, may have just made some sense of it for me. (Of course I would never think to go process more by making a post, that would just be silly.)

And dude, I remember that link! Sort of. Which is kind of depressing, as it is from 2008. (Also, thank you, it is useful and I think I understand, and am impressed by, what the fiddly bits of the explanation mean). I'm assuming the overlays are the Blaine effects bit, since that sounds familiar-ish and I might have bookmarked it at some point?