This week is a bit harder to calculate, as I sort of did everything at once.
-Video Editing (4 hours)
-BMG Finding (In and out during renders of the video)
-Playtest Analysis (1 hour)
This week, as the team discovered we had a video sell draft due, I decided to tackle it. The GDC panel we presented to about a month ago had used a testimonial video to try to pitch to the judges, so we used that as the base. It definitely required some updates to reflect the game, and also needed better editing work done in general.
However, this process proved far more difficult than it should have. Namely, I ran into many video issues. The plus side to this is while waiting for the multiple renderings to finish, I had alot of combined time to search for background music files. After awhile of rendering troubleshooting (to no avail), I managed to get together all of the music that we'd need so far.
The first of these issues was that I had some de-synced audio for some of the clips. Very well, fixed easily enough. Took about 15 minutes and done. That was the easiest problem, though. The second was that I knew in its current state, the video needed captions because we captured it in a noisy area. So I spent at least an hour (if not more) using Adobe's captioning tool, following their official steps. When it got to the final step for caption display, it simply wasn't working as advertised. I asked around for some people's opinions, and they didn't know how exactly to solve it either (most people never used the actual captioning tool, but just title cards). So that was an effort that ultimately went wasted for this draft because I couldn't find anyway to get them to appear. The final and largest problem I ran into was that when previewing or exporting the video draft, it would constantly get stuck at 62-64% with an 'Unknown Error'. Because it didn't know itself what the problem was, I didn't ether. I had to sift through all my footage that would be around the 60% area, check settings, change encoders, render in different ways--when it came down to it, after too many attempts, I disabled two video layers and it exported fine. This leads me to believe that the computer I was working on either didn't have enough RAM to render out the edits I wanted to (it was a heavily edited portion of the video), or there was some sort of RAM cap on Adobe Premiere.
That eventually got finished though, and I made efficient use of my rendering time to find music, as I said above. This week wasn't perhaps as productive as the last, but it definitely had me ripping my hair out.
Content Positive
- I got the Video Draft Finished
-Unique BGM for all games now yay!
Content Negative
-So. Many. Premiere. Editing. Issues.
-WHY DON'T THE COMPUTERS HAVE ENOUGH RAM IN THE GRAD LABS
Total Time Spent - 5 Hours