Kill this
motherfucker. Seriously, the person who wrote this
needs to be shot. The person who decided to code
"Unknown Error" into a program is a lazy BITCH that
needs to be bound to a stake and shot. Blinfold and
cigarette, the whole 9 yards. Why? Because after 72
straight hours of work (and I DO fuckin'
mean STRAIGHT), I FOUND OUT what the cause of
this "Unknown Error" was and I COULD'VE written a
more helpful prompt as to what to do next, but this
ass goblin couldn't spend the time?
I'm a bit
frustrated.
Imagine you've
worked for months on a DVD project. Working
painstakingly on every section, hundreds of carefully
placed buttons and menus. Something that should be
pretty simple but not for this friggin' program.
Something as simple as the BACK and NEXT buttons
in the 40 screenshots on the disc, took me over 10
hours. Why!?!? Because this fisher-price program can't
place the buttons in the same place. You have to treat
each picture as a menu, then place a back button over
it, then compare it to the previous picture's back
button, then go back to the new one - move it 2
pixels, go back to the old one, go back to the new one
move it 2 pixels to the right, then compare it again -
over, and over, and over until they match up. That
equals one. Try that for 80 buttons on the screenshots
alone and you're already about to burn small
children's ears with hot pokers to relieve the stress.
Then of course sweating over the bitrate to encode
your media files so the viewer would get the best
possible picture because no compression program tells
you what it is. Are you all used to SP and SLP for
your VCR? Yeah, well here - you just have to guess and
hope it is the highest possible for you material.
Goddamn rocket science is easier. I'm not kidding. At
least that's logical. You work and work and work until
it's perfect. At 2:35 AM Sunday night you finally have
it ready to burn. You hit burn, and in the middle of
the pre-burn process (a 90 minute duldrum of something
called "demuxing") this window pops up:
And that's it. It
could truly be one of 650 things. I assumed that
I had made my bitrate too high. Even though the
program accepted the files before, I assumed that's
what the BR in (BRErr, 1) stood for: BitRate. So I
took the 20 video files, and one by one recompressed
them. Took me 16 hours. I dozed off by the
computer so I could hear the DING, to insert the
next one. When I got all that done, the program now
wouldn't even import them them. Forget the actual burn
process I couldn't even insert them. So I
compressed them AGAIN for another 16 hours, and this
time - they came in fine. Re linked everything hit
burn and:
It was at this
point that I came to the realization that there was a
very real possibility that there would be no DVD for
my DVD release party. There's really not a whole
lot to troubleshoot when the program comes up with the
brilliant prompt equivalent of: "I dunno". As a
test I took the media files and I put it into a new
file with just 2 menus screens and hit burn, and it
worked. EURKEA! So that meant that SOMETHING in one of
my 80 menu screens, and hundreds of buttons was
causing this "Unknown Error". So all day Wednesday I
spent manually taking a button out, then hitting burn,
and waiting for 3 minutes until it got to the point
where the error would come up. I did this 217 tmes
before I figured everything out. How do
I know it was 217 times? 'Cause each attempted
burn puts another folder on your harddrive and I
opened my harddrive this morning and POW! All these
folders. It actually made me crack a smile for the
first time in 3 days.
It ended up that
there were 7 menus screens that the progam just didn't
like. No mistake on my part, it just didn't like it.
By a 17 hour process of elimination where I took
screens and buttons away one by one and then tested by
burning, I got it narrowed down, and then I had
to put them back in one by one to see which were the
faulty pictures. 17, straight fucking, hours. Of
nothing but INSERT, DRAG, BURN - pray. Over, and over
and over. Folks my head was in a state of frustration
and stress that I'm not sure I've ever reached before.
There was absolutely no other course of action but to
do this, and do nothing but this without break until I
found the problem. I still had to make 50 of these
bastards before MONDAY.
When I
found a pic that wasn't working, all I'd
do was re crop it, save it under a name
(something like
"garyPLEASEFUCKINGWORK.jpg") then reimport
it and it would work fine. It came down to
4:45 AM Thursday morning, and one picture.
I was one picture away from the end. I had
to redo the picture, you ready for
this?.... 21 different times and import it
to see if it would work. Finally, time 21
it liked it. And started the burn, praying
everything else would work as I fell
into a deep sleep. I awoke 3 hours later
to an opened tray, a silver disc, and
heart palpitations that were inhuman.
Here's
what I
saw.
It worked.
IT FRIGGIN WORKED. I was so scared the
DVD stock would be bad (that happened before),
but these were PERFECT. Not only did it work, it might
be the best looking DVD I've ever done. The video
turned out nearly flawless, no compression artifacts
whatsoever. The menus look great, the music during the
menus is perfect - it's done. At this time I've paused
my burning process for a moment to write you. I'm 31
discs into the first limited edition run of 50 DVDs
for the performance. All will be numbered (and signed
if you so desire) - and there's no way in hell I'm
selling these for $15. No offense but, fuck you all if
you think $20 is too much for this. LOL. There's never
been a more legitimate price for a DVD that is slaved
over like this than $20. I individually burned each
one (over an hour a piece) and everything from the
show, to the process of putting this together is worth
20 bones EASY. I know the flyer says $5 of the cover
goes towards the purchase of a DVD, so I'm making 'em
$24.99 and giving them to you all who show up that
night for $19.99. It's a sleazy thing to do as I
mentioned $15 previously, but again as I said so
politely before: "FUCK YOU ALL".
:-)
But I digress,
project is DONE. And I'm really, really proud of how
amazing it turned out. So many special features. I
mean damn, look at this:
-1 full show,
morphing all 7 venues from year one of Adam &
The Trinitrons together seamlessly (basically just
cool transitions)...
-The entire
Trinitron Chronicles 7 part series from the web,
now in full screen
-Deleted
sequence featurette with commentary
-Outtakes
featurette
-Cameron Opens
featurette with commentary and 2
bloopers
-Casting
Director Demo tape, updated specifically for the
DVD
-The
"Stability, Potential, Success" short previewing
the next 4tvs show "The Journey".
-40 Full-Screen
shots of the boys...
-In depth
sections on each band member including all their
"favorites" and "vital statistics"
Giddy-up. I'm
certainly proud to put this in your hands.
Also, I'm proud to
tell you that at the release party on the 5th I will
be announcing a project that will debut next year that
many thought would never happen. It's been goin' round
in my brain for a bit, I've begun writing it and I
gotta tell you, I'm pretty pumped. "The Journey" will
still be out by the end of this year, but quick on
it's heels will be this. "The Journey" will be a
living and growing show anyway - that will be added to
and changing forever. There will still be the need for
other stuff on top of that one...and this will
certainly make people happy. So again, yet another
reason to be there on Thursday, September
5th.
Quick side note on
the "John Wayne Gacy" thing... John Wayne Gacy is a
famous serial killer/rapist - that wasn't the name of
"Francis" from Pee Wee's Big Adventure. Oh, and it
never happened.
(sigh)
I figured if
I wrote about the event a few hours before it
happnened, it would be pretty much safe news. Wrong.
An hour before I left I got a call that they
already did the scene and forgot about needing those
extras. Ahh well. Again, the only positive is you guys
get yet another insight of what it's like to live in
this city. (sigh)
But at this point,
nothing can get me down. I'm so goddamn glad the
DVD is done I can't even begin to tell you. To be
able to come back and perform to a welcoming crowd is
gonna be the moment of the year for me. And of course,
beating Marty's ass at videogames and foosball is
something to look forward to as well. SO this is it!
My last entry from LA. My father's new computer will
allow me to do my first updates from Columbus in 3
years so expect something next week, and for the love
of all things holy - please do all you can to make it
to the show a week from this upcoming Thursday (2
weeks from yesterday).
