Life of Kyle Prohaska

Today was a long day.  I got up around 10:30 to get started on my day early.  10:30 is early for me…zip it. I began working on the DVD right away and found some interesting problems.  I had done something to the film recently that required me to shift the subtitles of the film so they sync, also my chapter markers were off.  What does this wonderful discovery mean?  Well, since you asked so nicely let me explain.  I went through the entire film and all 2000 subtitles it has between the English and Spanish tracks…and moved each subtitle over to sync.  DVD Studio Pro, and Apple in all their great wisdom didn’t add an ability to select more than one subtitle element to move it…so this means moving them all one by one.  A crazy chore to be sure, and it took me a few hours…about 5…but I got it.  This gave me an opportunity to make sure the English subtitles were correct.   I found some minor errors in speech, and capitalized things like “Lord,” “God,” “Jesus,” etc.  Eventually I got it all straightened out.

Another wonderful issue came along.  This film is going on a Dual Layer DVD, so I need to set a break-point in the project file.  For those of you who don’t know what a break point is, it’s the point at which the DVD player changes from reading the top layer of the DVD to the bottom layer.  Have you ever noticed when watching a film there seems to be a slight pause at some point?  It isn’t a skip but it sorta paused suddenly?  That’s the DVD player switching to the other layer to continue reading the disc.  Well thing is, I had chosen one just to see what happened, and because of a bug in DVD Studio Pro…it became permanent.  What did this mean?  Either A) There’s some magic fix for this and things are fine or B) It can’t be fixed and I have to re-author the DVD completely, move the subtitles again, and pray that the break-point I set in the new project file is the right one.  Eventually I found a fix, which involved me opening the project file in Xcode which is the Mac’s development SDK (basically the thing people make programs in), and edit the actual code to change the break-point value.  I’ve NEVER done anything like that before and found it funny that I had to, and luckily it worked after I did it…so YAY.

The DVD is really close to being completed.  I found some minor mistakes that I want to fix in my credits of the film, so I’m going to have to re-render the film again, but it doesn’t take long so no biggy.  Sorry this blog post is so technical, for those of you who are bored.  When it comes to rendering out anything to a DVD, I ALWAYS render out to an uncompressed SD file first.  Settings set at 720×480 NTSC 16:9.  Why do you ask?  Well, the downrez of the footage comes out better.  Most compression programs when going from a large source to a compressed source of a smaller size, cause some issues in the downrez process.  Most of the problems are hard to see but when it comes to things like text, or anything really fine in detail, you can get jaggies.  Exporting to a downrezzed Quicktime file from Final Cut Pro, THEN going into Apple Compressor solves this problem and it gives you extremely sharp and crisp encodes.  I’m sharing my dirty little secret with you, so feel privileged.  Check out the end credits of the Standing Firm trailer: http://www.standingfirmmovie.com/ and look at the text…it’s crystal clear.  I’ve seen the results with and without the uncompressed Quicktime source, and the results are night and day.  Ok I’m done with the tech talk, someones brain might explode!

I had an hour and a half phone conference today for PR/Marketing on Ace Wonder.  I feel really lucky being able to work on this film and being in a more legitimized position to do what I think I do pretty well…web design/graphics/PR.  I do it on a smaller scale but I think I have some good things to share and offer.  I’m looking forward to working on the film more as time goes on and helping release things, update the website with new content as the film comes together, etc.  It’s gonna be fun

My father also flew into town today.  He’ll be home for a little under two weeks.  I look forward to spending time with him and visiting.  We don’t get to spend that much time together, and it’s nice to have him in the house.  This home has been way too quiet lately.  I miss my dog too, so I look forward to seeing him when my mom gets home on the 7th.

Later into the night I started recording my commentary for the STANDING FIRM DVD.  They’re HARD to do.  I’m 22 minutes into the commentary but I probably recorded almost an hour of dialog just from re-recording things where I stuttered or said something dumb or whatever.  I want the commentary to be good and include a little bit of everything.  So far I think it’s coming out OK but man it’s frustrating when you want to share something but the film keeps moving on without you.  You need to talk fast but not too fast, and be informative but not annoying, and share things that matter not just stuff you think would be cool to share.  It’s a fine balance, but I think I’ll have a pretty good commentary by tomorrow night.  I gotta get this thing in the mail….NOW!

Till next time folks…adios.