$@!%#& Movie

Ahh…

As you may, or may not know, I’ve been trying to get the On Piracy documentary out the door for the last few weeks. It was supposed to be out by Monday. However, the process has been hell. Absolute hell. I’ve barely slept in the last week at all.

To understand the problem, you have to understand how I’m putting the movie together. For every of the twenty-four interviewees, I have a Premiere project file. In these files, I have the raw footage of the interview, and then separate “sequences” for each of the clips they appear in the movie. So I cut the footage up, put them into these clips, clean up the audio, clean up the video, add images, and render. This makes a small MPG file. I do this for each interviewee, each time they appear in the film. I also do this for the narration sequences. So in total, I have about 120 of these clips.

I then put these clips together in a new project file, adjust the volume of the clips, add the soundtrack, add any last images, and render. This is the part that’s problematic. Hours in, it just stops for no apparent reason. There are no error messages – it just stops rendering. But it fails consistently in one spot. It took hours of testing to figure out that it was the images. If I had pictures which were too big in filesize (either due to filetype or resolution), the whole thing would just fail. These images weren’t malformed or corrupt in any way (I checked), it was Premiere. It just couldn’t handle it. At least not when I was rendering such large projects.

So I cut it all up. In the end, the movie was separated into eight segments. I also kept toying with the images, making them smaller, converting them, trying other images altogether, attempting to appease the Adobe god. But even these, hours in, would fail. Sometimes at one point, sometimes at another. If I shut down Premiere and started it up again, I tended to have better luck – and sometimes render all the way through. It was a frustrating experience.

After many sleepless nights, I eventually made progress. I ended up with the massive files I wanted, and joined them together. I produced a DVD. Both these files worked great – everything in sync. But then came the conversion to XviD. Out of sync. To FLV – out of sync. So I cross-encoded the large base file into a raw AVI – still out of sync. It seems like no matter what I do, it messes up. Why? I haven’t the slightest clue.

And that’s the stage I’m at right now. Playing with this until it works.