Nope. I previously reported I was just about finished with the Treasure Hunt movie. Well, the universe is not done f-ing around with me yet. After getting all the chunks rendered in high quality (which takes much longer than before) I assembled them together, along with the audio, and now the lengths no longer match!
It’s possible I messed something up when I was ‘chunking’ things, I didn’t look closely as I was really upset when I discovered this, but I did very quickly try to sync things at the very end of the flick and wasn’t seeing things line up there.
So, clearly, the open source Linux-based software I’m using (Kdenlive) is not ready for prime time. In order to get the high quality renders, I had to get the latest ‘appimage‘ version, but that version couldn’t reread it’s own files after upgrading from the version I had used for all the editing. Fortunately, the file is in (mostly) human-readable XML format, so I edited it so the stupid thing could read it correctly (imagine if I weren’t a professional programmer).
The core of the problem seems to be my initial decision to cut the library scene as an independent project. Since there’s no option to copy/paste (at least there wasn’t in the old version, I should try in the new version (multiple versions because all the various Linux distros update things asynchronously; yes, there can be an, at times very heavy, price to use Linux)), I was thinking I was going to have to reedit those scenes. However, I found out I could include another project as a subproject. The wrinkle? The renders weren’t high quality for those subprojects for some reason (though I thought of something this morning I’ll try this afternoon). If the copy/paste doesn’t magically start working, I don’t know how else to get things to come together.
Professionally, I used to ‘straddle the fence’ between Windows and the various flavors of UNIX, but when Microsoft decided to go to Vista from XP and renamed/moved so many of the administration applications, I decided, if I’m going to (re)learn a new operating system, it might as well be a free one. Since then, I’ve only become more and more allergic to Windows. Sadly, the most popular editing packages are all Windows-based, so I pretty much cut off my nose to spite my face before I even got started. That being said, I never wanted to do editing, but was persuaded doing at least my first feature would be an invaluable learning experience.
The problem with bringing in someone else is they’d almost certainly be using some Windows-based software that’s totally incompatible with the software I’ve been using, which would most likely mean they’d start the edit all over again. Not only can I not afford this financially (likely to be thousands of dollars for someone experienced), it’s likely to take several more months, and I want to put this puppy to bed.
Well, maybe I’ll get lucky and one of the ideas I came up with since I had to walk away last night will work. I’ve managed to overcome all the editing obstacles up to this point…
