Technical difficulties . . . please stand by

It’s been a stressful rough couple of weeks for me. 

For starters: I had 2 vacations planned back to back (not my idea or the original plan) and I had to take my car in for an oil change (overdue) and other general upkeep and maintenance.  Somehow that turned into a $1,200 bill.  Now that’s a lot of money.  My car is an older car (2001) and I’ve been thinking about getting a new one, but I wanted to be debt free (except for my house) before I got a new one.  That bill has pushed that thought back a couple of months or more.

Next: I bought a new mattress and box springs and had the delivery date changed on me 6 times before I finally got them to deliver the goods.  Of course I had to threaten them that I would cancel my order and take my business elsewhere if they weren’t delivered by a specific date.  They were but I only had 3 nights sleeping on that wonder soft fluffy cloud of heaven before I had to head out on vacation.

Vacation #1: My first vacation was stressful because I was traveling to a place I’ve never been and I was responsible for all the expenses.  It was a bit relaxing (almost to the point of boredom) even if I didn’t really get out of the heat.  It was nice to get away from the rat race, but also nice to get home again.

Vacation #2: I was only home for 3 days before I left again on a family reunion.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love my family but being trapped with all of them in one house (there were 16 of us which wasn’t everybody) for 3 days is not the relaxing vacation I like.  There was chaos, crying children, glasses broken, coyotes barking, howling and killing in the middle of the night and my brother snoring like a lumber jack and keeping me up all night.  It’s hard to go from my quiet, peaceful existence to something that resembles more of disaster movie than my idyllic life.  Like I said, I love my family but I’m not use to being around so many temperamental kids.  And don’t even get me started on being trapped in the very small back seat of a pickup truck for almost 6 hours going and almost 8 hours coming back (stupid construction delays). 

When I got home I was very excited to film some more videos and edit them for my channel.  I did.  And then I tried to edit them.

When I went on my first vacation there wasn’t going to be anyone home so I took all those valuables that I didn’t want stolen and secured them elsewhere so they’d be safe while I was gone and house was empty.  Unfortunately, when stashing my audio mixer, the settings got messed up.  For some reason I didn’t check them too carefully (I only checked the volume setting) and went and recorded a couple of videos.  I don’t know why I didn’t even do a mic check before recording.  I guess being on vacation really fried my brain.

When I listened to the audio recording while syncing up the files I realized how bad it was.  Oh shit!  I didn’t know what went wrong and I didn’t know how to fix it.  I did a lot of research trying to find a way to minimize the damage (there was no way I would be able to fix it completely) and I learned a lot . . . and learned that there is still a LOT more that I don’t know.  All of the videos I posted this week had bad audio.  Hopefully I know enough now to fix the problem with the things that I want to film this weekend.  If not, well I’ll have to think of something else.

Spring must be the season of technical difficulties.  I was having issue with the audio and gameplay tracks getting out of sync the longer the video was.  Then there was the gameplay audio was getting out of sync from the gameplay video even though they were on the same track.  None of these problems were evident while playing, but only were noticeable once I was editing.  It made things very frustrating.  I even changed up my posting schedule to give myself more time to editing some of the more difficult files.  I learned a lot then too.

To fix those problems I had to end up uninstalling both Audacity and Elgato and reinstalling them.  Once I did that, things were back to normal.  And that was when I went on vacation and I came back to another set of issues.  It is so frustrating because there are so many things I want to do with my YouTube channel and other things that I just don’t have time for because I’m dealing with all this crap.  I’ve been posting videos for 2 years now and it really doesn’t seem that long, but I also think I should be further along in my plan than where I am at now at this point. 

It also doesn’t help that I don’t have any support in what I’m doing.  My family thinks it’s a waste of my time and just don’t understand that I enjoying do things like this.  My friends just want to play games and aren’t interesting in making content with me.  It doesn’t really matter though because I’m going to continue to keep doing what I love whether anyone supports me or watches my videos.  The whole point of this was to finish games and have fun.  While I am finishing games (I’m almost done with 2 more that might be done before the end of the month), I’m really not having a lot of fun right now.  Things will get better.  Whatever else goes wrong I’ll figure out how to fix and I will move on.  So if you watch my channel and notice technical difficulties . . . please stand by.

I really fucked things up!

I don't know how I did it, but I really fucked things up in my last recording in Psychonauts.  I've been trying to fix it for the last couple of days and it's just not gonna happen.  I was able to figure out a "work around" to the problem, but then I was fucking that up as well.  I think that's all straightened out now so hopefully I'll be able to get a video posted in the next day or so.

The first fuck up: audio

I don't know how I did it but I recorded the audio for one session in Psychonauts over the top of the previous session I had recorded.  It didn't replace the audio for that session but just added the additional dialogue to the existing track.  I didn't catch that my system did this when I synced because I never talked at the same time on both of these tracks.  I didn't realized my error until I went to edit the file and got about 17 minutes in when I noticed that I was double talking.  It took me a while to figure out what was happening, but when I did I didn't panic.  I thought I'll just go back to the original audio and resync with the game play.  That's when I realized that the original audio was fucked up because the raw footage was saved together.  I didn't have separate recordings for both videos.

I spent a bunch of time trying to find a way to split the tracks so I could delete one and keep the other.  Couldn't figure out how to do that.  I figured out how to separate from stereo to mono, but that didn't help me.  After messing with the file for 3 days I finally gave up and decided I would post the game play video without my lovely commentary.  I'm sure no one would mind.

The second fuck up: video

I remember when I was playing I accidentally triggered a cut scene before I was ready to record.  I hurriedly pressed the record button on the game play and just never activated the audio recording (which is probably why it took so long for my audio tracks to overlap).  When the cut scene was done I stopped the recording and took the time to get things set up properly before recording.  I figured when I edited the video I would just add this cut scene to the beginning of my recording and everything would be okay.

When I gave up on the audio I started working on putting the original game play clips together to make one cohesive video.  Except whenever I added the game play clip to the cut scene clip the game play clip would error out and become unwatchable.  WTF?  I tried cut scene + clip #1 = unviewable error after processing.  I tried cut scene + clip #2 = unviewable error after processing.  I even tried clip #1 + clip #2 = unviewable error.  So I gave up and close down my editing program.

Except I hate giving up.

I came back to it a little while later (I will not have a program defeat me!!!!).  I put clip #1 and clip #2 together and after they were done processing they were viewable.  Hallelujah!!!  I quickly saved that configuration and called it a night.  Now I've got to see if I can get the cut scene attached to the game play clips and still have everything viewable. 

The cut scene is kind of important so I can't leave it out.  If things don't work I guess I could post just the cut scene as one video and then the game play as another.  Seems like a lot of work for such a stupid problem.  I really fucked things up, but I'm not sure how.

I wish I was better at this editing thing.  I wish I had more time to work and figure things out than just a couple of hours after work each night.  I thought I was getting better, but then something like this happens and I'm reminded of how much I don't know how to do.  I am trying though . . . and hopefully learning too.  I guess we'll have to see how everything turns out in the end.

A little less Dark Souls . . . for now

So I've noticed something when I play Dark Souls.  I get a headache.  A very bad headache.  I don't know if it's because the game stresses me out.  Or I just get too mad and frustrated with myself when I play it that my brain cramps up on me.  What I've also noticed is that I also get a headache when I edit my gameplay footage of Dark Souls.  This is not good.

I don't exactly know what to do about that.  I want to keep playing the game.  When I'm not dying I'm actually enjoying myself.  The problem is I'm dying a lot.  And over stupid stuff that shouldn't get me.  But it does.  And now that I've noticed that it is effecting my editing I'm at a loss of what to do.
 
I don't know if it's because I know I would rather play other games that I'm less terrible at or not.  I mean I like Rayman Origins.  And I die A LOT more in that game.  But it doesn't frustrate me as much as Dark Souls does.  And I don't get headaches editing the gameplay. 

I've been trying to figure out what to do and so I've been focusing on finishing up Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga.  I'm almost done too.  I've only got one level for the blue barrels left (a stupid vehicles mission) and just 4 gold bricks left to do and then I'm done with the game.  I can't wait to earn all achievements in that game.  Every chance I get to film some gameplay has been in that game.  I've got about 9 videos filmed but not edited yet so I'm debating about making all of the videos I post for the next little while Lego games so I can finally be done with the game.

My reward for finishing the Lego Star Wars achievements and getting 100% in the game is to buy myself an Xbox One system.  I can't wait, but I promised myself that I would until I finished at least one retail game on the Xbox 360.  I've completed several arcade titles but I haven't finished the achievements in a full retail game and I would feel guilty about moving on to a new system without having done that.

I've been asking all of my friends what XBO games to get since my budget will be limited.  Of course that means I'll still have time and games to play on my 360.  Which means I will finish Dark Souls . . . it just might not be for awhile.  Does that make me a bad gamer?  I hope not.

Permanent delete is actually . . . permanent

So if you ever get the message "do you want to permanently delete this" you better be sure that's what you actually want to do.  Who knew "permanent" actually mean gone forever.  What's the point of a recycle bin if you don't throw files in it?

Here's what happened.  I was cleaning out some folders on my laptop and I accidentally had a folder called "synced-needs edits" checked off.  This is a folder where after I've synced up my audio and video files I dump them there until I can have the time to edit them.  I had 15 files in the folder.  When I hit the delete button I got a pop up message saying something about the files being too large to fit in the recycle bin so do I want to delete them permanently.  I clicked yes because I was cleaning out my folders and I would have emptied the recycle bin before logging off anyway.  Big mistake.

I didn't realize that my synced-needs edit folder was one of those files.  For some reason when I hover over a folder for too long my system thinks I want to select it.  No, I don't want to do that laptop!!!  But I hadn't realized this is what had happened until I went looking for some videos to edit.  At least not until I tried to find it and open up a file to edit a video.  The problem was I couldn't find the folder.  And that's when it hit me.  I had deleted the folder . . . permanently.  I guess that's what I get for not paying attention.

So, now my folder is gone and all my synced videos are gone.  So I spent most of Sunday and all of Monday night resyncing my videos.  It's a good thing I hadn't deleted the raw videos and audio files when I was cleaning house.  That's 15+ videos that I've got to process, sync and then save.  And to top it off I deleted part 3 of 5 in a new game that I haven't posted about yet.  Luckily I still had the Elgato footage and could piece that together and reprocess before I could then resync.  It's been really frustrating the last couple of days.

Every now and then I have those moments when I don't pay attention to what I'm doing and then end up doing something completely stupid.  Thankfully with this little boo-boo the problem is recoverable, albeit time consuming.  I had some plans that I wanted to put in to place this week but those are now on hold while I try to get caught up on editing.  Maybe in the next week or so.  Barring any other disasters I should be able to put everything in to play by the first week of August.  I'm really excited about those things.  I can't tell you about them now, but I hope you'll be excited to see what I've got planned.  If not . . . it's okay to pretend you're excited.  I won't mind.

I live in Hell and I'm losing my mind

I think I'm gong to lose my mind.  There's so many things that are frustrating me now in my life that I just want to go stark raving mad and get hauled away to the loony bin.  At least then I might get some peace of mind or at least a mental vacation for awhile.  And someone else can pay for the air conditioning.

Work: I've had so many meetings lately that some days I spend less than an hour sitting at my desk actually getting work done.  Why so many meeting?  I've been there so long that I'm the resident expert on everything so whenever a new project starts up that effects our unit, I'm asked to be the SME (subject matter expert).  Even when I'm too busy and they assign someone else in my place that always fails and I'm roped in later on because the original person can't handle it.  Well guess what?  I CAN'T HANDLE EVERYTHING!!!!

Also, due to the fact that I've been there so long and know everything, I'm also the trainer.  And I'm damn good at it (I did get my degree in education).  We've tried to split it up and have other people train on some things and that hasn't worked out very well.  I have to step in and "re-train" someone because they are so hopelessly confused.  It takes about 6 months to fully train someone so that they can function completely on their own and even then they probably haven't seen everything yet.  We had a new assistant start last June.  He got fully trained around late November/early December.  In January we had another assistant start.  He's almost done training, hopefully in the next week or two.  And guess what?  We have another person starting next month that will also have to be trained.  All these meetings and training are in ADDITION to my regular job.

Video capturing:  I've been so excited to finally get set up to capture video of game play and put them on line.  I've had some bugs and I thought I had everything worked out.  I spent a lot of money to get equipment to correct audio issues and at first it was working just great.  Then I seemed to have problems again.  The same types of problems.  I haven't figured out how to fix it permanently but I have figured out a work around.  Unfortunately that work around triples the time it takes me to edit a video.

Editing:  Now I'm having a new problem come up in the last couple of days.  Every time I go to edit a video when I get about half-way through and try to cut something out my whole video gets corrupted and I lose everything.  Not lose permanently, as I can always scrap the project I'm working on and start over from scratch.  But there is only so many times I can take trying to edit the same video file over and over again after it crashes each time before I start to go mental.  That's why I haven't posted a video in awhile because I can't finish editing any of the ones I've got recorded.  I think I'm going to have to edit in stages.  After I make a few cuts and things haven't crashed then I'll save the file, close out, reopen and try again.  Lather.  Rinse.  Repeat.  I'm not happy.

Weather:  I live in Arizona and the winters are absolutely lovely.  The summers, on the other hand, are brutal and I hate them.  I've been here for the last 19 consecutive years and I'm starting to feel like that's 12 years too long.  I can't take the heat anymore.  I can't take the endless blue skies with not a cloud to be seen anywhere.  It looks good on paper, but 114 degrees sure doesn't feel good in real life.  Yes, I have a pool and can take a dip to help cool off but that requires getting out in the sun and the heat.  I was only out there for about 20-30 minutes yesterday at lunch and I got burned.  Add a nice sunburn to the "uncomfortable heat" factor and you can see why the summers suck.

I miss a change of seasons.  Where snowy lawns give way to spring flowers.  Where cool breezes give way to sunshine and worth.  And then the air turns crispy and brisk as colder air comes in heralding the first arrive of winter and snow.  It's the cycle of life.  In Arizona you only have 2-3 months of "wonderful" and then 7-8 months of "bake in hell you SOB" weather.  I'm tired of it. 

I hear of other places getting inundated with rain and I openly beg them to send some my way.  Then I start to think.  Why should they send it over to me?  Why don't I just go to the rain?  Or at least somewhere that has weather and hopefully a change of seasons.  It's a scary thought about picking up to move just because of the weather (that and the fact that my job is sucking the life out of me) but I don't know how much longer I can take living here. 

Of course, I feel that way every summer and somehow I get through it.  Then the brief "winter" comes and I love living here.  But then the summer comes back and the cycle of my life repeats itself.  I'm finding this summer particularly awful.  I think we've had almost 2 weeks with temperatures above 110 every day.  That might be new record.  I don't think my other frustrations are helping me.  It's hard to get excited about editing after I've come home from a very stressful day at work.  And then when the editing doesn't work . . . .  You get the picture.

I've noticed some of my crabbiness has been getting into my commentary in videos (at least as far I can tell while doing what editing I can).  I'm trying not to let things get to me but it's hard when you're hot and miserable all the time.  I'm going to push through it and hopefully things will get better.  At leas the weather will get better . . . in about 6 months.  Until then I'll just keep living in Hell and losing my mind.  I'm pretty sure I don't have much left.  It's been fried from one thing or another for a while now.

I curse a lot when I get frustrated

So, I was editing my next video for YouTube and I noticed something.  When I get frustrated I curse.  A lot.  Everything started to fall apart when my game got glitchy and I couldn't get a minikit.  I tired over and over again to fit it and try to get it, but it didn't work.  All I could hear was me swearing, over and over again.  I thought it was really funny (not at the time though) so I added credits to the video and added a "swear count" to the credits.  You should watch the video and you'll know right when I start to lose it.  Did I miss any?  Should I go to anger management classes?  You tell me.

Clueless . . . .the sequel?

So I usually spend my Sunday afternoons editing the videos I made earlier in the week.  This Sunday was particularly dreadful.  My epic failures from the last video continued into this one.  I don't know why because they were filmed in different days.

I only have myself to blame though.  I really screwed up in the game and instead of letting my audio run while I went online to figure out what to do to fix things, I stopped the audio and then restarted when I was ready to play again.  Unfortunately I had to do that more than once.  I ended up with 3 audio files for one video.  Getting those to sync up and edit was a pain in the butt.

After all was said and done and while I waited for my video to upload to YouTube, I called my brother dain bramage.  I had some questions to ask about external hard drives and such.  I mentioned my editing nightmare and he asked why didn't I just sync up all the audio initially and then render the file into one file (my audio and video are separate files now with the way I have to do things) and then edit that.  I wouldn't have had to edit the video and audio files separately and then have to constantly have to check that things were synced up.

Pow!

It's such a simple thing.  But it blew my mind.  Why didn't I think of that?  I'm the one playing around with the editing software so I should have been able to figure that out.  Or at least make a guess that something like that would work.  But no.  I was so set in the painful way that I've been editing that I couldn't think outside the box to make it better.  What took almost 3 hours to do could have been done in less than an hour.  Mind blown.

The main reason I wanted to talk to my brother was to ask if it was okay to use an old external hard drive that I had been using for my old Windows XP machine that is now completely worthless.  I had a bunch of stupid questions to ask because I'm not a computer geek like he is, but he helped me figure things out and told e how to reformat the drive once I've taken off all vital information that I want to keep.

I also had to ask him how to get all my writing that I've stored on little floppy disks on to my laptop so that I could keep them and possibly work on them.  We talked about the size of floppy disks and he said they were only 1.44mb in size. 

Pow!

That's all?  I remember when floppy disks came out (I'm dating myself here) and I can't believe that that was only how big they were.  So I asked him who big a CD had for storage.  He said only about 700mbs.  What?  Really?

Pow!

I then tried to do the math in my head on how many floppy disks you could store on a CD.  Or how many floppy disks you could store in 1 gigabit of space.

Pow! and Pow!

I was thinking I would need a lot of space to store all the short stories I've written over the years because I have a lot of 3.5 floppy disks but it's actually not that much.  I was thinking that I would need at least an 8gb thumb drive but I think I could get away with a 2gb drive and have room to spare.  I thought I had a lot of writing but when you put it in that perspective, I really don't.

Pow!

I hate it when I don't know something because I hate looking like a fool.  Tonight I looked like a BIG fool.  And with simple things too boot.  Maybe I'm too focused on other things that I don't really pay attention to other things.  I mean, nothing I learned tonight is earth shattering.  I don't just learn of a cure for cancer or how to stop hunger in Africa, but it was still weird to have my eyes opened to such simple things that I was unaware about before.

I wonder what other things people know that will blow my mind.  It seems my can be so easily blew, but I wouldn't think of myself as naïve.  Clueless maybe, but not naïve.  Maybe my life can be a sequel to that movie.  A good preview of my cluelessness can be found in my latest video.  Check it out.

W.I.P. for April 19th - 25tth now up on YouTube

I'm still working through my audio issues but I was able to upload a video of short snippets of game play of what I've been playing this week.  These are games that don't warrant a whole video to themselves or games I was just messing around in.  Most of these are failed audio tests but I was able to save the video footage to compile a montage of sorts for you.  I'm hoping to have the audio problems fixed so the next video I post will have live commentary.  If I fail at that I don't know what I'll do with myself.

But on a positive note, I did learn a lot more on how to use my editing software.  It was difficult at first to mash up several different videos and find the good parts (or at least something usable).  I got a little better as I went along so much so that I think the next time will go much better.  That's something right?

This might sound crazy but one dream job I've always thought about is editing.  Editing commercials or movies.  I find it fascinating being able to manipulate people's emotions, whether to buy something or to get them to feel a particular emotion.  They say the best music in a motion picture is the ones that sway your emotions but you don't really hear it.  Meaning that the music plays in the movie and the audience gets carried away in an emotion but don't realize that the music is manipulating them.  Now that's power.  If I could ever figure out how to do that for a living I would.  But I think I'll just start with messing around on YouTube.