I have been awake for 32 hours…
… and only slept 3 hours Monday night, so it’s been a long week already. I can’t recall how much caffeine I’ve had, but it’s a lot. I don’t know how doctors do it.
I mean, I’ve put together an entire 3-minute cartoon in that time, including illustrating a couple of scenes I forgot — or tried to forget, animating everything in Flash — including full speech/mouth synchronization — exporting to image sequences, flipbook-style, resizing said 4,321 images in batches of 100-200 from 720P HD to 480P widescreen, reassembling them into video via QuickTime Pro 7*, editing the whole thing together with audio in Premiere, exporting to H.264 .F4V video, re-importing into Flash to add a player wrapper around it, and uploading it to the site.
I’m amazed I can remember all that, and the fact that it’s my mom’s birthday.
I can feel every one of my teeth.
And I’m still not done.
Don’t cry for me, Argentina. At least I’m working, right?
You might ask, “Why don’t you just export QuickTime movies from Flash if you need them in that format?” I would answer, “Because Adobe’s Flash export to QuickTime is as fucked as any application I’ve ever used. The motion trails and artifacts it leaves are great if you’re a hippie looking for a cheap psychedelic visual experience, but for something usable, there is none worse.”*
**If you use Flash the way you’re supposed to, animating within symbols, then animating the symbols — repeat as necessary — for more complex visual effects, and then you tried to export anything but a SWF file, you’d find that all your symbols’ little embedded animations don’t export, and instead you just have little static things not doing much of anything, even though the SWF plays as expected. Then, at 4AM after having been at it for 20 hours solid, you’d pay a software company $99 for a license to their most excellent screen capture utility (Screenflow), then record your desktop at full resolution with the SWF file playing in the foreground, then crop the resulting video down to 1280x720, then re-open it in QuickTime Pro 7 (notice how that keeps coming around?), resize it to the same resolution as the rest of your movie that isn’t fucked, and go on about your business, rather than try to figure it out, because to try to understand the minds of software engineers is almost the single worst thing I can imagine.
