because ... well ... why not ...?

it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Sunday, July 31st

_9:38AM

Down on the Farm:

Why is it that everything takes so much longer than you expect?

I actually slept quite well last night...in twenty-minute pieces. I could get used to this.

Though, to be perfectly honest, I'd prefer not to. There are a lot of other things I can think of that I'd much rather get used to. Not that any of them are at all likely, so I'll just keep working on the "sleep twenty minutes, start next job on computer, repeat" schedule. I probably have another day or two left of that.

On this job, anyway.

I'm exporting about twenty-five hours worth of edited high-definition video from Adobe Premiere into m2t format, which I hope will be readable by the software that's going to be using it. Getting video converted from m2t to the CineForm codec used by Premiere took about an hour per hour of video; going *back* to m2t is taking nearly four hours per hour of video. It's like the parking lot of any mall designed in the last twenty years: relatively easy to get into, much more complicated to get out of.

Hmmmm...you know, a lot of things in life are like that, now that I think about it.

If I were feeling cynical, I'd wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that the converter is made by CineForm, which is in the business of selling its codec, and I'm doing it in Premiere Pro, which Adobe would prefer you to be doing your editing in rather than exporting to a competing product.

The bad news is that I've got delivery deadlines to cope with, none of which had taken this kind of rendering time into account. The good news is that the new editing computer I'm putting together for Mark finally showed up (over four weeks since I'd ordered it) when I was getting started on the rendering part. Athlon 64 3400; not state-of-the-art, but good bang for the buck--and it was an even better deal when I'd actually bought it. I tossed in some additional memory, some 300 gig hard drives, and a Promise FastTrack TX2 hardware Raid controller, and in the tradition of assigning nine women to the project of making a baby in one month, got it chugging away at the rendering jobs, too. Add some of the speedier laptops I've got on hand and put a few more computers together and I've got my own little render farm.

checking out the crop at the server farm

One tidbit of information is that the Athlon 64 3400 is only a little slower at it than the dual 2.66GHz Xeon system. Granted, the Xeon system is about two years older, but it would still be more than twice as expensive as the Athlon 64 to build.

One word of advice, though: if you've been spending a couple of long nights (and days) rendering video instead of sleeping and would really like a high-protein snack that looks like it crawled out of the mind of H.P. Lovecraft, you can't go wrong with Octodog's Frankfurter Converter, "The fun, simple and safer way to turn ordinary hotdogs into exciting to cook and super fun to eat... Octodogs"

Oh. I guess that was sixty-three words of advice. Ooops.

See what I mean about everything taking longer than you expect?

Saturday, July 30th

_03:51AM

Silent Night, Render Night:

It's a good thing I don't need to sleep.

Really. Sometimes I have a hard time remembering this important fact myself, but at least everybody else knows it.

On a night like tonight, I do sleep, I just do it in little bits. When I'm digitizing tapes, rendering video, laying back to tape, or encoding and authoring a bunch of DVDs, it can take a couple of days straight of starting a job every half hour to every two hours. When you've got a job that'll take sixty hours of computer time--assuming everything goes perfectly and the computer never crashes in mid-job--and sixty hours before it has to be delivered, that's life. But it's nothing new. Back in the days when I was programming S-100 based mini/micro-computers, debugging a large project could sometimes be like that, too.

Adobe After Effects Pro will let me set up additional computers on the network to distribute the workload among them, which is a great feature...when using After Effects. Rendering in Premiere Pro has no such option. For that matter, it's not even very good at multi-threading: I found that disabling hyperthreading on my dual-Xeon box cuts the time to render to high-def m2t in half (!). Just FYI, in case you find yourself converting a lot of high-def video into a more widely used format than the Cineform codec used in Premiere.

But when it comes to catching a little shut-eye and wrestling it to the ground, working at home makes it easier, and I've got carpeting up here, which also makes a difference. Lately I just toss a pillow on the floor of the closet and it works just fine: I'm right by the computers and I'm less likely to accidentally sleep several hours in a row.

Speaking of which, it's time to get the next job going. Bedtime. G'Night! See you in an hour!

Thursday, July 28th

_21:18PM

Gnoring:

I finally got caught up with the bulk of my video editing backlog, and I didn't even have to use any movie props to do it. I just had to ignore everything and everybody else for a while. I figure they'll either forgive me for it or storm off in a huff and leave me alone to get caught up on the audio editing backlog.

If I get lonely, I can always go looking around for a great, big huff and see who's inside.

Not that I'm entirely finished with the video portion; I still have to get my work on to everybody else involved. I have Premiere Pro and Avid Xpress Pro HD, two pieces of software that nobody else is using. I've got one person using Pinnacle and two people using Final Cut Pro. So, I've still got lots of rendering time left once I figure out which format(s) I need to render to.

Christopher Atkins headed back to LA this morning and we never did find him the laptop of his dreams, but I'll keep looking. Right now there's a few projects in development that we might end up working together on. It looks like the one that had been scheduled to begin shooting in early October is likely to get postponed, which is probably a good thing for me, given the danger that it would be filming in Denver during the time I'm scheduled to be in LA.

Looks like August is shaping up to be a quieter month filming-wise than June or July, with just one project slated to begin filming in the last week of the month.

That one I just got called about today...so I guess I didn't ignore absolutely everybody.

Tuesday, July 26th

_16:00PM

Bound and Determined:

I survived Sunday's shoot without incident, or at least without any incidents that hadn't been in the script. The character I was playing wasn't quite so lucky, but that's just the way of things sometimes. Christopher Atkins got in that night to work on Pathways and his first call time wasn't until Monday night, so we ended hanging out on Monday, tossing around movie ideas and whatnot. Lots of whatnot.

Chris was in the market for a new laptop, so we did some running around to stores looking at what's available this week (the ones I'd gotten in earlier are really too big and have too short a battery life for the uses he'd put them to). I was a little surprised that nobody came up and said, "hey, aren't you...?"

I would have been even more amused if someone had done it to me, but I haven't been getting that much lately. Used to be that half the time I'd leave the house somebody would recognize me, but it hasn't been like that for a while. I think the last time was about a month and a half ago.

Today I got him set up with one of my extra laptops; he'd come up with an idea for a project we could work on together and I'm all for that. It's a good talent in this business to be productive working on developing other projects while you're waiting for your next scene to start shooting. I should develop some of that skill myself.

Though in my case, any kind of "being more productive" would help. I've got a huge backlog of video work I should be cranking through and my crank has just been turning a little too slowly.

Either that or use some of the props from Sunday to keep myself at the computer until I'm done. Hmmmm....

Saturday, July 23rd

_12:23PM

Flood Rebatement:

I've got more desks than I need out here at the treehouse, so maybe I should set one up just for filling out and keeping track of rebates.

Like most everything else, I tend to get rebate-laden products in spurts. I'll get a bunch of them in a week or two and then I'll usually hold off for a few months until I've forgotten how time-consuming it is to fill all those little forms out and prepare all the required materials that need to be mailed with it.

This time, at least, it's been for a good cause. I've been having to get in hard drives like crazy to keep up with the video files--both for transferring the files between computers and for backing up the data files for movies I'm not working on right now so I'll have space for the ones I am. Two terabytes of drive space (that's how much is on Roo, my main video editing machine) once seemed like a lot, but now that I'm working with high-definition video, it's feeling smaller by the hour.

I got a little carried away this time around and bought a few things that I didn't really need just because the after-rebate price was so good: a complete (except for monitor) Athlon 64 3400+ system for $137 (after rebate) and a few nice laptops...which worked out fine, because the laptops in particular ended up being extremely useful and cost half as much as if I'd had to buy them when I *did* need them. So, sometimes, even the crazy things I do end up working out after all.

laptops being used as high-definition monitors (the laptop on the far left is driving the middle display, too)

Now I just have to wait and hope for the rebates to get back. It's a bit of a gamble, but rebate reliability seems to have improved over the last few years and it's nice to get something back.

I'm still looking for the rebate forms that work for the rest of life. They're probably out there somewhere. It'd be nice to get some things back from life, even if you have to wait a bit.

Thursday, July 21st

_09:41AM

Days Go By and Still...:

105 degrees in Denver yesterday. Tied the all-time record for highest recorded temperature in Denver, set all the way back in 1878.

Got in a great bike ride through the hottest part of the day. I do well in the heat. And the cold. It's a nice feature that I wish more computers had.

After biking, I headed off to a Colorado Film/Video Association meeting, figuring I'd get more serious about video editing after I got back (and it was a little cooler). The marketing VP at Shoreline wanted some changes to the trailer for The Shadow Walkers in time for the VSDA show in Vegas next week. (I've been to the VSDA show myself before, but I hadn't planned to go this year; I've got a lot of video work to get done out here. Last time I went, I wrestled a giant anime hamster, something I don't normally get to do every day. But, now that I think about it, I really wouldn't want to.)

Then I got in a few notes from different people about needing some graphic design work created and prepped for print...by Friday. I don't mind that kind of thing, as long as I have a good idea of what people are looking for. I'm still trying to get a clear answer to that, though. It's taking the random graphic stabs in the dark that slows it all down, but sometimes you do still hit the target that way.

...at which point Terry Knab called to say that he's having problems connecting to the server he's got co-located here. Turned out that a Nyx user with a great, big pipe was pulling down entire CDs worth of music files and that was enough to saturate the T1 line. There was a time when a T1 was something big, but nowadays half the world has 5-megabit of better cable or DSL and a single user, if he's got the full bandwidth available, can saturate the T1 lines.

So, having tracked down the source of the problem, I was implementing an improved queuing strategy on the router (fixed that problem right up so it shouldn't happen again) as Nyx's mail server crashes. Again. And that's the machine that's set up to be the most annoying to bring back up. (Don't look at me; when I set it up originally, it didn't have that problem; the annoyance functions all got added later.) So it takes 45 minutes of attention to bring it back up (it's past midnight at this point) and it crashes yet again five minutes later.

And I'm still trying to get the video editing done for tomorrow and work on the graphics for Friday. Did a bit of work on the mailserver's hardware, replaced what looked like the most obvious candidate for the culprit, and got it back up. Nyx's mailserver is still running strong; let's hope it stays that way for a while. Got the trailer re-re-edited, too, and at least some sample graphics sent out.

Typical night at the treehouse. :) Well, maybe not. Fortunately.

Not much time for sleeping, though. Think I'll go hit the bike trails for a couple of hours; it's supposed to be 103 degrees this afternoon, but I don't feel like waiting that long.

Tuesday, July 19th

_22:51PM

The Last Sensei:

Today was the last day of shooting in Colorado on The Sensei, and as tempted as I was to stick around to the very end, I did have a backlog of video and audio work to crank through on both The Shadow Walkers and War of the Planets. After a mere ten-hour day, there wasn't anything left for me to do there, so I snuck back here. I'm guessing they'll still be at it until two or four AM. As a side note, just in case you were wondering, there's no war involved in War of the Planets and there's only one planet, unless you count the Earth, which we only see in a couple of flashback sequences. But, you wouldn't want to argue with the marketing mavens at Lionsgate, so War of the Planets it is.

Keith David

I do need to start paying more attention one of these days. It didn't occur to me that I'd just seen Keith David in The Chronicles of Riddick until after I'd spent the day on the set with him--and that was even the most recent mainstream/studio movie I'd watched. I'll claim the heat was at fault (101 degrees, another record for the date); it's a good excuse, even though I don't really have any problem working in the heat.

They still have about four more days of shooting in LA on The Sensei before they finally wrap. It'll be good.

Sunday, July 17th

_20:17PM

Even More Records:

Once in a while you read about an idea so brilliant and simple you're amazed that you didn't think of it yourself. Once in a while you read about an idea that's so outlandish that the amazing part is that it works at all. It's not too often that you read about an idea that's both of these, but that certainly describes Ofer Springer's Digital Needle - A Virtual Gramophone, where he created software to play vinyl LPs using a flatbed scanner.

I'm completely amazed. Unfortunately, the sound quality isn't all that good, but it does work.

Saturday, July 16th

_19:27PM

Records all 'Round:

Today was a day for breaking records: the mercury hit 102 degrees, a record for this date; I went out in the late morning for a six hour bike ride, which was a record for me this summer (I'd done a bunch of five-hour rides, but six is longer than that). And, unfortunately, the band Marillion just realized that The Shadow Walkers is a horror movie (egad!) with blood and guts and stuff (double egad!) and are making noises about pulling out of their agreement to do the soundtrack. So it looks like I really do need to track down one or more replacements, and not just because I think doing a music video would be fun and worthwhile.

I'm not always in monster makeup

I should just get into the habit of always getting backup musicians, since this isn't the first time I've run into this situation and it probably won't be the last. It would probably be easier if I were doing films filled with meaningful social commentary...but "easier" isn't the only goal. They also have to be saleable.

Truth be told, if I were involved in a production that *didn't* run into some score/soundtrack problems along the way, that would be a record.

Saturday, July 16th

_07:00AM

Sensei-tive New-Age Guys:

I'm back from the set of The Sensei after another long day. After fourteen hours of shooting a dream sequence, you'd think I'd feel more rested.

L to R: Mark Steven Grove, Louis Mandylor, Trygve Lode, Diana Lee Inosanto, Michael O'Laskey II

If the sets, equipment, and film stock are any indication, the completed film is going to be beautiful. Originally, they were expecting to do most of the movie on DV using a few Canon XL2s and the parts they could afford on 16mm film, but the producers managed to wrangle a pair of Panavision 16mm cameras and cover the cost of doing the entire film on Kodak's Vision II Series stock. Great cameras, great film stock.

Part of the dream sequence involved a swordfight with Japanese-armor-clad statues come to life. I would have been happy to be one of the statues myself, but it's hard (if not impossible) to find Japanese armor in my size.

Here's Mark in a suit he made himself. This kind of armor is a lot lighter than any of the armor I have, which is probably an advantage for a scene like this where he not only had to fight but also needed to do some acrobatic maneuvers in it. I've done some minor acrobatics with swords before, but never in a full suit of armor. I'm betting it's a challenge to do it with style and aplomb.

Mark Steven Grove not only fought in this but also jumped into the scene off of a trampoline

Friday was Mark's birthday, though with the shoot running until after midnight, by the time things calmed down, it was already the next day. So nobody even volunteered to spank him.

'Course that could also have been because of that old saying, "Never spank a Ninja." Hard to be sure.

Friday, July 15th

_07:15AM

Are You My Monster?

Since the wrap on Monday night, I put in about twelve hours capturing the last of the video and I've been chewing up computer time on Roo (dual 2.66GHz Xeon, 2TB RAID array) ever since, converting the raw m2t data stream into the Cineform codec that Premiere likes to use for high-definition editing. That finally finished up about 3:00AM this morning, and since I'm working on the set of The Sensei today, I figured I'd get up around 2:00AM so I'd at least get in some quality time actually working on getting the raw footage from The Shadow Walkers organized before I head over to the set.

It's a slow process, but you can't help but be impressed by the detail in high-definition video compared to standard-definition. In the case of 1080i or 1080p, you've got six times as many pixels as grace an ordinary NTSC video frame. Click on the picture at right to see what I mean. You may need to turn off image resizing in your browser to see it in its full glory: not too many monitors are set to resolutions above 1920 pixels wide.

actual screen capture from the video click image to display in full-resolution (1920 x 1080)

Oh, yeah, as always, the script calls for me to pick somebody up by the neck. I'm tempted to put together a special demo reel one of these days that consists entirely of such scenes culled from the various movies and shorts I've done that in.

In The Shadow Walkers at least I get in some variety, which is good, because I have a whole lot of cast members to kill off before we get to the credits. The most disgusting method ends with my ripping somebody's spine out and, if you haven't ever done that before, it's actually fairly difficult. And messy, too. Really messy.

It was flattering at the wrap party that so many of the people there were working on the development of other horror movies and said, "we want you to be our monster." While I don't want to play *just* monsters, I'm all for playing a bunch of 'em. So, we'll see. One minor worry is that one of the projects is scheduled for filming in October, just before the American Film Market. That'll keep me busy.

At least I'll probably have enough time at the end of the shoot to get the makeup off before getting on the plane to Santa Monica. I don't think they'd mind if I didn't at the market, but I'm guessing that I'd be running the risk of being detained by security and missing my flight if I went through the airport that way.

But, then, I am flying in to LAX, so maybe they're used to that.

Thursday, July 14th

_11:01AM

Sound Bytes:

Got back fairly late from the wrap party. Since I had to get to the set hours before the crew to get into makeup in time, this was the first time that some of them had seen me without the makeup. Nobody complained, though, and, mysteriously, everybody still knew who I was.

Not sure if that's good or bad. I think I'll just assume "good" for now. That's my plan.

I picked up all the location audio tapes while I was at it, so I can get started working on those. One of the limitations of these HDV High-Definition cameras that I'd pointed out at the beginning is that the format actually encodes the embedded audio as a 384kbps MP3 stream. I've got major issues with the use of any perceptual encoding on location audio. If you're just going to splice together a few pieces of sound without any other processing, you're probably okay, but in the real world, you'd never do that. You'll always want to clean your audio, remove hisses and thumps, bumps and thuds, and (occasionally) unexpected wildlife noises.

I contacted the advertising agency that handles "Monster Energy Drink" to see if they'd be interested in product placement or co-op advertising. It's a long shot, especially this late in the game, but it would be terribly amusing if they went for it.

Which means you're going to be left with cleaned-up audio with constantly changing frequency bands modulated by the sounds that are no longer there. It's hard to say how big a problem this'll be with a relatively high-bandwidth MP3, but I'm not thrilled with the idea of waiting until you're testing your digital surround mix to find out how hard it bites you.

Unfortunately, the day before production started, my portable DAT deck started flaking out, so I ended up getting a Tascam DA-P1 shipped overnight from B&H. That worked great, at least. I'm not thrilled about incurring the added expense of getting a deck Right Now, but it's a still a fine thing to have on hand.

Fortunately, after my experiments with ripping audio DATs on a modified computer DAT drive, I can get it all digitized at about two-and-a-half times normal speed. When you've got twenty or thirty hours of location sound and a couple of hours of wild sound, that's a handy feature.

Speaking of sound, I'm hoping that Marillion, who's doing the soundtrack will go for my offer to cut a music video. Even if they don't go for it, I'm thinking of tracking down a local band or two that would like to be added to the soundtrack, and I'd push for making the music video part of the deal. That'd have the advantage that it would be easier to shoot some footage of the band, which is a little easier than having to pop out to the UK with a high-definition camera.

I'm awfully tempted to do a track myself (with lots and lots of help). I'll think about it. We'll see.

Wednesday, July 13th

_05:04AM

Wrapping Up:

Tonight's the wrap party for The Shadow Walkers, out at Gates and a good time it'll be.

It'll be strange, though. Making a movie warps time and space in more ways than one. During the shoot I kept losing track of whether things had been said just that morning or some days past. It all seemed to blend together sometimes. And now I'm faced with getting used to the real world again. Darn.

It's hard to imagine that a matter of weeks ago, I didn't know the head of the FX Makeup department, Kurt Van Ulmer. I really don't know him especially well, and I certainly haven't known him very long, but after a week it felt, somehow, like he'd always been around. I don't know why that is, whether it's some quality he has or if he reminds me of someone else that I'm not remembering consciously. Spending three hours a day getting into makeup probably has something to do with it. Combine that with the time required to get the makeup *off*, that's a lot of close, personal time. I count myself especially fortunate to have had a team of makeup assistants who are quite delightful to sit back and watch when they're six inches in front of my face for an hour at a stretch. :)

We were originally planning to have the wrap party a few weeks from now, but with all the other films that are about to start or have already started shooting, it proved impossible to come up with a date that fit everybody's schedule. So, today it is, not quite fourteen hours away, which will hopefully give me time to come up with *something* to show on the video projectors I'm planning to bring.

At least it should be time enough to get used to entering a room without the benefit of a smoke machine.

Tuesday, July 12th

_05:49AM

Bitte Sweet Monster:

Production wrapped on The Shadow Walkers, last night and I was sorry to see it end. A month of twelve-to-eighteen hour days and then spending the nights (or days, depending on the shooting schedule) digitizing and downconverting the day's high-definition video into DVD format so it would be ready for the production team the next morning.

A little slice of heaven. Heaven with fangs, claws, and lots of red-colored corn syrup. About a half-hour before the very end of the shoot, Dave Marchiori, the executive producer, announced to the cast and crew that I'd finished my last scene (a simple shot, just me standing up in the fog and slowly turning to face forward in the frame). He tells me the applause I got from the crew then was the longest and loudest of any in the cast. I think that's the only standing ovation I've ever gotten, and I got it covered in latex and foam and icky, sticky goo.

I snuck away from the set on the last day to the book signing with Bruce Campbell who was in town promoting The Man with the Screaming Brain and Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way

It's hard to find words to express how great it was working on this movie, how terrific the whole cast and crew were to spend that month with, and it's hard to express the words I can find with a set of fake teeth in my mouth.

So those came out soon enough after I finished my last scene. I stayed in the rest of the makeup for a while longer last night.

I was happy and sad and still pretty shaky from a weekend that may have cost me two friendships. I shed a few tears when they removed the makeup for the last time. "It's just the solvent," I could say, 'cause monsters aren't supposed to cry. I know these things can't last forever; they have to end or nothing would ever make it to the big screen. I enjoyed every minute of it...everything except for the upper set of fake teeth which were painful and ill-fitting and always got caught on the lower set and popped out when I moved or roared. But we stopped using those early on, right after I'd spent two days wedged upside-down through a rough hole cut in the top of an elevator that was so filthy I couldn't touch anything without ruining the makeup...though I still managed to maneuver through a maze of cables and light stands and two-thousand watt movie lights to get around up there.

Like so many of the monsters and villains that I've been, I'll be back again. The producers have promised they'll make another horror film quite soon.

But waiting is always the hardest part.

Sunday, July 10th

_19:47PM

Making the Fantasy Real:

That's my job.

It's not a bad job, though for the movies, you wouldn't want it to be *too* real. Fortunately, it's not nearly so scary when you know you can press "stop" or "pause" at any time.

...or "play again."

It's remarkable how many things on The Shadow Walkers, have been shot backwards. In real life, the problem is usually not knowing the future. In the movies, the hard part sometimes is knowing the past (which hasn't been shot yet). Case in point: we've shot the scenes that came after some of the fight sequences first, so you have to know how you're going to be injured, how you're going to fall (and where and in what position), and where everything and everyone is going to end up when you *do* get to filming them getting thrown around.

(photo by Dr. Dan Yahnian)

Not like this is anything new; I've certainly gone through the same thing in productions before. It's just another time you have to imagine what will (or did, in the movie timeline) happen and make it real.

In real life, "pause" and "play again" would help a lot, but somehow I haven't found that magic remote control. I muddle through anyway, though, and I still believe in dreams. I do.

See you there!

Monday, July 4th

_16:53PM

Indie-pendence Dailies:

Like most days lately, Saturday began with getting into makeup for The Shadow Walkers, but this time the makeup included having a pipe through my chest.

I've had worse.

Fortunately, I heal pretty quickly, even from serious plumbing-related incidents. Unfortunately, these kinds of things can get rather messy, so I've learned to bring along a complete change of clothing including (this is important) underwear.

This time I recovered quickly enough to get away from the set a little after 4:00PM--much earlier than usual--which was good, because I had a new project slated for Saturday night: the production team was meeting on Sunday to review what had been shot to date and determine what might need to be reshot, what should have been shot but wasn't, and (maybe) who should be shot. Armed with that information, they could make any necessary revisions in the shooting schedule for the upcoming weeks. That's a pretty serious job even at best, and in this case it was complicated by the minor detail that the movie is being shot with a couple of Sony HVR-Z1U high-definition video cameras operating at 25fps 1080p...so the dailies are all on high-definition video tapes, which isn't a format that they could easily review.

I ended up taking all the footage shot to date back home with me and, after a quick job of washing off most of the makeup, I headed off to collect the equipment that would be necessary to downconvert the high-definition video to standard-definition video and burn it to DVDs. It's always an interesting feeling, having a little box next to me in the car that contains all the original tapes (with no backups in existence) of a movie. And when I get home, that's always the first thing I take into the house.

Whatever I did get for this task would have to support standard definition NTSC video at a 50i frame rate. (NTSC is normally 60i.) To further add to the adventure, there was almost as many hours of video that needed to be converted as there were hours before the meetings the next morning.

I ended up with a Sony HVR-M10U high-definition video deck hooked to a Cyberhome DVR-1600 standalone DVD recorder. The Cyberhome was the cheapest DVD recorder in the store, but it was one of the few with a firewire input and, most importantly, it supports 50i video. One very minor issue is that it, like a lot of cheaper DVD recorders, only records to DVD+R disks and, while I had several hundred DVD-R blanks on hand, I've never bought any DVD+R disks. So I picked up some of those, too. Probably too many, but the store I went to had a "Managers' Special" with 25 disks going for a little under $6.

Fortunately for the production, everything worked the way it was supposed to and, working through the night, I finished the job with twenty minutes to spare. Whew!

Since then I've been working on getting the video digitized onto my video editing computer (without downconversion), but that's another story. I'll probably be taking a break from that pretty soon, since I need to get back up again at 1:30AM to get back to the set. It's going to be a long day tomorrow, but it'll be fun.

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