I have uploaded the trailer to our old Facebook page too, and our Youtube channel. Just because it is a very rare evet so in case anyone still follow us there. Let me tell you....Facebook is such a clusterfuck. I already knew that but I did not get to interact with it for a long time now. To simply add a video and a description is a mess. A million buttons, a million popups, a million boxes. Promotions and ads everywhere, and all of the crap. If people call that a "social network" they might as well call a Mall a "family home".
Friendica compared to Facebook is haven on earth. A pure social network.
So after I uploaded the trailer on FB and clicked "publish" the post popup disappeared and I was lost. I waited for like 10 minutes and I wanted to post again because I could not find that post....to then see that it was posted after those 10 minutes out of the blue. Took a while and no notification....so terrible.
Youtube is also a mess. An ad-video-platform where the focus is on clicks, views, how to monetize, where to put the ads, how to engage and all of this crap
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I have uploaded the trailer to our old Facebook page too, and our Youtube channel. Just because it is a very rare evet so in case anyone still follow us there. Let me tell you....Facebook is such a clusterfuck. I already knew that but I did not get to interact with it for a long time now. To simply add a video and a description is a mess. A million buttons, a million popups, a million boxes. Promotions and ads everywhere, and all of the crap. If people call that a "social network" they might as well call a Mall a "family home".
Friendica compared to Facebook is haven on earth. A pure social network.
So after I uploaded the trailer on FB and clicked "publish" the post popup disappeared and I was lost. I waited for like 10 minutes and I wanted to post again because I could not find that post....to then see that it was posted after those 10 minutes out of the blue. Took a while and no notification....so terrible.
Youtube is also a mess. An ad-video-platform where the focus is on clicks, views, how to monetize, where to put the ads, how to engage and all of this crap. I added a few subtitles to our trailer and it was like 5-6 clicks to add a single one, compared to 2 clicks on Peertube.
Again, Peertube is haven on earth, or the digital space. A simple and efficient VIDEO PLATFORM.
And that's how we can see how trade has a powerful and bad influence. If a social network or a video platform engages in trades with its users (data trade, attention trade, currency trade) then those platforms will never remain that, they will metamorphose into bazaars. Marketplaces.
Thank fuck that we now have our own social network and video platform, and they all connect with the greater fediverse. I LOVE that I can post our documentary on Peertube and not fear any Youtube BS rules. SO awesome!
We live in a world where everyone is busy, everyone is consumed, everyone seems confused. Money, social credits, ads, data collection, prices and billionaires. Climate change? Who cares!
A one-marble world, floating in a giant soup of stars and planets, clustered in donut-shaped galaxies.
What are these humans living for?
In a 5 hour, 4 parts documentary, we try to explore their world, to understand what makes them human, what makes them enslave their kind, destroy their habitat, and be unaware of their place in this universe. But also what makes them so special.
Through the lives of 5 humans, we look at the culture that creates them, their struggles growing up on this planet, and where they are headed toward.
We live in a world where everyone is busy, everyone is consumed, everyone seems confused. Money, social credits, ads, data collection, prices and billionaires. Climate change? Who cares!
A one-marble world, floating in a giant soup of stars and planets, clustered in donut-shaped galaxies.
What are these humans living for?
In a 5 hour, 4 parts documentary, we try to explore their world, to understand what makes them human, what makes them enslave their kind, destroy their habitat, and be unaware of their place in this universe. But also what makes them so special.
Through the lives of 5 humans, we look at the culture that creates them, their struggles growing up on this planet, and where they are headed toward.
I think I could do a very relevant review of Kdenlive after I publish the documentary. I worked with Kdenlive for the past 2-3 years to make a 5 hour, 4 parts documentary. I learned a lot and probably I can have a relevant opinion about it overall :D. It was interesting to make a documentary with a FOSS video editor, and I am very proud to have used it overall :D.
It was a beautifully hectic day for the past hours. Bunch of people jumped to help with making subs for the TROM II trailer. We already have it in Romanian, Russian, German and Portuguese. Tomorrow we will probably have it in Catalan and Spanish, plus perhaps French too. Awesome! Wonderful people. Oh, and they all loved the trailer so much I am again quite surprised. Anyway, the goal is to make the trailer available tomorrow. #tromstuff
The trailer for TROM II is done. We are now working on making a few subtitles for it. Maybe we will release tomorrow! A huge thanks to everyone who is helping with the subtitle making, and if you want to help please use our Matrix chat https://matrix.to/#/#translation:matrix.trom.tf #tromlive
Did you know that Kdenlive has a mindblowing text-to-speech feature now? I tested it for our trailer. 99% accuracy. I am amazed! This gives me a lot of confidence that we can do the transcriptions with timestamps and all that for the entire documentary, quite fast. Just WOW!
Here's where these so called AI systems are helpful, not the nonsense hype around them. #tromstuff
So today I made a poster for TROM II that I may release tomorrow or at the same time that I release the trailer. This week for sure. I've also worked on tromsite.com to get the release pages ready :P. Not public yet but did a lot of work today. 5 nonstop hours on my laptop, battery mode, and still 20% more battery left. Not bad at all considering that I pushed the CPU a little bit here and there.
Anyway we will try to release the trailer with several subtitles so maybe it will take us a few more days to do it. #tromstuff
I have finished the bloody color correction for TROM II. Again. And you bet this is it. I can't handle it any longer. It is good. I'll make a big post about this "behind the scenes" work for TROM II, after I release it in June. The trailer is almost done too. Next week I will send the documentary to those who come for the TROM Meeting and to a few close friends. I will also release the trailer this next week.
After that the focus will be to first make a transcription of the entire monster, to then have others translate it into several languages before the release. Ideally at the beginning of June we will release it on our Peertube with a Spanish, Romanian, and Russian subtitles. Maybe more. Maybe French and German too. Let's see.
Too bad that the moron filmed vertically. I will never get used to this retardation of filming vertically, especially for these situations. Vertical videos + the "shorts/tiktok" style = idiocracy. :D
A bit of any is fine, but anything more than a bit is just the narrowing of the human brain, literally :D. need to recommend again this documentary imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ :)
I see you're still not giving up on the vertical war, haha š Also I should see that idiocracy movie sometime, just cause its referenced everywhere now, lol š
Today I felt inspired to work on the documentary trailer and I think I found a perfect combination. It gives me goosebumps and I watched it 40 times already haha. Only the backbone is made but that was the important part. I just got inspired and things worked great.... There is a particular song that many may not know, it is a few decades old, that kinda describes the society/world we live in. And that song, as you'll see is quite a powerful part of this documentary.
Anyway. Making some progress with the color correcting too and now I am more hopeful that i may finish the color correcting in a week and by mid May there will probably be a trailer released.
Let's see. But damn I am happy that I could put together something for the trailer, even if it is far from being done. We need a good and relevant trailer for this massive documentary. If most people would like this documentary even 20% as much as @Sasha @Georgi @Aaron and @Dima liked it, it would be a success.
I am completely losing my mind over the "color correcting" bullshit for TROM II. 5 people, recorded over some 6 months period. For each we recorded 2-3 days, for me a few weeks probably. Each recording was some 3 hours long. We had to pause every 20 minutes because the camera was overheating.
Now the idea was to have everyone filmed on a dark background. We had a dark piece of material behind us, but a small room, and powerful lights. That created a non-dark background. At times it looked grey, at times blueish, at times brownish....
Combine all that with so many interruptions while filming over a period of months, and of course you realize that you can't have the lights placed in the same way. So you end up with some interviews being super exposed, some having different shadows, etc.. Georgi had a very white tshirt which made the lights reflect back a lot making her face washed out; I had a dark-blue shirt which made it so difficult to try and make the background pitch dark....
Also, people change colors while recording...Sasha for example has bright red cheeks
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I am completely losing my mind over the "color correcting" bullshit for TROM II. 5 people, recorded over some 6 months period. For each we recorded 2-3 days, for me a few weeks probably. Each recording was some 3 hours long. We had to pause every 20 minutes because the camera was overheating.
Now the idea was to have everyone filmed on a dark background. We had a dark piece of material behind us, but a small room, and powerful lights. That created a non-dark background. At times it looked grey, at times blueish, at times brownish....
Combine all that with so many interruptions while filming over a period of months, and of course you realize that you can't have the lights placed in the same way. So you end up with some interviews being super exposed, some having different shadows, etc.. Georgi had a very white tshirt which made the lights reflect back a lot making her face washed out; I had a dark-blue shirt which made it so difficult to try and make the background pitch dark....
Also, people change colors while recording...Sasha for example has bright red cheeks at times :) - it is a feature of her own genes. haha. So at times she is normal looking, at times very red in one cheek. And so on....
And my task was to make them all look like it is ONE recording since I often switch between recordings in the same scene.....
And I did it but I made us all kinda darkish and Sasha's cheek overexposed :)).
Now combine this with the fact that originally I did the color correcting on my old laptop that had an LCD screen, and later on, I did it on the new laptop that has an OLED screen and I realized that some things looked very different. I had to redo this so many times. Also when I do color correcting at daytime vs night things look different....
I am going INSANE. And for what? The message matters....
Oh and add to it that Kdenlive is buggy when it comes to this so pretty often when I color correct it ruins the entire documentary and I need to move the clips (tens at times) from one track to another...it really fucks the entire documentary.
And I have to do this for a 5h documentary.
This is not healthy. I will give it 2-3 more days to see if I can do something, if not I'll probably give up and leave it as it is. I am telling you this is something no one notices unless you start to talk about it, then you start to notice some things. And if you want to "correct" that, then you fall into this black hole where there is no end in sight in terms of what and how you can improve.
Damn that sounds frustrating. Do you think it would've been better if you used a green screen or something? As a viewer I don't care much about what the background is, just that the people in foreground are clearly visible. And if you think people won't notice it unless someone points it out then that's probably true, minor details like colors go under the radar while watching a 5 hour documentary, so unless something's really bad and sticks out to the viewer you shouldn't worry about it :)
idk if using a green screen would have been better....but overall it is fine, even how it is now. I just have to accept that I can't make it "perfect" and that Kdenlive has a nasty bug that should be the reason not to continue this for more than a few days :D.
And yeah am telling you for sure that you wont pay attention to these things at all. Even I forgot completely when we were watching it last time with Sasha.
I donated my old laptop to a dear friend who also helps with the TROM project. I used this laptop for many years but I needed a more portable one and luckily others helped me buy a better one for myself. I am happy to know that my dear friend the laptop, that helped me make 80% of the TROM II documentary, and trom.tf, and tromcasts, tromjaro, and so many books, and so on, now has a new home :)
Others helped me, I am helping others too. We should all help each other. We should share the vast amount of stuff we have in this world, rather than keeping that stuff around and not use it, or throwing it into the garbage.
I too often see these in the town I live in:
Massive waste of stuff. Unacceptable!
BUT:
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I donated my old laptop to a dear friend who also helps with the TROM project. I used this laptop for many years but I needed a more portable one and luckily others helped me buy a better one for myself. I am happy to know that my dear friend the laptop, that helped me make 80% of the TROM II documentary, and trom.tf, and tromcasts, tromjaro, and so many books, and so on, now has a new home :)
Others helped me, I am helping others too. We should all help each other. We should share the vast amount of stuff we have in this world, rather than keeping that stuff around and not use it, or throwing it into the garbage.
I too often see these in the town I live in:
Massive waste of stuff. Unacceptable!
BUT:
We are incentivized to buy and buy and buy; every day bombarded with such messages. And thus people buy even when they don't have to.
There is no sharing platform that is useful enough, or some place where you can put these things to then be repaired and shared with others.
People have no time to take any initiative. If people had the time to get involved they can create all sorts of sharing platforms and places. Like for the place where I live: imagine if some people can have the time to take the stuff people put at the garbage bin, repair and clean, and have a central place in the town where anyone can pick that stuff.
So. Yeah, anyway, I am super happy I could send my laptop to someone who will likely make good use of. I have 1 more laptop and a tablet that I want to give to others. I don't like to have much stuff anyway. I will try to get more and more involved with this physical-stuff sharing in the future, like sharebay.org/ that's made by our friend Colin. I will try to share stuff on that website too after TROM II is released.
So, I like a lot Kdenlive and am proud to have used it fully for the TROM II documentary. I will praise it more when after the documentary is released. BUT.
Here's a very tiring and frustration situation for me: @Dima correctly pointed out that the interviews are mostly very darkish. An easy fix tho. But Sasha's recordings are over saturated and it just so happens that this girl has these pretty red cheeks (haha) when she is excited, stressed, or drunk. And her cheeks go on and off, from red to pale, for the hours of recordings that we did. To make her look natural I have to tune down just that one cheek. At Dima's advice I started to use masks in Kdenlive and almost frame by frame track her cheek and tune it down. Very time consuming, but seems to be worth it.
I color corrected this documentary so much I feel like passing out at this point.
Back to my frustration.
In Kdenlive if you add effects to main clips, and these clips are in the timeline, then
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So, I like a lot Kdenlive and am proud to have used it fully for the TROM II documentary. I will praise it more when after the documentary is released. BUT.
Here's a very tiring and frustration situation for me: @Dima correctly pointed out that the interviews are mostly very darkish. An easy fix tho. But Sasha's recordings are over saturated and it just so happens that this girl has these pretty red cheeks (haha) when she is excited, stressed, or drunk. And her cheeks go on and off, from red to pale, for the hours of recordings that we did. To make her look natural I have to tune down just that one cheek. At Dima's advice I started to use masks in Kdenlive and almost frame by frame track her cheek and tune it down. Very time consuming, but seems to be worth it.
I color corrected this documentary so much I feel like passing out at this point.
Back to my frustration.
In Kdenlive if you add effects to main clips, and these clips are in the timeline, then it can so happen to have these clips DESTROYED in the timeline. Meaning, you have 1 clip say in your Kdenlive BIN. You add 100 parts from it into the timeline on different tracks. Now you edit that ONE clip in the BIN to tweak the colors and realize that 67 of the scattered clips in the timeline look like this:
Instead of this:
And the only way to fix is to drag these clips to another track, if you have space left....and many clips have all sorts of stuff on top of them....
Imagine now checking the entire documentary tracks for such errors...
I feel like going insane. After working the entire day, now to get it all fucked.
Here's another fuckery that I get:
And I didn't even touched that video yet....
Truth is, you can't simply color correct in Kdenlive. You have to color correct then check your entire timeline for errors, then export and check what you exported again to make sure it did not render it badly.
For projects like TROM II, Kdenlive can be a massive pain in the ass.
And this was an issue for the past 2 years. I reported it countless of times....
Nothing annoyed me more than this color-fucking-correcting for this documentary...I wish I made it in black and white.
I thought so too but it is Dima's fault! haha. No but he is right he sent me some samples of how I should do it better and in some cases it is a big difference. It is fine. I may release it in June anyway for a plethora of reasons so that I do not rush with it. But if so I'll send it to you and a few other close friends in May anyway.
I want to talk to the trom friends maybe it is a good idea to release it with a few subtitles, meaning in a few languages.
I've sent the documentary to those who were part of it. They all watched it and provided a ton of feedback. What was absolutely surprising to me were their reactions overall. I am still unable to compute why they thought so positively about it. You see I have edited this documentary a thousand times so I was unable to understand it anymore. I did not know if it makes sense or not.
So maybe it is good?
I can tell you that their comments range from "Tio deserves and Oscar" haha, to "this documentary is a masterpiece", to "it's a brilliant work" or "the best documentary ever". This seems quite a lot for me to digest but they keep on telling me that. @Georgi watched it first, she could not wait, and digested it in one go sending me tons of feedback while watching it. She bought a pizza and she said she was so captivated she could not eat much hahah.
@Sasha came in the second place but just 1 hour later than Georgi haha. She 'forced' me to re-watch it all in one go :D. She was so amazed and happy she kept on telling that to me, to the point of me being confused and thinking that she exaggerates. I even asked her to please not exaggerate. haha.
Don't be deceived!
Now, please do not let these feedbacks, some of which were public, influence you when you'll watch it. These people took part in the documentary, they agree with these ideas, and we are very close friends. I keep on saying to lower your expectations even now when you see these first reactions. Please! I am 1 guy, with 1 laptop, and this is the first time I had to record for a documentary and do it in this fashion. Put it into that perspective please. Their reactions and feedbacks are valuable (very much) but I do not want to make people have big expectations from this documentary.
Ok. So these guys also had a few criticisms but way less than I expected. Some 6-7 people watched it and 2 said there are a few "boring" moments in the first part of the documentary. Others said that was their favorite part and not boring at all. One said in the last part we repeated a few things, quite a minor offense ;). Lastly @Dima had some good inputs about the colors of the recordings. Most are ok, but they need to be improved and I am doing it now (again....I improved the colors so many times idk what colors are anymore haha).
But that's all the criticism so far.
The PLAN.
On 20th of May we have that special TROM Meeting. We had one in 2019 after I released the book The Origin of Most Problems. It was great to see all of these wonderful brains together.
For TROM II I still have to do a few things: color correct that may take a week or some 10 days; make a trailer - and I want to make a very good one so this can take a week or more; make a poster (easy); do the sources (time consuming); prepare tromsite.com for the release.
With these being said, I should not force myself to do all of those before the May meeting and quickly release just before that. I want to enjoy that meeting and not think about the release. Plus would be fantastic to make an english subtitle that we can then translate in several languages and release TROM II with them. Wouldn't it be better to release TROM II in a few languages? I think so.
Therefore when we meet in May we can also work on some of these things. Let's do this well!
Release.
I think the best would be to release in the beginning of June. With a good trailer, in multiple languages, better color correction, and all that. This is entirely doable. I do not know the exact date, but should be in the first half of June FOR SURE!
I am quite excited about the release :). And I may try to make the trailer in May. Will keep you posted!
Oh awesome new improvements to the latest Kdenlive kdenlive.org/en/2023/04/kdenliā¦ :) - so happy to see the nested timelines, the auto-generated subtitle tool that I may use for TROM II to make the ENG subtitle, and the effects and all that. Awesome!
Sasha with her wonderful review haha. I am surprised that she liked it so much since I can't have much of an opinion about it after editing and watching so many times.
Sasha with her wonderful review haha. I am surprised that she liked it so much since I can't have much of an opinion about it after editing and watching so many times.
I have a new favorite documentary!!! TROM II: A Message to the Aliens :)
I think @Tio deserves an oscar for this one! :) The documentary hasnāt been released yet, but I got to view it last night hehehe :D. It is 4 parts, about 5 hours long, and I watched it in one go, staying up until about 6AM and I couldnāt get my eyes off the screen.
I think Tio did an absolutely fantastic job and itās really hard to believe that this doco was a one-man job. Iāve seen him struggle with this documentary for the past 2-3 years. At first, he started to make a script and put a bunch of footage together, then he scrapped that idea and decided to interview 4 people (Dima, Aaron, Georgi, and me) + himself. Tio came up with all the questions, hoping to present his view of the world through our answers, combining our general knowledge of the world with our life stories.
We spent months filming these interviews (at night with bright lights and a black background- which later made it challenging to edit). After all the filming was done, Tio had dozens of hours of footage, all scattered in different interviews, between 5 different people. Imagine trying to create a story out of that. Little by little he went through the footage and created a story that pins our world and our human society to the backdrop of the universe, combined this cosmic perspective with 5 personal stories, demonstrated how we, humans, are influenced by our environment, and how so much of this environment is permeated by trade. Then he demonstrates some of the immense problems this has caused, and introduces a new idea on how to tackle those problems.
And of course, to make all of this, he used footage from many many documentaries, movies, video clips, etc. Finding the right footage was a huge challenge (he didnāt use any stock footage) + combining all of this with great music + many editing effects, and a lot more. All in all it was a massive challenge and Tio really nailed it. I am so proud of him :)
Canāt wait for TROM II to be released to the public!!!!
I just spent 5 hours re-watching the TROM II documentary with Sasha :). That's it I won't watch it ever again. I watched it a million times by now haha. Am sooooo tired. But yeah I think the documentary is ok. Maybe good. Maybe great for some. IDK anymore. Can't wait to make it public. We at least spotted some errors that I have to fix. No big deal. Let's see if the rest will find anything new.
Finally the TROM II documentary is done and it was sent to the ones who took part in it for review. From now one there will be no change, unless they notice anything that is REALLY REALLY bad and needs to be fixed. Or typos.
4 parts, some 5 hours long. Soon we will make a post about it and about when we plan to release it.
Stay tuned and follow us on the fedierse trom@social.trom.tf or via our updates tromsite.com/live/
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