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.

#tromstuff

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:

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:

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.

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

2023-04-23 13:06:58

I have a new favorite documentary!!! TROM II: A Message to the Aliens :)

I think @Tio deserves an oscar for this one! :) The documentary hasn’t 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 couldn’t get my eyes off the screen.

I think Tio did an absolutely fantastic job and it’s really hard to believe that this doco was a one-man job.
I’ve 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 didn’t 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 :)

Can’t wait for TROM II to be released to the public!!!!

#trom #tromlive

[share author='Roma' profile='https://social.trom.tf/profile/esh' avatar='https://social.trom.tf/photo/133815196160ad8b2377357761626644-5.jpeg?ts=1621986114' link='https://social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc44-2064-41b9-c5e7-f04410071943' posted='2023-04-20 22:16:37' guid='dbc8dc44-2064-41b9-c5e7-f04410071943' message_id='https://social.trom.tf/objects/dbc8dc44-2064-41b9-c5e7-f04410071943']Amazing to see what even small amount of Humans are capable of.. Yes, this is just a tiny drop in the big ocean of problems Humanity keep accumulating because of the power of trade, but on the other hand it is a GREAT "small" example of the Power of Collaboration, those you may find everywhere even in the today's world.

We could relatively easy restore the natural environment and biodiversity of our beautiful Planet, rewind back at least some of the impact of the anthropogenic intervention, if there would be more people free of the constant trading for their lifes out there. Instead of spending their precious time wasted on figuring out dull and manipulative ways to sell the shit or themselves, more and more of these people might choose to participate and would come up with ingenious ways to ACTUALLY make a difference, fullfil the Human unique potentials at its max..

#InstitutoTerra #environment #reforestation #SebastiaoSaldago #trade-free

dw.com/en/in-brazil-photograph…

One of the things I submitted for Peertube to implement is responsive embeds (and I also provided the solution - the code). I am so happy to see it implemented and working in Peertube!

Oh and ofc you can follow my website via RSS or email too - all links here tiotrom.com/follow/

Federated, RSS, Email. All easy. All useful.

How beautiful to see the internet working this way. That's how it should be. My WP Website can connect to my social Profile (Friendica), and vice-versa. They all have RSS feeds too. Awesome!

I want to thank again to people like @Michael Vogel @Hypolite Petovan @Tobias and the like who work on Friendica. I love it and we talk about it (and the whole fediverse) in the upcoming TROM II documentary.

tio

2017-05-11 20:22:46

NEW BLOG POST:

Home

Read it on my website (recommended):

tiotrom.com/

Or read it here:

TIO

^TIO

When videos like this ytb.trom.tf/watch?v=d7-EhGIeGU… tell you that Manjaro is not stable, or that mixing AUR with repos is bad, or that Manjaro packages "beta" software, please be skeptical. I have been using TROMjaro which is basically Manjaro Stable with some custom stuff to it, for several years now. My laptop never shuts down. I edit videos (like I work on a multi hour documentary for the past 2-3 years), I edit photos, I write books and I design books, I manage servers, I make websites, I consume a lot of media too like documentaries and such. I test thousands of apps for our TROMjaro library and I do the updates the same day they are released.

With all that being said, despite a few apps from AUR that may not work here and there, the rest is flawless. We use XFCE as the desktop env so that helps to make it more stable.

But yeah, idk if these people use these distros much or they encountered some issues 5 years ago and simply decided that all is bad about them.

As for Manjaro controversies even those are hyped and clickbaited. And I am one of those who fought with the Manjaro devs on their forums about some of their decisions, and yet I am still sane to be more objective and see that the things they are accused of are blown out of proportions. Sure they did some stupid things, but hey they are a company after all....what do you expect.

Anyway, Manjaro as a whole is great because they have a bunch of great tools and huge repos.

TROMjaro is rock solid from my experience and manages the look better than any distro I know. Syncs the themes, icons, and fonts across pretty much all apps out there.

That's all :D.

Today I was a bit in the mood to work again on the documentary. I finished 55 minutes in total now. Still some 25 minutes to improve. Thing is it seems that I got a bit lazy towards the end of the documentary when I made it and I left a few parts that are not as good in terms of video editing as I would want to. They are too simple....

I am also trying to add a few more minutes to it. Even record something new, for like 3 minutes. I tried today and I recorded 20 minutes. No good. I need 3 minutes! No more! :D

I have tortured myself with this documentary beyond belief haha. I will NEVER make a project that lasts more than a few months to finish. NEVER. At least not in the next decade! It is really tiring.

I just kinda hate myself for not putting more work into this last part, at least towards the end of it in some parts. And now I need to work a lot more than I expected. It is also frustrating to know that there are only some 25 minutes left....the rest is done. But annoying 25 minutes!

Anyway. I will try to calm down, relax, take more breaks if needed, and then work little by little. At times it happens that I wake up and be so in the mood that I can do a ton of work. Anyway, will see...

#tromstuff

I finished 44 minutes for the last part of the documentary but....for one I need to work a bit more on this than I expected. To make it a bit better in terms of video editing. Second, I got so tired these past weeks I feel like I'm gonna pass out haha. I wake up tired, I work while being tired. I am tired. Maybe I need to put it in my head that I have to finish the documentary this month, not this week.

IDK how I'm going to find the energy to make a trailer. Maybe I'll leave that for May. I may need to take a break for 2 or so days. Go out. Not think about the documentary at all. Then come back and finish it.

The reason I am pushing myself so much is because of the TROM Meeting in May, but also because I am sick of working on this documentary for so long. I want to finish it.

Here are 3 scenarios:

• The IDEAL: I finish it and the trailer this month. Plus deal with the poster, tromsite.com, and the sources. I release it in the first week of May.
• The ACCEPTABLE: I finish it and the trailer this month. Deal with the poster, tromsite.com, and the sources in the first half of May. I release it in the second half of May.
• The UNCOMFORTABLE: I finish it and the trailer before the second half of May. I deal with the rest after the TROM Meeting. I release it in June...

Let's see...

#tromlive