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Update 5/27/26: The longer video has been exported. It will exist as a separate post. See the *** below for details on this update. Part one of my new comic book series is releasing in less than a week. Here is a teaser video of some of the panels.
In case the video above doesn't show, here is the embedded LinkedIn post. Since this blog exists to document project updates, I'll use this space to expound upon the making of this video. Briefly put, my editing program crashed, making the music track on an online site was becoming cumbersome, and my backup editing software took some getting used to. Keep reading if the details interest you. I wanted to have this video finished by yesterday for a full 7-day lead-up before the June 1st release. However, after a week of animating, compositing and assembly in the editor, HitFilm Express crashed. After rebooting the program, it would crash again within a minute. The problem grew more frequent to the point that I couldn't even 'Save As...' to try to make an incremental file, should anything happen to the one file I was working on. Figuring that HitFilm needed a cooldown for how long in the day I was using it, I decided to work on the music in Cakewalk. As much as I didn't want to use the cloud-based online-only program site, I figured that I could use a bunch of samples from the community library to go with the particular melody that I had in mind. That pretty much went out the window because I forgot about the library, but I remembered again and ended up using 2 samples. Time for me to rant about the current Cakewalk program website, which I'll refer to as Cakewalk Online. I've used it once to jot down 1 tune to reference later. I have used Cakewalk offline as the desktop application before the switch to the cloud-based website with subscription potential model. With Cakewalk Online, I was unsure of how I could, if at all, animate an effect over time within a track like I could with the desktop application. I know I can get answers to that now, but at the time I was trying to finish the music as quickly as possible. My glitchy mouse would randomly register a double-click when I click on a note and delete it. Sometimes it would cause "Regions" of notes to be deleted. I know that isn't Cakewalk Online's fault, although I do think it's weird for me to double-click a note to delete it. And when I would accidentally delete something, using Ctrl + Z would cause the selected track to be deleted, and focus on the top-most track. The "Undo" button in the top-left would restore the track, but Undo-ing again wouldn't "undo" the prior mistake. And after a while, even after closing and opening the project to continue editing, the "Undo" and "Redo" buttons were forever grayed out and disabled. After a long session, the sound would cut out for notes on the track when I placed them, highlighted them, clicked on them, or used the virtual keyboard. I could only hear the notes if I played the track. That required an "Exit" and re-open to fix. When I was ready to download my mix, it would flash "Done" but not appear in my Downloads folder. I thought maybe there was a rule that individual tracks would go to the Downloads folder on the device (as I have downloaded one of the tracks during the process), but to a website location for the entire project. Nope, it just took a really long time to show up. I went to do something else, came back to the website, and saw the browser notification that it was in my Downloads folder. It took about three days to get a somewhat decent music mix download. I ended up with some sounds that I really liked, and I liked the variety of instruments offered through the virtual MIDI. Rant over. Back to HitFilm Express. Everything was finished, I just needed to export it. If I could just export the video without sound, I could add the music in another program. I tried to re-open my editing file in HitFilm again, but it again immediately crashed. I looked online to see if I could download a new version to my graphics tablet to try to work off of it. That's when I found out that FXHome, the makers of HitFilm, was bought out and defunct as of 15 months ago. So I couldn't officially install a new version or seek support from the team. And all of those "Send Report" dialog boxes went nowhere. I was determined to keep re-opening the file until I can do something, and eventually I managed to switch from the "Editor" tab to the "Export" tab to a small composition tab. I knew the "Editor" tab was the problem. But after more brute-force clicking, I figure the composition for the full title animation was the culprit, with it being 45 seconds long and having a lot of motion blur and other effects. I realized that I could Export > Add to Queue > In and Out Area from the media bin without having to open the composition. I eventually was able to export the main 3 compositions with no issues. I tried to quickly open the title animation composition, turn off all but one layer, and set the "In and Out" points for export before closing the composition. I then would add it to the queue from the media bin. It worked for 2 out of the 7 pieces of the title animation. One of the 7 pieces was taken from a different composition, so I exported that with no issue. HitFilm began crashing more frequently again, so I gave up. I reassembled what I had in DaVinci Resolve, which I hadn't used much. I had Resolve because I need the utilization of QuickTime .mov files. But, I forgot that it didn't export .mp4 files on PC. I managed to convert the .mov with VLC. The original video was formatted for Instagram and social media of similar aspect ratios. I also made a format for websites that primarily display HDTV aspect ratio in posts like LinkedIn, which is the one posted above. With my limited knowledge it was hard to get it to look right in Resolve, but I will leave both exports as-is. About 22 seconds of animation and compositing will remain unused. The full runtime was 1 minute 30 seconds, and the music track was a little longer than that. After finishing the music track, I wanted to change the sections around, but given my problems with Cakewalk Online above, I decided not to risk it with the website and try to chop the pieces into place in Resolve. You can see the "M," "e," and "a" being formed in the absence of the "t" and the "-Ka" to form "Meta-Ka". It would have zoomed out into position of the front cover, and the cover would have been revealed by many rectangles sliding into place. Then, the camera would zoom in to Kai's eye, and fade to the panel animations. Given all of the frustrations, I know that my perseverance will pay off. I may make another teaser video post-release for this title, as there will be a lengthy gap between now and the second chapter to be completed. I'll see of Maxxon's compositing program Autograph will do the trick. *** After taking a shower right after this post, I had an idea: What if I delete the already exported compositions and files from the media bin? That should free up resource space, right? When I had been able to export chunks of the animation, I managed to save multiple files. I figured I could delete some media from one file and delete the inverse media from another, so I will still have all of the compositions without them all overloading one file. Knowing that the "t" animation composition was a problematic part, I deleted it first. I also deleted the other rendered portions from the title animation. I was able to export the animation of the title logo, the cover and the transition mentioned above. In another file, I deleted all of the other compositions and media files unrelated to the "t" animation. Exporting the "t" animation from the title animation composition caused the renderer to crash. So, I deleted the title animation composition and quickly opened the "t" animated compositions to turn off some layers, and export them piece by piece. HitFilm still crashed when I sat on the "t" composition for too long. But, when I opened up the file again, all of the compositions and media were back in the media bin. That was a relief that, at least by not saving as I'm purging and exporting, the compositions were not completely gone. I was able to recreate the "t" animation in Resolve for the most part. I had all of the videos and image sequences ready to put together in Resolve. Somehow, the runtime ended up being 4 seconds longer. Resolve was really struggling to play the extended music track at normal speed in the timeline, so I had to frequently stop and move back-and-forth between two frames to check if the edits were smooth. And apparently, switching the audio codec and video frame rate to match the outputs from HitFilm Express causes Resolve to essentially softlock. I will refrain from ranting about my issues with DaVinci Resolve for now. |
ArtistName: Diamond Stewart Interests: hand-drawn animation, comic book art, video games, and music. 
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