I’ve Moved!
November 20, 2008
So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:
In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here
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That said, this is not the end of Time Immortal. My wife Grace has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.
Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.
Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.
Arrrgh…pictures and video and bears, oh my!
February 23, 2007
Unfortunately, O Reader, working on the slideshow kept me up until 3:20 AM (which wasn’t cool). Then, to add insult to injury, I discovered this morning that iDVD was suffering an absurdly long delay whilst attempting to encode the audio for the movie I was attempting to burn to disc.
Apparently this is actually a fairly common issue with iDVD, and indeed with several different DVD authoring suites, especially when the video being rendered for disc has a complex audio track with lots of fades between tunes, sound effects, and other such niceties. Funnily, or perhaps tragically, the slideshow has exactly that. And while the soundtrack has its funny moments (and there’s a pretty good Hitchcock spoof in there as well), well…I didn’t feel like waiting 48 hours for the audio to encode (seriously!) when I had to present the video in approximately 10 hours.
Now the situation is a little better, but only slightly. I stopped the DVD render and re-encoded the soundtrack for the slideshow into a unified audio stream. That should hopefully have the effect of speeding up the audio render (I base this assumption on the fact that the 2005 and 2006 slideshows took relatively little time to render, by comparison — both slideshows were of comparable length to this one, but had single audio streams instead of the more complicated arrangement I had used for this latest effort). It should, given that the two slideshows I put on the previous disc only took about 6 hours to render, and their total length was at least 20 minutes more than this slideshow runs for.
At any rate, I’ve now got approximately 3 hours (maybe a bit more) before I leave work for the banquet, and iDVD is about to enter the audio-rendering phase again. Here is hoping that all goes smoothly. God willing, the render will finish in less than three hours and I’ll be able to burn at least a FEW discs before the banquet (thus enabling the plan to sell them as a fundraiser). If not, I’ll be taking orders.
Oh, yeah: forgot to upload the Pics of the Day. Sorry about that…I’ll work on it tonight when I need a break from cleaning the sty that is my apartment.
ZOMG: I think my plan worked. iDVD is rendering the video and is actually about a third of the way through its final encoding phase. I can’t remember how long the “burn” phase takes, but this is way further along than it was the last time, at a similar time benchmark.
If I’m really, really lucky, I’ll have a working copy of the video on my hard drive by 3:30 or, less ideally, 4:00 this afternoon. Either way, I should have at least a little time left for the burning of actual DVDs that can be sold at the banquet.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to say thanks to a certain Lord and Saviour I know, his Father, and a handful of saints for good measure.
