Episode 1 is finally finished

Working on first episode for my Xenosaga series was painful, especially at point where I was trying to finish it. I'm not going to go into much detail, but the biggest problem I faced, and the one I would like to share here, was file size of final video, which was 11 gigabytes. I am not joking. I don't know why really, I guess maybe it has to do with it being in an avi video format, or since that I'm working with with an older version of Adobe Premiere, it may have had some difficulty with exporting a video that's up to fifty minutes in length. I don't know. I solved this problem by putting the 11gig video in Movie Maker, and exporting that to a wmv video that's around 600 megabytes.

 Before I post the video I'm going force ask some friends and acquaintances to watch the video and hear their thoughts on it, wondering if they had any difficulty in following the plot of Xenosaga, and they're thoughts on the editing job I did. When it comes to working on stuff like this, I'm a bit of a perfectionist who wants to fix every problem to be had, especially since I'm working on something that I'm going to put on the internet.

 I'm also thinking about retracting what I wrote in my first post, where I said that I would release these videos on a weekly basis. Keep in mind, I'm working on these videos at my school during their night hours, which is three times a week, with each night lasting four hours, and since I'm currently taking day classes five days a week, and I have to wake up early, those four hours are reduced to three. I suppose I can still try to release these video weekly without any hiccups, but I would have to finish at least the first three episodes (as opposed to two, which I said in my first post), before I post anything. So to those reading, would you prefer the videos to be released weekly, waiting a while longer before I post the first episode? or would you prefer me releasing these videos when I'm done with them, which would likely be on a tri-weekly basis? Let me know.

What I've Actually Been Doing

 So as of right now, I have only gotten six people who have viewed my blog, with no followers or comments. Some people may just give up on their blog at that point, but not me. I'm still going to make posts on this blog, even if in the end, there's only been one person following me. Anyways, to those who actually find my project interesting (both of you), I suppose it's about time I talk about what I've been doing on this project, specifically what I've been doing before I started this blog.

I've actually started making videos for this project around six months ago, finishing five episodes. The reason why I didn't post any of them was because I wasn't really confident in how I did the editing, and a lot of times, I would go back to videos that I already completed, trying to fix things that would cause, at least one person, to nitpick at. It also didn't help that the video-editor I used in making these episodes were Windows Movie Maker. Good news is my school as Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 on some of their computers, and I've been using those to make these videos. I know it's pretty dated compared to the latest version of Premiere, but it's free and it's a hell of a lot more advanced than the version of Movie Maker that came with Windows 7.

Now you're probably wondering why I don't just take the videos that I already made, and edit them further in Premiere? Well unfortunately, the laptop I was using in making these videos, caught a virus, and everything on my hard-drive had to be erased. And the real kicker is I couldn't save anything on a flash-drive because everything was inaccessible. The only videos that I saved on my flash-drive, before this event, were for episodes 1 and 3, which I didn't feel were really any good. So yeah, I'm pretty much starting from scratch here.

There have been some changes I made from the old episodes, to the ones that I'm making now. The most noticeable change is the hidden subtitles. One of the reasons why I didn't post the videos that I've made, was because of the subtitles that were seen in every footage that I could find for this game. I didn't really mind them personally, but I'm sure that other people would have had a problem with them, and since I'm trying to fix everything that would cause someone to nit-pick, I was reluctant to post them. Now that I've been working on premiere, I made this widescreen look to the videos, which in turn, hid the subtitles.

Another thing that I wanted to talk about were the length of the videos. I had a little difficulty deciding whether I wanted to make each episode last around an hour or 30 minutes. In the end, I decided to make each episode 40-60 minutes in length, since I wanted to these videos to feel epic in scope, and I felt that a forty-minute episode would've been more appropriate for that goal.

Other than that however, I just want to say "thank you" to everybody who visits this blog (both of you), and that I'm halfway done with working on the video for the first episode.