long day... and a diagnosis

expectations fulfilled: a very long day indeed. less ennui than normal, though: one of the projects had come back with a minor revision.

brief history:

in the course of the past week or so, the client had decided that the songs that were part of the project would benefit from some "sing along" text, complete with bouncing graphic, to enable the target market to, well, sing along.

that part i was more than happy to leave to the edit group on the other side of our floor.

once the overlay text was done, i put it into my edit and discovered that there were portions where the transparency part of the video would disappear. odd, but no matter: it only happened at the beginning and end of each overlay video, so that was easily edited out.

so, that done, export edit as playable quicktime and call it a day.

...then, as mentioned earlier, minor revision looms on the horizon.

turns out that the text that was given to the edit crew to use was wrong somehow. a couple of phrases, where one would pause in the song, ended with colons. this, client could not live with. funny, client supplied text to begin with.

anyway, edit redoes text overlay; and to be absolutely pendantic on the matter, includes faithfully all punctuation given with revised lyrics. including quotation marks.

and now edit software decides to put a spanner in the works. this time, whenever the text disappears (instrumental parts of the song), the transparency decides to vanish, leaving a black video over my edit.

troubleshooting, i export the entire project off the editor's machine, and open it on the mac that i use. fiddling around with the sequence settings resolves the issue, though counter-intuitively. made sense later, thinking about it. if one were to need to export a video with a transparency channel, make sure the sequence is set up beforehand to output that way (codec, bit depth and all that).

so, that done, export playable quicktime, take that quicktime and make playable dvd project, burn dvd -- and day is done.

make my way to pasay (haven't addressed issue of deflated bed yet), and receive a text.

...the diagnosis.

not the original expectation (which is good), but still worthy of concern. i call up, and the matter seems to be on track for a resolution; and that is very good.

still and all, i pray.