‘Cause I Know There’s Got To Be Another Level

February 11, 2010 at 3:55 am (Rock Band) (100%, Expert, FC, Gaming, Plastic Rock, Rock Band, Team Cena, Vocals, Xbox, Xbox 360)

Song: Typical – Mute Math

Game: Rock Band 2

Path: 2/, 3/, 4/ (ProffessorJoe)

Session length: 22:44

Total # of FCs during session: 2

ScoreHero rank (at time of entry): 1st

Squeezing info:
2/ (+1468), 3/ (+0), 4/ (+2180)
43468 / 115468 / 237648 => 241,648 (0)*

*points below 1st place on SH for 360

This post is going up redonkulously late, but there’s a good reason for that, trust me! It all started this afternoon when I looked at one of the videos I uploaded last night on YouTube for the Team Cena contest. To my surprise and dismay, I discovered that the introductory video clips “branding” the vid for Team Cena & it’s sponsors were mysteriously absent. A bit flustered by this development, I checked on all the other files I’d uploaded for Team Cena this week and discovered that NONE of them had the intros I’d so painstakingly added before uploading! Oh noes!

Turns out that simply saving the edited files in QuickTime (as I’ve done since this blog’s inception) wasn’t sufficient when cobbling videos together from various sources. In order to get YouTube to see the intros, I had to use the export function – which takes about 100x longer. Ok, I thought, not a big deal, I’ll just export my existing saved files and re-upload them to YouTube. If only it were that simple!

You see, after exporting my first video, I discovered that QuickTime turned the letterbox bars above and below the 16:9 intro clips white instead of the expected black. The result looked, in a word, crappy. It took another hour or so to figure out how to save the intro vids so they’d automatically have the desired black bars during the intros, then I had to go back to my saved files (all 11 of them), cut out the existing intros, add the new properly letterboxed versions and start exporting all over again. The export process strained my poor laptop to it’s proverbial breaking point, and took another 4 hours and several restarts to free up all the resources that QuickTime was hogging.

Plus, simply exporting the files was only half the battle…they still needed to go up on YouTube, of course. On a good day, I can usually upload a 150mb file to YouTube in about 25 minutes. I don’t know if Monday’s “scheduled maintenance” had anything to do with it, but tonight my upload times were averaging 40 minutes to over an hour, for each file! Gah! By 10pm I’d only gotten 4 of my revised videos online, none of which were blog-related. I know I know, that was poor prioritization on my part. Determined to have my blog vids up on YouTube in the correct order, I bumped “Know Your Enemy”, “Knight On The Town” and “Wonderwall” to the front of the queue, but at that point I already knew that it would be well past 1am before I’d be able to even START uploading tonight’s offering. As it turns out, even that estimate was optimistic…truth be told, I’m only bothering to write about this whole fiasco to kill time while my “Typical” vid uploads and processes…which, according to YouTube, will take just under an hour, finishing at around 4am. :-P

Plan for tomorrow: clear the backlog of files still needing to go up on YouTube, and make sure to budget WAAAAAAAAY more time for exporting/uploading my next set of videos! Ze lesson, she is learned!