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flamingswordA month before Christmas, when I decided on Teh Sekrit Projekt of making an anime music video for Ghost for Christmas, I basically knew the barest essentials of how that worked and assumed that it would take a few weeks to learn how and make the first one (which would suck, as first attempts do) and that it would take me less time to do each successive one. By Christmas I would have three AMV's and one of them would likely not suck and be his present. In theory. That was the plan.
In reality, I had no clue how much there was to learn, how steep the learning curve was, or that my previous experience of visual editing programs like Paintshop and Photoshop would offer little framework on which to pin new data. I had no real understanding of the digital formats or the programs used to decode and manipulate them. I gave myself headaches trying to learn it all by Christmas, and still failed. I'm still only mostly through with learning how, and about to start transcoding to a lossless codec, which is step 8 in a 19 step process. And I'm still on my first video-making journey.
I realize that it's arrogant, but it's messing with my self image that this is so hard to learn. I'm used to being good at things! I'm used to data just slotting into place in my brain and staying put, but so much of the technical language is in acronyms that, I kid you not, are *one letter different* from other acronyms that mean opposite or tangentially related things, and the structure of the information is built to do a lot of separate tasks (in separate programs, each of which you have to learn to use) that do not mesh in any organic or intuitive way. Not only did I underestimate the investment necessary for this project, I erred by an order of magnitude.
Now that I understand the basics, the rest is fine-tuning and fiddling with the programs until I get proficient. I think that because of my decent visual memory and access to several large music collections, that actually making the vids will be the pleasant sort of challenge, but right now the "I'm good at stuff"/"I suck at this" cognitive dissonance is driving me up the wall, and I'm trying not to snap at people now that so much of my patience is being used up on non-people things. So much of my ability to process feelings is going towards fending off the unbalanced emotional reaction I'm having to this frustration that I'm spending as much time goofing off and avoiding reading the fucking manual as I am reading it and following its instruction in the programs.
It feels like a threat to my identity, and in all fairness that probably means that my identity needs challenging. But it's a good thing I'm good at being uncomfortable, because this is crazy-making.
In reality, I had no clue how much there was to learn, how steep the learning curve was, or that my previous experience of visual editing programs like Paintshop and Photoshop would offer little framework on which to pin new data. I had no real understanding of the digital formats or the programs used to decode and manipulate them. I gave myself headaches trying to learn it all by Christmas, and still failed. I'm still only mostly through with learning how, and about to start transcoding to a lossless codec, which is step 8 in a 19 step process. And I'm still on my first video-making journey.
I realize that it's arrogant, but it's messing with my self image that this is so hard to learn. I'm used to being good at things! I'm used to data just slotting into place in my brain and staying put, but so much of the technical language is in acronyms that, I kid you not, are *one letter different* from other acronyms that mean opposite or tangentially related things, and the structure of the information is built to do a lot of separate tasks (in separate programs, each of which you have to learn to use) that do not mesh in any organic or intuitive way. Not only did I underestimate the investment necessary for this project, I erred by an order of magnitude.
Now that I understand the basics, the rest is fine-tuning and fiddling with the programs until I get proficient. I think that because of my decent visual memory and access to several large music collections, that actually making the vids will be the pleasant sort of challenge, but right now the "I'm good at stuff"/"I suck at this" cognitive dissonance is driving me up the wall, and I'm trying not to snap at people now that so much of my patience is being used up on non-people things. So much of my ability to process feelings is going towards fending off the unbalanced emotional reaction I'm having to this frustration that I'm spending as much time goofing off and avoiding reading the fucking manual as I am reading it and following its instruction in the programs.
It feels like a threat to my identity, and in all fairness that probably means that my identity needs challenging. But it's a good thing I'm good at being uncomfortable, because this is crazy-making.