Post-Theatresource

The word on the streets is that those from the now-closed Theatresource have migrated primarily to the Workshop Theater and to the Secret Theater.

Rack

That's a 51-minute version of Luscious Earth. That's right.

But you're here to talk about my rack, aren't you? So I'll tell you about it. One day I'll actually label the inputs on that patchbay. Won't that be lovely?

I can record 14 channels. I get hella "lost ASIO buffer" errors with my little laptop, but I can't hear them. On this recording I may or may not have used some sort of drumagog thing to replace the kick and the snare (I'll never tell!) but the short answer is that the two toms, the bass, and Greg's guitar are using the built-in preamps on the Tascam US-2000; the kick and snare are using the Lindell preamps there on top; the drum overheads use that pair of Neve preamps in the main rack, the sort of "distance center kick-ish" mic uses one channel of that Neve under the computer on the right, while my guitar uses the other channel of that Neve (which isn't actually mine but my friend Scott's).
Although things may change in the future, the mix I've done here is a "laptop mix". It's extremely simple without any fancy limiters or anything. Plus it's not really "mixed" in that I'm not riding levels or anything during the, er, 51 minutes of the song. I just set them and let the mix roll off. 

High Speed

So some idiot shot all these POV improvised monologues at "40%" on the GH3. Which means they're at "60p" and, essentially, in slow-motion. Sheesh.

I had tree sap on my lip for hours after shooting this.

That is... less than awesome. Especially when I can't figure out the math. I have to speed it up by... 250%? Is that right? 40, 80, then half of 40... I think so. I'll have to see. But of course it means re-rendering everything. Again. Pleh.
What I was hoping, and this is kind of a giant "hope", is that I'd be able to actually finish the picture cut of the dragon movie today. I have a feeling that won't happen.
Hey -- for the end credits: should we do alphabetical order? I think we usually do.

And that's all I got.

Apparently with Diatomaceous Earth I'm the guy who keeps saying "This is the most brilliant rock music every created" and the rest of the guys in the band look at one another and think "What did he smoke before rehearsal?"

I think I've figured out our rack situation. I wish... well honestly I wish we could just leave all the gear set up and then I just walk in and someone hands me my guitar all tuned up and we start playing.
Hmm... what was I smoking?
In any case I'm feeling fairly confident about the new direction of things. When we play out I think I will wear a kilt.
So anyway, I think we have most of this all figured out recording-wise. I feel pretty good about our ability to record everything. I suppose I might be inclined to wish we had an even better drum kit. The sound of the snare sort of made me feel bleh last time. It's a wooden snare drum. Which is... weird. I mean at least to me it is.
Could we replace the snare with something like Drumagog or such? Sure. Do I want to? Not really. Lou would prefer DW drums. I don't have any experience with them. I do know that I like Gretsch drums though. Word on the street is that DW's are easier to tune.
Remember that fantasy world we I live in? Well in that world we'd have some sort of permanent space with everything set up where we can just go in and lay down tracks after turning everything on. That being said, our recording rig is remarkably mobile for being so confoundingly, er, confounding. One 6-space rack, one 1-U rack, a computer, and a suitcase of microphones and mic cables. The monitoring system (so far) tucks into the rack when we aren't using it. Everyone (in theory) brings their own headphones.

Prometheus Trap review

Fair enough, this is a review of Prometheus Trap.

Movie Reviews I Monkeys I Vampires - Stupid Blue Planet: Mockbusted #4: The Prometheus Trap and Alien Origi...: I didn't get the chance to review Ridley Scott's pseudo-Alien prequel Prometheus for this site, as I saw it several months before...

Honestly I don't know where the movie is as far as North American distribution goes. I see it's available in the UK on DVD.

Barbara Stanwyck never had these problems.

Today's big project in the Pandora Machine is to create interstitials in Dragon Reign. Right now we just have these monologual or monologulist "bookends". But this morning's shower inspiration was to simply go through and put some direct-to-camera in every act. I'll tell you how that goes when we're done.

Get in the Robot, Fight the Monster

Now this is a fairly spoiler-free observation about Pacific Rim.
Here's the thing: as much as we love the idea of giant robots fighting monsters (and let's face it, you love that idea) there is an inherent dramatic problem with fight scenes between giant robots and monsters.
This is one of the same dramatic problems which leads you to having soldiers taking off their helmets all the dang time in a war picture. Two guys (or one giant robot and one monster) fighting is by and large dramatically uninteresting unless we know or understand something about the relationships between the people involved.
This is also a Starship Troopers problem. Or, for that matter, a stillsuit-in Dune problem. The idea of being encased in super armor or what-have-you is pretty cool. Pretty cool in a book I mean. Once you put on helmets (especially face-covering helmets) you really stop caring about the characters. Luke and Han lose their stormtrooper helmets really freaking fast in Star Wars. I mean seriously, they wear them in a handful of shots and then put them down just before the firefight.
While tactically that is quite possibly insane, dramatically we need those characters to freakin' interact. Otherwise we got nothin'.

So. Pacific Rim. Giant robots. That can be a real heavy-duty problem. So they add to it an interesting conceit -- that giant robots require two pilots. And then those two pilots share one another's thoughts and... well I'm not going to posit that the conceit actually played out right. But it is a brilliant dramatic solution to this perennial (for sci-fi folks at least) problem.

Next Up: Giant Robots

The internecine fighting in the cultural anthropological world would be comical if it weren't so tedious. Apparently Bill Gates tweeted some sort of agreement about Guns, Germs, and Steel suggesting that only the fairly picayune factual elements of the book were only contested by other academics. Here's a fairly incoherent article which in its attempts to disprove Diamond really only end up proving his points. As far as I can tell.

So. I thought I would write a second novel. I would have based it on the story I wrote on my Twitter feed a couple years back. Normally I would have thought that would be right in my skill set. I already wrote the story, right? So just filling it in with some more dialogue and such would make it a novel.
Right?
Well then I started reading a whole bunch of Dick Francis. His books, mystery/thrillers told in the first person by someone who either is or was an English jockey, are fantastically well-written. I won't even go into how I suspect that the books in his ouvre were likely written by he and his wife together, but suffice to say that I think most books were written by (at least) two people.
In any case, "my" previous "novel" was a re-write of "No Easy Day". Now, the way that book is written it's essentially event-anecdote-event. There's very little character development actually. And since I already had the structure of the novel pretty well worked out (which could be derived from reading that portion of my twitter feed, er, backwards) I thought I was in good shape.
But no. It's just not going to work that way.  
So I either go back to the very hard work of going through the thousands of hours of writing this novel or... or I quit. It's not like I don't have a lot of other things to do with my time. I vaguely recall a commitment to making 8 feature films a year and an opera. I think I should get back to work on those things. Not really "get back" so much as "not put any brain power into this novel".
So that happened.

Angry Planet

Angry Planet is our third Pandora Machine movie and we'd only just gotten North American distribution for it. It's also, I daresay, the movie I have the most affection for. It may in fact be our best picture.
It does not seem to exist on DVD but only as streaming. I don't know if it's on Netflix. But:
It's on iTunes.
And on Amazon:


It's on XBox.
There's an overview in the New York Times.
On Google Play.

The Bastille of the Comforted Milieux

Above (if you click through) is our newest "album". Yup. Only two songs. We of The Diatomaceous Earth, found a thing we do and are happy with -- space rock which goes into funk and other sections. This is a "laptop mix" -- fairly quick and dirty. But honestly with the tom and snare (and extra kick) microphones it's much and vastly easier to mix. The bass was Lily playing Ethan's fretless Jazz bass through that lovely little Fatman tube compressor. (Set to... "Bass 2" maybe?)

Getting rid of open tabs

Vacuform wall panels.
Cool band called Gramophone.
Toshiba laptop review.

Cabling

It's true. I simply do have have a decent way to create an input list. What I really need is a cable list. I feel as though I need some XLRF to 1/4"TRSM 18" cables. But I'm not sure now am I?

So in order to make a mess of this blog, I'm trying to figure out what cables need to be in the rack. Good times, amiright?
These are the inputs to the Tascam US 2000. We already know how to patch into the associated preamps.

5. Low tom -- short XLR ✓
6. Hi tom -- short XLR ✓
7. Greg guitar -- patches directly into front via XLR ✓
8. Lily Bass -- patches directly into front via TRS ✓
9. Kick close -- short XLR F to 1/4" TRS M (from Lindell)
10. Snare -- short XLR F to 1/4" TRS M (from Lindell)
11. OH L -- short XLR F to 1/4" TRS M (from Neve A)
12. OH R short XLR F to 1/4" TRS M (from Neve A)
13. Distant kick short XLR F to 1/4" TRS M (from Neve A)
14. Drew guitar short XLR F to 1/4" TRS M (from Neve A)

I think this means that eventually I'm going to need at least four more XLRF to TRSM cables. And maybe a half-dozen short XLR cables. 

Input channels

♠ 1U rack Neve outputs to 11 and 12 on XLR bay to 13 and 14 on Tascam
    Distant kick and Drew guitar
____________________________________________________________________
1. Lindell pair (inputs 7 and 8 inputs on XLR bay) and outs to inputs 9 and 10 on Tascam
    Kick and snare microphones
2. Neve (inputs 9 and 10 on XLR bay) outputs 11 12 on Tascam
    Ear Trumpet Labs overhead microphones
3. Tascam A/D converter
4. XLR patchbay
5. 1U Power

Here's an input list:
5. Low tom
6. Hi tom
7. Greg guitar
8. Lily Bass
9. Kick close
10. Snare
11. OH L
12. OH R
13. Distant kick
14. Drew guitar
We only need 10 inputs until we add cello, flute, a second bass, and vocals.

Workstations Anywhere

So my Titanus computer died. It's 14 months or so old. I called Titanus, told 'em it was dead and the guy was like "Well, it's got a 2-year warrantee and it sounds like you just need a new power supply. How about I send you a new power supply? I'll even upgrade it."
Holy cats. Yes.
So I installed the new power supply (they sent it overnight via Amazon) and the computer works fine. If the guys at Titanus saw how sloppy I did the wiring they might be outraged. But it works.
Being without that workstation for a week concerned me though. Made me anxious. Makes me feel like I need another high-end workstation. Maybe I need a heavy-duty laptop?

Robin Kurtz in Earthkiller.

Trying to look further into Adobe Anywhere it seems that it simply isn't practical for a small shop. To which I say "bleh". I would switch over to Premiere in a heartbeat if we could actually use Adobe Anywhere and set up licenses on editors' laptops and suchwise. But we can't. So we don't.

 ♠

Lastwise, an essay in Forbes about why the DVD isn't going away.  What I should do is write a post titled something like Why the movie business sucks and why it isn't all that bad as a business.

Activated

Blogger has been awfully buggy lately. There was that thing where it kept whining about not having a blog title as soon as you started a new post. Then sometimes it just decides to not actually allow you to have a bandcamp link (the first few tries you make to publish one.) Anyway, I'm (almost) done with complaining about that.

Saw Annie Activator at Otto's Shrunken Head the other night. I had a mai tai. For the first half of the drink I was all like "this drink isn't very strong at all."

Then, instantly, I was plastered. Furthermore later on in the evening Ethan then bought me some other tiki concoction which actually glowed a radioactive green. Just because he thought it was funny. I took a bus home.
Also, Ethan lent us his Fatman compressor. The manual for it is here. I had a devil of a time finding it because I kept googling "HHB Fatman manual" and that only led me to links talking about how the compressor has a manual setting on it. Ha-rumph.
So, in a way, I'm sort of pleased that the Aphex preamp is dead only because it means that there's one fewer things for me to deal with.
That being said, cabling is something I do have to deal with and I haven't done anything about it yet. The Tascam US-2000 actually has 14 analog inputs. This pleaseth a Drew. The only thing is that my laptop can't really handle the ASIO drivers at low-latency without causing errors. I'm working on that.
In any case, we'll try the Fatman on the bass. We just need to keep the very high-amplitude stuff (slapping) from breaking up the rest of the analog chain (our monitors).

A 6U rack just might not really work for the recording setup.
1. Lindell
2. Neve A
3. Neve B
4. A/D box (Tascam US-2000
5. 1U Power strip
6. Input XLR patchbay strip

See? There's no room for connectors for the monitor system or the computer in that setup. If we keep one of the Neves in a separate rack we might be able to make the whole thing work. I have to figure out the way that stuff gets in through the input XLR patchbay though.

You know you love it when I share my notes out loud to the universe.