5X-Day Returns

From: "Rev. Ivan Stang" <stang@subgenius.com>
Date: Sun, Aug 17, 2003

Last year, Yonderboy and Sinphaltimus wanted my 5X-Day video footage
for their NYC SubG-TV cable-access project. (Which turned out
GLORIOUSLY.) I had shot this stuff on a borrowed mini-DV camera, so I
rather hurriedly transfered the best parts of it onto my computer, and
then put that back onto about 2.5 hours of mini-DV tape, which I mailed
to the New York lads, to subsequent GOOD EFFECT INDEED.

So I still had this roughly edited video sitting on one of my hard
drives, taking up about 30 gb.

Just before 6X-Day, this last July, I had half a week of Slack and
decided to DUMP THAT CRAP OFF MY COMPUTER to free up space for the
ARISE DVD project. But I couldn't just... DUMP it. I mean, there was
some real funny shit in that footage and it'd be a shame to just LEAVE
it. Plus, God knows I need to practice my new-fangled electronical
video editing skills. Upright Moviolas went out of style about 20 years
ago. I have Final Cut Pro 3, a fancy video editing program, and so I
decided to work with that to make a quicky edit of the 5X-Day stuff,
just for practice.

Once I started, I was locked into CUTTING MODE. I knew it would happen.
I live to chop up media. By half abandoning my houseguests and friends,
I got about 3/4 of the way through it before 6X-Day arrived.

Dr. Dark projected the rough cut that I had done so far on his Badfilm
Drive-In Theater at 6X-Day, and, well, the unedited last quarter of the
show put everybody to sleep or drove them back to their tents.

After 6X-Day, I found another weekend free, and finished the editing
job, removing all the sleep inducements. Then I went over the whole
thing again and added titles, subtitles, and music. Then I went back
over it AGAIN and tightened it down here and there, so that it would be
no longer than 70 minutes -- so it'd fit on a VCD.

Philo, Onan, your Scribe and other old-timer Subgenii are enamored of
the el-cheapo VCD level of video technology. It plays on your DVD
player and doesn't look TOO bad, but the sound quality is excellent and
it only costs 30 cents and 5 minutes to make a copy on a CD-R. (DivX is
a better bootlegger's format, but requires some geeksmanship to play,
whereas VCDs are basically the kind of MPEG computer video file that
EVERY operating system can handle.) To give you an idea of what VCD is
good for, I have EVERY EPISODE of the cartoon show FUTURAMA on VCD, and
the whole collection fits into half a shoebox.

So, finally, despite myself, I ended up with a not too boring 70 minute
DV featurette documentary about a "typical" SubGenius X-Day Drill at
Brushwood. But I still needed to get the shit OFF my computer.

First I copied it from the computer direct to DV tape, using the
borrowed A.C.E. Sony DV camera. Twice. And stashed the second copy in
my distant secret paranoiac stash. Then I did the same with a VHS
videotape copy. Then I rendered out the main MPEG copy for VCD. Then I
rendered out a super-high-res Quicktime video copy that took up 25 gb,
and used that to make a DivX avi copy and a RealMedia copy.

Then I made a DVD of it, complete with menus and 13 scene breaks, AND
"slide shows" of some of the copious still photography of the event,
timed to go with music by Saint N and El Queso. I found that the slide
shows don't work on my APEX DVD player. They only work in my computer's
DVD player.

Then I archived the DivX, VCD and RM copies into RAR files, and made
PAR parity files from those, so that I could post any of these formats
to the various format-happy movie binaries newsgroups, with impunity,
whence they could be bootlegged endlessly by voyeurs, rubberneckers,
frogwatchers, kook collectors, and so on.

I have done that with all our Church movies, but I haven't yet posted
any of them anywhere but a.b.s. I do plan to unleash them all on the
downloading bootlegging geek public, the various movie newsgroups, but
I want to do it in a certain order so that we SubGenii don't look like
a bunch of yoyos and yayhoos IMMEDIATELY. Let them learn the truth
GRADUALLY.

Now I am about to finally erase the crap off my drive to make room for
the ARISE revision. But I did this one last-minute routine -- I made
FRAME GRABS from the video, in Final Cut Pro.

After grabbing frames for a couple of hours I was startled to find that
half of them showed terrible scan-line distortion, while half of them
were very clear and sharp. Then I looked closer and saw that the
scan-lines generally were where a BLUR would be in old timey film
still-framing. Wild.

So, anyway. SubGenius Stalkers and those who attended the last couple
of SubGenius events at Brushwood will likely get a kick out of these
video portraits of your fellow Bizarros. As always, I try to isolate
the frames that have startling compositions, OR ELSE pretty girls. As a
SubGenius male, my Bonobo-Yeti glands allow me to fully appreciate the
forms, skin textures, hairdos etc. of the SubGenius females, and, like
any serious photographer, I try to capture the essence of the subject
I've selected to shoot.

I also like spazzy, fucked up, grotesque sights, and my fellow
SubGenius males generally fall into that category.

It's not art, mostly, but for purely primate reasons it may be of
interest to some scholars and archivists.

I don't know about you, but I find these creatures fascinating subjects
of study.

--
4th Stangian Orthodox MegaFisTemple Lodge of the Wrath of Dobbs Yeti,
Resurrected (Rev. Ivan Stang, prop.)
PRABOB

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Original file name: 5X-Day Returns.txt - converted on Saturday, 25 September 2004, 02:05