Random Space Engineers Bullshittery - Update #5

Good evening folks. Welcome to the weekend. It's the end of the 8th week on the latest project and good lord this edit is something of a behemoth.

It's currently in the quality-assurance stage and the runtime is about 23 minutes. I'm about 10 minutes through the QA with the remaining 12 minutes in progress. Were this a regular bullshittery then it would be on the verge of completion. But as it's double the length, I'm afraid there's still quite a bit left.

The problem with quality-assurance is that it's not very sexy to describe in an update. It's a case of rendering the video, watching it to spot errors and fixing them until it just "feels" right. Meaning it's lots of notes listing dozens of minor changes each morning. Some of them 5 minute jobs, some of them an hour ish:

Meaning it's all quite tedious and fiddley and oh god there's so much to fix in 23 minutes!! And After Effects is so slow with this many compositions!! AND IT CRASHED AGAIN, WHY?!

On the other hand, one of the remaining fun parts is those introduction scenes for the fighter battles. Which have been going through some audio experiments this week in order to figure out which final effect to go with. Rather than do them all and backtrack.

In the first audio test, I had Nep narrate a short paragraph and tried to make it sound entirely synthetic. So I took some inspiration from the late Looking Glass studios (Thief & System Shock) and duplicated the tracks, giving each a slightly different pitch. Then I repeated a few words to replicate glitching/corrupted audio. The result was this first audio test. 

However, I felt it sounded far too sinister. Quite clearly sounding SHODAN-like. To the point that it would be distracting.

In the second audio test, I did away with the pitch changing and used a reverb effect to make it sound like an intercom system. The result was this second audio test.  But I felt it wasn't quite there yet. It sounded like it was being broadcast across a large facility, rather than a transmission to the audience.

After that I sought advice from ZF Bavon, who is something of an expert on audio related stuff, being a very talented musician. And he quickly returned with this third audio test which I think is exactly what I needed it to sound like. A narrator-voice from a computer, with could be artificial but is not overbearingly so.

So this means that I'm unblocked on these intros and I'm able to cut the audio and proceed, once Nep is good to go with the recording. I look forward to it.

So in summary, next week:

•  Get all of those fighter intros cut and consistent with each other.
•  Finish the remaining quality assurance work and keep rendering it until it looks good enough to release.

Also ZF Social messaged me during this and subsequently says "Hi".