Winds of Complications (Patreon)

I'd meant to post an updated version of Metamorphoses last week. It took several hours just to render out the version that combined multiple captures to reduce color noise. I would check its progress every so often, and a couple of times I noticed frame blending errors that I thought I had sorted out in the editing process. And then while working on the next phase - using the luma-only version to separate out & filter the color - I found even more errors; not single frames, but seconds of footage mismatched...

Taking a break from that headache, I happened upon an English widescreen trailer for the film. The main advantage to that, is it allowed me to more or less correct the image distortion in my captures.

Over the past week, I've started a different approach to editing together my source videos. By the time I'd rendered the luma-only video, I'd focused mostly on using captures to fill any remaining gaps. Now I'm going through each capture and matching them frame-by-frame to a reference video. Once that's done, I'll stack them together to make the luma as clean as possible. That's more important than color stacking, I think, since any noise in the final image will mostly be from the luma.

Getting those captures matched has certainly been consuming the vast majority of my free time. There are 3 more weeks on my contract, so I'm hoping I'm done with this by then. Especially since now the job has me mostly cleaning up another outsource company's sloppy work, I may need to resume drawing just as a form of therapy.