TODEPOND TIMES: Resolve

Hello! I'm writing to you, which can only mean one thing. It's time for the weekly...

🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸

What's new this week?

Resolve

I've finalised the script for the video! And I'm ready to record my voice-over.

The process of doing this is a little bit different this time... because... I'm trying out some different video-editing software.

Previously, I used all the Adobe stuff. This means I used a range of different programs: Premiere Pro for editing, After Effects for effects, Media Encoder for rendering, Audition for audio editing, and so on.

As these are all Adobe products, you'd hope that they'd work well together. But I kept finding issues with getting them to 'play nice' with each other. And I came across a nasty bug last time, where Media Encoder struggled to render my Premiere Pro project.

This time, I'm giving Davinci Resolve a try. It seems to have the nice benefit that you can do *everything* within just one program. No more hopping about.

So far so good! It's working well so far. If I come across any bumps, I'll use Premiere Pro for those pieces. But... Fingers crossed!

Music

If you didn't know by now, or you're new here, the next video is going to be partially themed around *music*. Because... the engine that it features (Arroost) lets you make music - or at the very least - a lot of noise.

So... The video won't feature the usual trance-tune background-music all the way through.

Instead, some tunes will gradually build up and down as we progress through the video. It might not have the usual trancey vibes, but that's ok. It'll be fun to do something a bit different for this one! It'll be trippy in some other ways.

That being said, I'm still continually hunting down tunes to put in future videos beyond this one.

Previously, I've used music from the Anjuna labels because I'm a massive Anjuna fan. (I've been to a lot of their shows here in London).

I started using their music after they gave me the go-ahead in an email conversation. I use it non-commercially though, meaning I don't have control over ads on my videos. YouTube automates this, and all ad revenue goes to them.

I don't mind losing out on the revenue, but I don't like how YouTube has now started putting ads in the middle of some of my more popular videos.

Because of this, I'm now looking for other sources of music! Monstercat allows you to use most of their music for a small subscription, and I already do this for one of the tracks in the 🤖 Nothing video.

Nothing beats the quality of Anjuna tunes though... I'll keep looking!

Assistant

I've done a lot more coding for the Arroost engine.

At any point in time, the entire Arroost world can be represented as a single piece of data, called a 'nogan'.

You could ask: What shape is a nogan? What's in a nogan? What's *not* in a nogan?

This week, I figured that out! And I made a 'nogan-checker'.

You can give the nogan-checker *anything*, and it'll respond by telling you if that thing is a nogan or not.

This is really helpful for me. As I build more and more of Arroost, there's always the chance that I make a mistake. At some point, I'm likely to *break the nogan* by accident.

The nogan-checker is my helpful assistant! It's already yelled at me a few times when I did things wrong. It's a great way of keeping my code as bug-free as possible!

Unless, of course, I wrote a bug into the nogan-checker. If that's the case, we're all doomed.

Thank you so much for supporting me through all these projects! And welcome to all the new people who joined this week! Wherever you are in the world right now, I hope you have a great week. See you next time! 🐸

Days since tode fell asleep: 126
Days since bot went missing: 91