The export from hell

The past 24 hours have been a letdown. I finished editing the video for my latest project and I was pumped because I wasn't up against a deadline. In fact I was still working out some details with the sponsor which put me in a very rarified situation: having time to spare. My plan was to post a sneak preview of the video on Patreon this morning.

This is something I’m always interested in doing. Not only is it neat for all you wonderful patrons, it’s also a great way for me to get feedback before opening up the video to the entire world. Unfortunately being done with the edit doesn’t mean you have a video. The edit has all of the individual clips in the right order but that has to be converted into a single video file through a process called encoding.

I’m not exactly clear on what happens during encoding, but it’s where everything tends to go wrong. Software hanging, encoder crashes, BSODs, missing-assets-that-are-right-there-come-on-you-piece-of-junk, you know, that kind of stuff. For this video I started attempting the export last night with a promise to myself that I would sleep as soon as the export was complete. Suffice to say it’s now 5pm the next day and I’m pretty tired.

I’m also now on the trip that I was doing my darnedest to complete the video before. So instead of sharing the video early, I’ll tell you a bit about the project. It’s actually a project I’ve been working on specifically for you.

I’ve been wanting to send something out to everyone as a way of saying thank you. I wanted it to be something that's actually neat and I eventually settled on a handwritten note. And by hand written I mean written by a robot with a hand.

This ended up being a neat project because not only is there some cool robotics and factory style automation, theres some really really neat software. This is mostly because I decided to do this on hard mode by setting the following requirements:

1. Every card should have unique writing
2. The handwriting should be indistinguishable from human writing

This forced me to dive into using machine learning, which to this point I have never used in a project. Mostly because I’m not skilled at it which is something I'm trying to change. It was a struggle and I had to cheat a bit, but I learned a lot and the results are nice. I even got a handwriting export to take a look at the cards to see how convincing they are.

I debated with myself weather I should show a picture of the results, but I don’t want to spoil the video so I’ll refrain.

I’m excited to get this video posted! I’m traveling for a couple days but as soon as I return I’ll be figuring out these encoder issues one way or another. There’s even been some discussion on the discord of writing custom software to grab the video frames from the editor preview one frame at a time then reconstructing the video from that. I hope it won’t come to that, but if that’s what it takes we’ll get it done.

ALSO VERY IMPORTANT: If you’re interested in a robot generated card please make sure your address is entered and up to date in Patreon. If like me you have a hard time deciphering the patreon UI, here's their help page that describes how https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002832686-How-do-I-update-my-shipping-address :)

Thanks so much for the support. If you have questions about this project, once the video goes live I try to hang out in the discord to discuss.

- Shane