#PastebinMonday 02/13/2023 A Colossal Waste of Time Edition

'Sup, doods!

I need the opportunity this week to rant. Bear with me. I don't get legitimately angry at a lot of things as I like to think critically about what I'm actually willing to tolerate. I may be a creature of habit, but there is a lot more that I am willing to go along with than I would even believe myself, so long as you don't mess with my money or my time. After what I went through this weekend, I feel that everything I tried to do was a colossal waste of time and I need to get those feelings out of my system.

At the moment that I am writing this, I am feeling hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok, and flat out deceived. I don't know if those feelings will go away after sleeping on them. I think writing them down will help me on the path towards healing.

Switching video editor software from Vegas Pro 14 to DaVinci Resolve was one of the best decisions for managing my content that I could have ever made. It has been such a huge time saver for rendering the final videos and allowing me to move on to the next thing quicker. When I get into the full swing of producing more speedrun content more often (which is not poised to happen this year at my current rate), DaVinci will serve me better than Vegas Pro ever did.

That said, I tasked myself this weekend to redo the broadcast intro video for the upcoming TA2023 tournament and, in my attempt to redo the whole video in DaVinci Resolve for easier future consumption, I came across one of DaVinci Resolve's greatest weaknesses:

alpha channels.

Alpha channels allow images to be made with transparency. PNG and GIF files can be made with transparency as well as select video file containers (AVI, MKV, WEBM, to name a few). The presentation style of the recent League of Puzzle Speedrunners tournament broadcasts is made possible thanks in no small part to copious amounts of PNGs, GIFs, and WEBM files.

Unfortunately, none of the good pieces of editing software I have worked with can create or work with WEBM files so I currently have to render videos in a format with a supported alpha channel such as AVI with a video codec that also supports it. Vegas Pro makes this easy. Pick a container. Pick a codec. Check the box for “Render alpha channel.” Done. The rendered timeline can immediately be used as a snazzy stinger transition within OBS or easily converted into WEBM for a smaller package.

After hours and hours of trial and error and research trying to do the same thing in DaVinci, I am convinced that it cannot render a timeline with an alpha channel under any circumstances. From this point onward, I share my personal experiences with trying to make this work in DaVinci. I am not an expert on video editing by any stretch. I like to think that I am in expert, however, in following directions and using Google for effective research. I find it telling that I keep running into forum thread after forum thread after Reddit post having the same issues with transparency and YouTube video after YouTube video offering solutions that do not directly apply to the things that I need in place to make the tournament intro video. I expect myself to get multiple details wrong, but I ran out of patience after more than a dozen hours of trying to render a 15 second video. Here were the complaints I came away with.

Can you apply an alpha channel onto a final timeline render? You can export “premultiplied” alpha from a single timeline, but for proper “straight” alpha that will actually create transparency, you have to render individual clips—and only if you add the alpha output to the individual clips, drag a mouse to connect input to output, and then chroma key out the part of the background on each clip that you don't want seen. Can you do all that from the timeline view? NO! There's a separate tab for that. And maybe you just caught on to a central issue I ran into after using Vegas Pro for so long: you apply alpha to video clips, not to a timeline. The tournament intro video uses 22 video tracks! I don't need 22 rendered clips! I need ONE! If there's no visible video clip in a part of a timeline, DaVinci will render black, not alpha. I need alpha rendered in those spaces just like Vegas Pro does! How is that hard to understand?!

The YouTube tutorials you may find, by the way, will often recommend specific codecs to render the final video to get alpha outputs. Will those codecs play in common media players out of the box? NO! The codecs aren't supported. Will those codecs play nice in OBS? NO! They stutter constantly. Can I use ffmpeg to tweak the video settings of those files rendered with those codecs to make use of a nicer format? NO! ffmpeg cannot detect the stream encoder.

I kept running into obstacle after obstacle, often going head first into the same issue multiple times. Eventually, I concluded that DaVinci Resolve was not suitable for this task and turned back to old reliable Vegas Pro to render this video once again.

I had the whole thing done start to finish in four hours.

To DaVinci's credit, it does let you manipulate text and static images really well. I can continue to use that as part of the creative process. BUT, if I need an alpha channel on the final video, for now, I need to make it in Vegas Pro. Remind me later to render the individual video tracks and back them up before doing this again. I don't have the space on my hard drive at the moment to need to hold on to 75 GB of videos every time I need to make this video for each tournament.

I am mad at myself for letting me waste so many hours on this 15 second video. I don't need to go in to work today. I just need to lay down. My head hurts, mostly from me smacking it into my head in shame and disappointment.

Today's (permanent) extra streaming goals:

Goal #1A: finalize broadcast layouts for the upcoming Tetris Attack tournament. I still get distracted and procrastinate. I just need to have this done. I probably won't be able to practice until I get this done.
Goal #5: script and record footage for my Puzzle League tutorial series. I have some scripts to touch up before feeling comfortable with moving on to recording gameplay. Maybe I do that part on stream? I still have not ruled that out. Then I will need to record my talking points and edit it all together. I definitely will NOT be able to do that on stream. I don't know if I can work on any of this during the tournament.
Goal #6: clean up my own stream layout. I am brainstorming how I want the final theming to be. I probably want to give people multiple options, maybe allow spending bits to change the look. I don't have anything written down yet. I don't expect to get to this anytime soon.


Right now, I'm just gonna practice Tetris Attack straight on Friday. No color swapping challenges are a little more interesting than I thought they would be. Maybe I can have a video on that done within the next six months.

That’s my life story for the week. Later, doods!

--Cards