So, I got stranded in the US, recovering from Corona, waiting for PCR tests to come in negative (I’ve gotten 4 so far, crossing my fingers on the one I just took an hour ago), which is nice because I got to spend two extra weeks with my family I hadn’t seen in 3 years, although I was sick.
However, I realized I wasn’t going to make it back in time for my first class. Going back in time a month and a half ago, I lost my wallet 4 days before my flight to the US, and it’s pretty difficult to leave Japan, or at least get back into Japan without a foreign residence card, which was tugged snuggly into that wallet that I dropped. So I had to miss three classes before my trip to take a day off and do the round-robin-death-leave-no-survivors-grudge-match between me, the police box, the main police headquarters, and the immigration office. Actually it was more of a mutant-three-on-one-tag team match, but there was a great translator in the police headquarters and the immigration office was actually a breeze (not like the time when I forgot to extend my visa).
So you’ve probably realized Japanese Bureaucracy and I are in a relationship. I am the forgetful yet diligent participant in the marriage who is having a good time, and Japan is the nitpicking, rules defining, norm regulating cultural entity that is reminding me to roll up my socks and dot my t’s. Huh? But anyways, we have a good time, I get to be ignorant and enjoy life, and Japan gets to hit me with an oversized paper fan and yell sentences that begin with, “Of course you have to…”, “Well, everyone does….”, and “Is this how you…. ?” I create a beligerant image of Japan in my head because it is much easier to deal with than the complacent/passive aggressive/defensively polite one that exists in reality. But hey, there are always exceptions to the rule, there are are some up front people out there. I just like to keep an imaginary one in my head. Their name is Natsuko/Kensuke and we eat nabe on Sunday evenings.
And anyways the anyways, back to sentence one, of paragraph two, that is so far back that I have emboldened it for you, dear reader/future me looking back on this, it felt really bad missing classes on my way out of Japan and coming back in. So I felt that I had to make something…. That’s when my dad decided that “We” were going to jar pears. He uses we a lot when it comes to projects and house repair. I contend that this “We” is different than “we” so I capitalize it. That will be discussed on a later log perhaps. So, We decided to make jarred pears and record the process.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm0jK76xBxw
Worksheet:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XSxB3BWBvzM_zL5zEhN_eSXfOu3OcS5AJstPgLY-1zM/edit
Notes to me in the future:
- The Pixel 6 Smartphone uses TS compression for its video files. Premiere Pro is TS intolerant. Be sure to change the recording settings on your phone to 264 or whatever it was.
- The Pixel 6 recording software does transcripts are nice, but it makes lots of errors. Dragon Voice Recognition software is more accuurate.
- VLC can convert videos out of the TS format into a format digestible for Premiere Pro but,
- even when converted in this way, Premiere Pro will not encode videos properly that aren’t horizontally shot.
- Get a tripod.
- Show the person in the shot, the frame area they have to work with before a shot so you don’t have to follow them around.
- Learn how to manipulate basic strings in python so they can be pushed into a generic caption .srt format with 5 seconds between each caption so I can just fiddle them around (this might also be bad too, as captions can’t overlap, let’s say 2 minutes between each) Regular Expressions seems to work better than the replace function for this.
- Figure out what functions in python actually alter the text and which are just local topological changes.
- For language learners, say little, and keep captions on the screen at least 3 seconds before what you want to say, during the sentence, and 3 seconds after. I realized this was the way to do it, halfway through the video, so the beginning is fast and hard and the end is slow and easier.
- Saying, “Prepare pears,” is hard for some reason.
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