Dream and Delirium - Website Documentation

As I commented in the Extreme Freestyle Hacking website documentation, I have abandoned the Coffee Cup Visual Designer software package except for making page backgrounds and buttons. With the designer software, I was very limited in making changes directly to the code; each time Designer would recompile and renumber all of the objects and images and wipe out any direct changes that I had made.

So I am back to plain old text editing. And much like editing in assembler, I have gathered a good supply of code snippets to be able to cut and paste to make new pages. I still keep Coffee Cup HTML Editor 2007 on the computer to help find a lost or extra markup character now and then. I like to have a second computer running for instant feedback.

My greatest hastle with making the Dream and Delirium website has been with the lack of documentation for making streaming 5.1 videos, both the DVD using Premiere and the Quicktime movie.

Adobe is happy to point out that Quicktime can now make movies with 24 audio channels (which means 24 amplifiers and speakers!), but trying to find the documentation to do this was a task. I finally discovered how to make a 200MB file into 50MB: compress each audio track to mp3 prior to adding each to the video file. Post-build compression schemes available limit the choices to stereo or monaural. The trick is to compress first.

Perhaps 5.1 is still too young in its development as a website opportunity, and the typical consumer computer does not have 5.1 capability (like mine). I could only find a few 5.1 sample files (none streaming, only downloadable). So much for being a dreaming pioneer. The delirium part appears to be rampant. That said, I do not have the ability to check my own entry into the 5.1 field.

Maybe I should check with the movie pirates to learn thier trade secrets. Oh, well. I am looking forward to another ACTLab semester, complete with the hair-on-fire challanges.