hope: Art of a woman writing from tour poster (I got a yorkie upstairs)
puddingsmith ([personal profile] hope) wrote2006-05-17 09:00 pm
Entry tags:

vidding thoughts

Because I'm still all afterglowy.


Vidding's a weird medium for me - my breed of creativity seems to be one that deals better with more static media, like language or html or pixels on a screen. Until I figured out a few tricks of the program(s) I use to vid, I used to be endlessly frustrated by the temporality of vidding - the inability to stop, freeze, divide up into portions that I can focus on and work on individually. Like pixels or layers in an icon. Like words or sentences or paragraphs in a fic.

Sure, there's the peaks and troughs of the visual representation of sound, but even that's difficult to interpret (though I'm getting better at it), but yeah, the temporality - even if I'm listening to the same half-second of song over and over to get the visual right, it's already over before I can get a hold of it. On top of that, I have a great deal of difficulty absorbing/computing the sound and the picture at once... Which makes it tricky to drop clips into the right place. On the super-quick cuts of the vid I posted yesterday, god, I had to play the sound over and over to try and recognise the beats I wanted in the sound visual, and then over and over each time I dropped a clip in, then microscopic changes in the size length of each to fit each unique beat, and and and...

Yeah. It fulfills my finicky nature, but it's not easy. The more I do it the more I like it, though, mastering a new skill and all. I think the Sweetest Perfection one turned out so well because of the 'narrative' structure of it, so to speak; not just that it pretty much appealed to everyone because it was "yay, show is awesome!" instead of exploring a particular idea/slant/opinion of the show, as vids tend to be all about. But also because the structure was essentially "each episode in chronological order; rinse & repeat faster; season arc", it's not like I was looking for footage on a particular theme, then using it all up in the first half of the vid and grabbing at straws in the second half.

But anyway. Enough of rambling on that for a while. Except for this, because yeah, I'm a static person more than a temporal person, and I think this looks kickass. Here's what the vid looks on the cutting-room table:



Needless to say, I was zoomed in on the action a whole lot more than that while I was working on it, in order to grab and drag and cut and resize. Like:




ANYWAY. Thus ends the self-indulgence for today.

[identity profile] maygra.livejournal.com 2006-05-17 11:32 am (UTC)(link)
And see, now I wnat to feed you songs and vid ideas becasue really, this was spectacular.

[identity profile] reynard-pyjama.livejournal.com 2006-05-18 01:27 am (UTC)(link)
What software are you using? I find the multiple video and audio tracks of something like Final Cut of Premiere much, much easier to work with than those linear ones like iMovie and wotnot which break my brain. It means you can work on small sections and go back and forth, like what you were saying you wish you could do.

[identity profile] reynard-pyjama.livejournal.com 2006-05-18 01:44 am (UTC)(link)
I've got Final Cut on my new machine and Premier on my old one that's still on OS9. Unfortunately it's all mac, but next time you're over lets have a go at it and I'll show you what I mean. When I tried to teach myself iMovie (it's totally linear, one clip after the next like that all butted up against each other) I nearly went insane because it was so opposite to the way I mentally approach editing. I found it really counter-intuitive.


[identity profile] cocombat.livejournal.com 2006-12-20 11:22 am (UTC)(link)
I had to play the sound over and over to try and recognise the beats I wanted in the sound visual, and then over and over each time I dropped a clip in, then microscopic changes in the size length of each to fit each unique beat

Yes! See that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Plenty of audio programs have various doo-hickey's to recognise the beat, so how hard could it be to implement automatic beat-matching? Or at least, better visual displays (snap-to guides) of the beat, to work with?
T'would be awesome.

Will check out Chaodyssey's recs.
:)