fray-adjacent

There is a very cool discussion about vidding -- process, tech, tips, you name it -- at wiscon_vidparty's vidding workshop.  Check it out!  This is such a great idea and I hope it keeps happening. I would have *loved* to come across this when I started vidding or in my first year as a vidder.  I love coming across it now!

A lot of people are talking about their vidding process, most of which are similar to mine in the finding/discovering song --> re-watching and/or clipping --> song editing --> vid editing --> beta process, but I've discovered (and rediscovered) that it really helps me to combine the clipping and video editing.  Because clipping is so boring!  I.e., I set myself a goal for a number of episodes to clip, then once I finish I reward myself by laying some of those clips on the timeline!  It helps with motivation.  Plus, I usually get a lot of ideas when I clip and it helps to enact at least some of those ideas right away rather than writing them down or taking mental  notes that don't get acted upon for days to months. 

Also, according to heresluck, an initial rule of thumb for matching motion to a beat is to have the explosion, fist-hitting, etc happen three frames before the beat (then adjust as needed).  WHOA.  I usually line these things up on the same frame as the beat, and I wonder if this is part of why I often feel like my timing is a bit off-looking.  I am definitely going to try this out.  If it works I will be glad to have a solution/bitter I didn't realize this ages ago.

I haven't been around DW much, and my fannish mode has generally been a bit different lately. ( Cut for navel-gazing about recent non-participation on DW )

Anyway, I'm honestly considering just clearing out my inbox and starting fresh, with sincere apologies to people who left comments for me and never got a response.

In other vidding news:  I've been vidding like mad the past week or so.  I'm making a Xena vid that is really trying to explore moral and thematic questions -- and take positions and make arguments about said questions -- more so than probably any other vid I've made.  I've been really digging the process of making it.  I think because, unlike with my Buffy vids, Xena is still quite fresh and new for me and I feel really excited about what I want to say about it.  Also, with Buffy vids I have the constant feeling that every idea I've ever had has already been done, and probably better.  But to be honest I haven't found even half a dozen Xena vids that I like.  I'm sure there were tons back in the day but they seem to be gone or at least beyond my ability/motivation to find them.  So I actually feel like I can make a contribution? Anyway, one of the cool consequences of my vid farr is that I'm finally learning how to use After Effects a teensy bit because my excitement for the vid is overpowering my laziness.

*Yes I am watching Farscape and one of the zillions of DW posts I've written in my head the past 6 weeks is how utterly I've fallen for Aeryn Sun, and about my predictable lack of response to John and the Aeryn/John pairing.

I swear, every vid I make I remember halfway through that I don't have to clip everything before I start editing.  And each time it is a goddamn revelation.  This time around, I'd been clipping for months, and I wasn't hating it, but I sure wasn't loving it.  Then I realized, hey, I have a lot of clips here.  I could throw those things on a timeline and have a lot more fun than I am right now.  Maybe even learn a thing or two about my new vidding software while I'm at it.

And it goes both ways -- editing gives me the motivation to keep clipping, but clipping gives me ideas for the vid.  It's a good back and forth.  I lose a little time by editing stuff that I end up replacing later once I discover better clips, but I bet I make that time up just by having more vid farr.  Plus it makes the experience overall more fun, which might have something to do with why I'm doing this in the first place?

So in the last two days I've filled up about 2/3 of the timeline for Sekrit Vid.  It's been a lot of fun!  I've been toying around with it a lot, moving between different parts of the vid, trying stuff out in one section till I get tired of it, tightening edits in another until I'm happy enough with it, for now anyway.  I'm still not sure what exactly I'm going to do with the other third, but hey, that's what clipping is for.  And that's my next task, as I've nearly exhausted the clips I have. 

And I'm doing it all in a spiffy new program -- Premiere Pro CS6, which came with my new laptop that came with my new job.  Mostly it's a lot like FCP 7, but prettier to look at.  I LOVE (really, really, a lot) that I can scrub through a preview of clips with the icon view -- it saves me soooo much time.  There's still a few kinks.  When I double click on a clip in the timeline to open it in the viewer (or whatever Premiere calls the monitor on the left), I keep expecting the viewer playhead to be on the same frame as the sequence playhead was.  I've found this is only the case maybe half the time?  I'm sure there's a reason for the discrepancy, but I don't know it yet.  It sounds like a small thing but it does slow down my fine-editing process -- I guess I need to adjust that part of how I work.  

I checked out Adobe's official "Classroom in a Book" for Premiere, and so I'm also learning some things I aught to know by now -- like what alpha channels and chroma keys are -- and I'm excited to use them.  Eventually.  Same with After Effects and all that.  Fancy titles and whatnot are exciting, but I bet I'll get the most use out of AE's de-noising effects, stuck as I am on shows that started in the 90s.

 you curse the Seattle sun shining in your window because it's hard to see your computer screen. On the other hand, I'm finally making real progress on my CVV vid!

 Also, I need to remember to export more often. Things can look really different at full-screen with clips that aren't so darkened. Sometimes for the better! But sometimes not so much…

But the guilt is taking over, so I'm off on a run.