Vidding update

[hmpf]

Spent roughly fourteen hours vidding today. Am totally knackered and going to bed now. Windows Movie Maker is teh suck, but I'm sort of learning to live with it. Does that sound stoically heroic? Not nearly heroic enough, believe me.

Vid's about two thirds to three fourths done.

Nearly lost my mind a couple of times after the program crashed for the umpteenth time, and learned to hate Tom McRae with a passion, or at least learned to hate his A & B Song, but am pleased with the result of my work so far (when I can stand to look at it at all - because, arrgh, fourteen hours today and six yesterday of constant replay will spoil *any* song for you).

I get the impression my vidding career may end up much like my costuming career: pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It's simply too much effort. The result is kinda pleasing, but the effort made is disproportionate to the resulting pleasure.

Also, if I were to keep vidding I'd have to get more webspace.

kljfdavn ,.jxy

Sorry, kinda falling asleep on the keyboard there. Off to bed...

Comments

How long...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

does it take you to finish a vid, on average? Just wondering if my 24+ hours are anything like the normal time it takes to make a vid. If so, my respect for vidders has just increased again. (Also, my wonder at people like LithiumDoll who produce such huge amounts of vids.)

Speaking of Farscape vidders and vids - I have some FS related vid bunnies, but I'm *so* afraid of having to a) put all of Farscape on my computer! It would totally kill my hard drive!, and b) let WMM import all the eps and split them into clips, as that takes around half an hour per ep on my computer. So... 44 hours for Farscape... arrrgh.

Re: How long...

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Hmm...difficult to say. Firstly of the three (four counting the one I'm working on now) vids I've made two (or three counting the one I'm working on now) of them are five minute songs, which is a minute and a half over the average. That said, yes, it takes a really long time. I don't usually work on them for 24 hours straight. But they usually consume most of my evenings for...I don't know, four days? Five days? So, probably, yes, that sounds about right. Then again, that time is greatly increased (probably) by the crapness and crashing of WMM. Also my first video took longer than my others.

Re: putting Farscape onto computer, yes, that will take a long time. Although, it might be worth using a free converter to convert them into WMV format at a lower quality (though still fine for vidding). This will reduce space on the hard drive and although it will take time, it might be worth it for future vidding endevours. Currently I mostly seem to be vidding BSG, and I have 173ish meg episodes for my portable cyberbox, and *those* are the ones I've been using to vid with. That said, it took a long time to convert the eps, but I had to *anyway* to put them on my cyberbox. So...it's a toss up - which is worth more? Hard drive space or speed? (and yes, it's the lack of accessible farscape episodes that's stopping me vidding more for FS).

I do have a tip about importing them into WMM, though. When you import something you get a box with two green bars that fill up, right? The one at the top is importing the file, the one at the bottom is making the clips. Once the one at the top is full (usually only a few seconds) you can just click cancel. This will leave you with the whole episode as a single clip. You can then spend about thirty seconds going through it, clipping it into five minute video clips for easier browsing. Again, this is a toss up - the convenience of having it clipped to smaller more specific scenes, or getting the episode quicker. I like to just get the file and do my own cropping because a) I usually know the episode pretty well, b) if I don't, I can leave it paused and just move the curser forwards by thirty second chunks to see still frames of what's in any given longer clip and c) WMM has that irritating habit of clipping a scene and leaving ghost frames at either end. So I have to be fiddly and crop both ends of any scene *anyway*.

Um...yeah, so this is getting really long - sorry! Hope that at least made *some* sense...

Useful tips!

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I think cutting the ep into smaller chunks myself may be something I'll have to try... on the other hand, doing that to 88 FS eps... hmmm...

Re: Useful tips!

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Will you be using *all* 88 in your vid?! If so...yikes and I *double* definitely want to see it. But seriously, if you don't try to go for specific scenes and just splite every five minutes or so, it'll take a minute or less to split the episode. So that's only about an hour and a half.

Hooray for you getting into the world of vidding!

TBRFKASK