The vid is done! It's done! Woohoo!

[marycrawford]

Ahem. Yes. Here's my first vid. Many many thanks to elynross, falzalot, flummery and halimede for beta'ing and egging me on. *g*

Title: Live Till I Die
Performed by: Frank Sinatra
Fandom: Hercules: the Legendary Journeys
Description: The many lives of Iolaus.

Size: 11.9 Mb
Type: .avi with the Divx codec.

You can download it (right-click and save, please!) here.

There's just the one .avi version for now, but I have been told both PC and Mac users should be able to play it - if not, please let me know and I will do my best to fix it.
ETA: if you're having trouble playing the vid, you may want to try downloading and installing the DivX codec.

(A good free movie player for Windows, Mac OS, Linux or just about anything is VLC media player; another free player for Windows is Zoom Player. Neither comes with ads or 'channels' or spyware or any of that crap.)

I would love to know what you think, and that includes critical feedback.



- I would never have figured out how to do any of this if not for the tutorials and vid reviews and helpful posts from other vidders, many of which can be found through permetaform immensely helpful overview page. Thank you all. It's a steep learning curve, at least for me - learning to deal with SmartRipper and VirtualDub and Premiere and codecs and compression issues and on and on, and that's just the technical stuff - but even so, compared to the analog method, it has to be infinitely easier. I doff my hat to anyone who can make a vid using nothing but two VCRs; that's just awe-inspiring.

- I still don't know half of what Premiere can do. I discovered yesterday that there was a special superimpose track. Who knew? And I don't think I figured out what the 'Enable Clip' option was until halfway through. Or how to unlock clips all at once instead of one at a time. Yes, I am a doof. *g*

- Sometimes not knowing how something works can really help. In the Iolaus-at-the-campfire shots, I wanted two dissolves, but what I ended up with was two dissolve-to-black effects as a result of
a) not understanding how the dissolve tool worked
b) not knowing what a true dissolve looked like despite having seen them everywhere.
I figured out eventually that I'd done something wrong, but I kept the effects because I liked the look of them, and eventually Seah asked me how I'd done it, hee. (If anyone else wants to know, I have an Adobe Premiere screenshot I can send you. *g*)

- De-interlacing all your source clips? Bad idea. I thought I needed to do that, but what I needed to do was keep the interlacing and just de-interlace the vid for Web output, so that I could still make a good-looking TV version. (TV needs interlacing, Web doesn't.) Again, Seah came to the rescue and showed me that the vid still looked decent on TV with re-added interlacing.

- When you don't have a strong visual memory, making screencaps for an episode is a godsend. But just rewatching the ep with the sound off works too; that way there is no plot to distract you from the pretty.

Comments

[voleuse.livejournal.com]

Awesome. Thanks so much for doing this!

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Hey, you're most welcome! :-)