![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Vidding 101 fun
Jul. 21st, 2004 11:03 amNow that I'm toying with Adobe Premiere, trying to make an actual Hercules & Iolaus songvid without blowing my head up in the process, I've begun paying attention to what transitions were used between shots in Hercules: the Legendary Journeys itself.
Maybe I'm unusual, but I don't think I ever even noticed whether a show or movie used straight cuts, dissolves, wipes or any of a host of special effects. Now I still don't notice half the time, but sometimes I do.
As far as I can tell, H:tLJ is mostly straight cuts (cutting directly from one image to another) with the occasional dissolve (fading one image into another) and fade-to-black for commercials. But occasionally they use wipes (one image moving horizontally across the other, almost 'bumping' it out of the way), mostly for comic effect. There's one that struck me particularly: in Mother of All Monsters, they use a tentacle wipe. One of Echidna's tentacles whips across the scene and 'wipes' it out, then we go back to Echidna. Unbelievable that I never noticed that. I suppose it's the cheesiest thing, but hey, I laughed.
I've seen a bit of discussion about special effect transitions in songvids. Since Premiere and other video editing programs come with a whole bunch of options, apparently some people think it's a waste not to use them all, whereas others say you should stick to straight cuts unless you really know what you're doing.
For me, it's easy: I'm sticking to straight cuts and the occasional dissolve because I don't know how to do any of the other things yet anyway. *g*
Argh. I wanted to compare and contrast two Xena/Hercverse vids here, one ('She Bangs') an example of a Xena vid that I liked, but that would have worked even better for me without many of the fancy transitions, and the other ('Discotheque' by Matt Savelkoul) a terrific Xena-Herc-Twankey-everybody comedy vid that doesn't seem to use any special transition effects at all. But I can't find either of them. Matt's vids seem to have been deleted, and I don't know who made 'She Bangs' (why oh why do so few vids have credits?). Has there been a purge in Xena fandom or something?
ETA: Thanks to Cortese, I now know that 'She Bangs' can be found here and that it's by JJ and the Video Vixen. Download and unzip; you'll need RealPlayer to watch it.
I like this vid because it zips and bounds along, uses great action shots timed well to the music, and the portrait of Xena is both affectionate and funny. (I particularly like the shot of Xena kissing Ares, then grabbing him by the family jewels to 'A woman's got one thing on her mind'.) But yeah, the transitions don't work for me at all, even though I can see that they're cleverly done; there's the shot scattering into pieces as Xena's fist hits, the three-dimensional wipe thing as Xena moves from trying to kill Hercules to kissing him, and so on. But all they do is distract me from the vid itself.
There's one effect I like, though, which is the split screen to 'thinking of her in her leather and lace' which shows a pan upwards of Xena dressing in her usual garb on the left, and a similar shot of her Miss Amphipolis guise on the right.
Maybe I'm unusual, but I don't think I ever even noticed whether a show or movie used straight cuts, dissolves, wipes or any of a host of special effects. Now I still don't notice half the time, but sometimes I do.
As far as I can tell, H:tLJ is mostly straight cuts (cutting directly from one image to another) with the occasional dissolve (fading one image into another) and fade-to-black for commercials. But occasionally they use wipes (one image moving horizontally across the other, almost 'bumping' it out of the way), mostly for comic effect. There's one that struck me particularly: in Mother of All Monsters, they use a tentacle wipe. One of Echidna's tentacles whips across the scene and 'wipes' it out, then we go back to Echidna. Unbelievable that I never noticed that. I suppose it's the cheesiest thing, but hey, I laughed.
I've seen a bit of discussion about special effect transitions in songvids. Since Premiere and other video editing programs come with a whole bunch of options, apparently some people think it's a waste not to use them all, whereas others say you should stick to straight cuts unless you really know what you're doing.
For me, it's easy: I'm sticking to straight cuts and the occasional dissolve because I don't know how to do any of the other things yet anyway. *g*
Argh. I wanted to compare and contrast two Xena/Hercverse vids here, one ('She Bangs') an example of a Xena vid that I liked, but that would have worked even better for me without many of the fancy transitions, and the other ('Discotheque' by Matt Savelkoul) a terrific Xena-Herc-Twankey-everybody comedy vid that doesn't seem to use any special transition effects at all. But I can't find either of them. Matt's vids seem to have been deleted, and I don't know who made 'She Bangs' (why oh why do so few vids have credits?). Has there been a purge in Xena fandom or something?
ETA: Thanks to Cortese, I now know that 'She Bangs' can be found here and that it's by JJ and the Video Vixen. Download and unzip; you'll need RealPlayer to watch it.
I like this vid because it zips and bounds along, uses great action shots timed well to the music, and the portrait of Xena is both affectionate and funny. (I particularly like the shot of Xena kissing Ares, then grabbing him by the family jewels to 'A woman's got one thing on her mind'.) But yeah, the transitions don't work for me at all, even though I can see that they're cleverly done; there's the shot scattering into pieces as Xena's fist hits, the three-dimensional wipe thing as Xena moves from trying to kill Hercules to kissing him, and so on. But all they do is distract me from the vid itself.
There's one effect I like, though, which is the split screen to 'thinking of her in her leather and lace' which shows a pan upwards of Xena dressing in her usual garb on the left, and a similar shot of her Miss Amphipolis guise on the right.