Vidding like whoa

[marycrawford]

Since Hercules: the Legendary Journeys vid #1 is in beta (all hail falzalot, flummery and halimede for undertaking said beta!) I've been working on vid #2.

Which is really vid #1, because it's the first vid I ever attempted, but then Premiere crashed so completely that the entire project was lost. I gamely reconstituted what I had, and Premiere gamely crashed again. (I'm talking all the clips disappearing from the Timeline entirely, clips suddenly acquiring names like "~1" instead of "Herc_and_Iolaus_taking_a_mudbath", and on and on.)

I still don't know what caused the crashes, since the problem hasn't re-occurred with the other vid at all, but to be on the safe side I started the whole project again from scratch, under a different name, and even re-encoded the .mp3 to .wav. I haven't had any crashes since, knock on wood.

sockkpuppett posted this hilarious and completely true thing called The Life Cycle of Vid and Vidder, and it's a very handy shortcut for posts about vidding.

With vid #1 (the Iolaus portrait), I am in stage 18: "Ok, I have to let it sit here for a few days to gel. I wonder if Ellen Thing 1 or Killa Thing 2 would look at it and ... be kind."

With vid #2-that-is-really-#1 (the Hercules and Iolaus approach to life vid), I am in stage 9, which is one of the best: "Hey, it's working! it's working!"

I am still worried that the song I chose for it (Let's Face the Music and Dance) is too generic and repetitive, and two songs by the same singer, in the same genre, what the heck am I doing? But I am sitting on my inner neurotic, because I love making this vid. A kind of primal glee comes over me - look! Hercules and Iolaus, punching people to the beat! Look, I timed his hands wiggling to the shababidababidi trill in the music! Hey, I totally constructed this scene where it looks like they're interacting even though they're really not! Whee! - and I get to raid all my own screencaps looking for just the right shot. I don't have much of a visual memory at all, but it really helps to have screencapped an episode, because you're looking at it in the same way as for vidding: the image is all that matters, and it actually works better to turn the sound off.

Since this is such a small fandom, I would like to get some idea of the format people would like/be able to watch vids in. Small filesizes means the vid will be small and of crappy quality, but OTOH if you're on dialup, downloading a 13 Mb vid can take forever. I've had good results with using astolat's encoding and compressing methods, so that my beta versions are between 10 and 15 Mb and still look good, but I could try other things as well.

Here's a poll, which I hope actually works since I never tried this before:



[Poll #360888]

Comments

[elynross.livejournal.com]

Yay, vids! Wheeee!

Also, that would be: sockkpuppett, two ks. *g*

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Oh hey, thanks! Weird, I thought that LJ showed that 'bad user' tag when you type a nonexistent username, but it doesn't. Will fix. :-)

Mary

PS: Wheeeee!

[elynross.livejournal.com]

No, it only shows that if the tagging is wrong -- you leave out the punctuation marks, etc. It's "bad user tag," not "bad user" tag, I think. *g*

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

It's "bad user tag," not "bad user" tag, I think.

Ha - clearly, that is my innate paranoia coming to the fore. *g*

[ltlj.livejournal.com]

Woohoo! I can't wait to see it! I notice when I look at the LtLJ site stats, that people keep searching for "Hercules vids" or "Iolaus vids" so there's definitely an audience out there.

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's good to know! I had no idea people were looking - although it's true that there are quite a lot of Xenaverse vids.

And that is a very very cute icon. *g*

[ltlj.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I made a couple new ones and fixed some older ones to look a bit better, like this black and white one.

And ignore my poll entry, because I think I screwed it up. (How can she screw up a poll, you're wondering? I don't know.) Zip file, no problem, big file, no problem, whatever looks prettiest, and I think the other computer that actually plays things uses Real Player.

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

How can she screw up a poll, you're wondering? I don't know.

Hee! It's Monday, is what it is. And thanks for the answers.

[falzalot.livejournal.com]

Whatever format you'd sent #1 (that is really #2) to me as is a wonderful format. It looks gorgeous. But since I really don't have much preference one way or the other, Look! Button!!

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Yay! That was #2, medium size - but all the credit for it actually coming out well goes to astolat, who unveiled the mysteries of multipass encoding.

[halimede.livejournal.com]

FWIW, with some multimedia things zipping doesn't actually bring the filesize down, it can actually push it up.

Also, I'll do medium, but freaking huge is coolest so I checked that one.

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Good point about the zipping. I'll certainly check that before I post.

freaking huge is coolest so I checked that one

Heh. I know what you mean. Now I need to find out how to encode stuff so as to make the file bigger...

Mary, grinning

[cookatwork.livejournal.com]

I'm willing to wait any time it takes for the vid to download, therefor I want the files to be freaking huge. And since I collected a fair amount of vid-players on my pc ( I really don't know where they're coming from, but they're multiplying unchecked ) I don't care that much about the format.

The funny thing is I have the song stuck in my ear right now and can't seem to get rid of it. I want that shababidababidi hand-wiggling. Badly I want to add.

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the answers!

The funny thing is I have the song stuck in my ear right now and can't seem to get rid of it

Ha. Clearly it's contagious. *g*
Wise vidders advise us newbies never to pick out a song that you can't stand to hear hundreds of times over, and they are very very right.

I want that shababidababidi hand-wiggling. Badly I want to add.

Yay!

[mythdefied.livejournal.com]

I'm really looking forward to seeing this vid now! I haven't the first clue how to construct one of these things but it sounds horribly complex so I bow to you for doing it.