Just a quick note about vids (since I've watched two hours' worth of Supernatural vids tonight)

[kate]

One of the things I've noticed about a lot of the vids I've been watching is that the songs are just Too. Damn. Long. There are a lot that start out strong but then either end up losing coherency in the middle or repeating clips over and over. Seriously, if you only have a couple minutes' worth of material, why are you choosing a song that's four and a half minutes long? Cut out the bridge if it doesn't fit. Do you really need twelve choruses? No, of course not! I find it funny that a lot of vidders (and this is just youtube, I don't believe this is anywhere near the best and the brightest of fandom, Festivids has shown me quite clearly that there are vidders who do this sort of thing, and do it well) don't think to cut the song up the way they cut clips up. You have to have an ear to do it, because you can't just mash two parts of a song together unless they work harmonically (or unless you're looking for a jump cut, which, musically is a little weird, but I'd love to see someone make work), but I imagine that most vidders have a pretty good ear, it's part of the job to make the clips and the music work together.

ETA: This wasn't really me bemoaning the entire vidding community, though I grant you it sounds like it (it was 2:30am, please cut me a teenie bit of slack). ESPECIALLY since I don't do this. I don't generally criticize (another reason this post is even here - I would never have posted this if I had been sober non-sleep-deprived). I certainly don't critique things I don't do, which, at least for now, and likely for a long time yet, is all vidders ever - even the people who made the vids I don't particularly like are obviously waaaaaaaay ahead of me, as I've never even tried it. This was me making an obvservation about vids that I was watching on one particular medium (one I think is maybe similar to FF.net in some ways? as it seems that the vids are generally of a lower quality than those of, for example, Festivids, a lot of which were hosted on vimeo and other sites (my vimeo experiences in general have been quite lovely!)). And busaikko points out below that editing music is harder than I think (which is not a surprise to me, not at all), and that a lot of folks don't have the time or resources to be able to do it effectively. If I figure out how to do it, I am going to make a giant meta post on how to edit music, because I want people to be able to do this so they can tell the stories they want to tell and aren't constrained by their resources. /ETA

I pretty much intend to edit my songs, probably fairly early on in the process and maybe some later, if there's clip trouble. I have a feeling I will be editing the shit out of the music a lot to accommodate my ideas (I tend to have ideas for parts of songs, with other parts of those same songs that are completely inappropriate for the concept).

So anyway - rec me some vids? I'm stuck on Supernatural at the moment, so of course I'd love some truly amazing stuff there (any pairing or RPF (also any pairing) or gen of either), but I won't turn down any suggestions for amazing vids. I only have a couple that come to mind, but My Brilliant Idea by lim (SGA, McShep) is my favorite to date. Plus lots of multi-fandom things by thingswithwings because xie's amazing. Also, I just recced cupidsbow's Red Right Hand, Dean/Castiel.

Comments

[franzeska]

I'd say plenty of vidders have a terrible ear, actually. But many also slavishly adhere to the "rule" that an ideal vid should be 2.5-3 minutes and either find a song that's already the right length or make their friends edit the music. (Actually, FWIW, if anyone wants me to edit their music for them, I'd be happy to. I'd also be happy to talk someone through Audacity, not that I have a clue what I'm doing in it mostly.)

Frankly, a lot of the n00b-unfriendliness in vidding communities (and there's plenty, even if it's usually unintentional) is due to people thinking a vid watcher can't have an informed opinion. Any reader who reads a lot has both personal taste and some idea about craft even if they don't have the vocabulary. It's the same with video art. Go ahead and criticize! :)

I... uh... have a taste for long vids. LOOOOONG vids. Mostly because my sense of humor requires space for the build and because I love cheesy OTT songs that are freakin' impossible to edit. (Think Jim Steinman.) I have kind of a hate-boner for that rule about vid length. I've gotten stupid advice plenty of times that my vids needed to be short, especially in the form of my least favorite vid feedback ever: "Get in, tell your joke, get out." Grr, hiss. This saying is a Thing in some vidding circles and it drives me batty. But... I still have to agree that there were a number of Festivids this year that were repetitive and where there was either no need for them to be so long or else I was unable to detect that reason. (I sense that in at least some cases, the vid may have been repetitive on purpose, circling around similar but not identical footage in canon that was somehow contextually significant. But if I haven't seen the canon then... my loss.)

Taste for epicness notwithstanding, I'll edit the music when I need to. I used a dance hit for one of my Festivids, and that repetitive sucker would have made for an awful vid as-is. I took it from ~6 minutes to ~3. It took me a solid evening after work because it's not a type of song with a bridge and choruses (i.e. those ~3 minutes weren't the second half of the song or a single obvious section). I didn't find it hard, just time consuming, but I think that kind of editing can be just too much of a pain in the ass for many people. By the time you've done all that, unless you enjoy editing music, all the spark has gone out and you no longer want to do the vid.

You can often hide a visual jump with effects or a change in the music. Hiding jumps in the music is very hard. That spot in the song will bug people even if they don't know why. When I have to do a real butchery on something, I try to do something visually dramatic at that point to distract or do it on a big boom in the music. Or there was that time I vidded My Heart Will Go On and I didn't care that the music edit was awful.

That said, Audacity is available, free and fully functional, for anyone with OSX, Windows, or Linux. The big stumbling block is experience and degree of musical talent, not tech (unlike with a number of things in vidding where access to tech is a primary issue).

Youtube is interesting. It's the home base of most vidders these days aside from some of the LJ/Festivids/Vividcon crowd and some other people who only show at cons. It's full of the equivalent of FF.net badfic, but it's also just plain full. Of everything.

The sort of vid I would post to youtube and only youtube might take as little as 5 hours total. The kind of vid I'd send to a con might be serendipitously quick... or it might represent a hundred hours work. I don't think I've personally ever spent more than that, but people do. And lots of vidders do the equivalent of drabbles or speed writing challenges. The big difference between writing and vidding in this respect is that vid length has very little to do with time invested. The difference between a slapped-together vid and a fantastic, rewatchable vid is the difference between somebody's 20-page story they typed in a sitting and never even spell-checked and somebody's 20-page story that an editor put through the wringer.


SO. MANY. VIDDING. THOUGHTS.

[franzeska]

I pretty much intend to edit my songs, probably fairly early on in the process and maybe some later, if there's clip trouble. I have a feeling I will be editing the shit out of the music a lot to accommodate my ideas (I tend to have ideas for parts of songs, with other parts of those same songs that are completely inappropriate for the concept).

I definitely recommend editing first, preferably in Audacity (though most video editing programs will let you do a crude sound edit).

Crack vids that use pieces of different songs are pretty common. There's a great one for Doctor Who that I can't locate right now, but maybe someone else will know it. It's Christopher Eccleston changing channels (from some other source), and every channel he turns to is a different one-note joke with some doctor and some companion. Teen Wolf is full of these things too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAhOqqx8gbg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJPUaQiF1Mk

I don't have anything up online that's quite like that, but I did have a vid idea where the songs involved were much funnier as ideas than as the whole song. I too used some sound and visual effects. (The humor kind of depends on being familiar with angsty Sherlock vids and with Highlander canon though.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqiAoC34oyE

You can get stock effects for things like projectors, channel changing, film ripping, etc. from freesound.org.

[franzeska]

Sadly, I got out of SPN before I got into vidding, and I was never much into SGA. I used to not be a vid person; it was a combination of never really taking the time to watch and never finding things that suited my taste. (I only care about funny or cheesy vids most of the time, and I haven't been into most of the shows that produced big vidding fandoms in the last ten years or so. I also wasn't going to cons until recently.) It was only after I started vidding myself that I began to care about watching other people's vids, especially in fandoms I don't know. (Vidders who mostly vid and don't watch/give feedback/etc. are totally a thing just like some fic writers mostly work on their epic and don't have time for anything else. With vidding, I feel like it's considered more of a faux pas to admit it though, and it usually means you won't have an audience places like lj because so many people just watch their friends' vids.) The limited footage thing is a huge issue, especially in movie fandoms or something like Sherlock. Sometimes, vidders use it to their advantage; there's a funny Highlander vid by the Media Cannibals that parodies the extreme overuse of key Duncan/Methos clips.


If you want to go truly oldschool, Mary Van Deusen is active online and has her stuff up on a webpage. Her Temper of Revenge Miami Vice vid blew my mind. (Miami Vice specifically: she's vidded it three times, and I found this one way better than the others.) It's a longish, cheesy song with overly-specific lyrics that don't fit a modern-day setting. The first time I saw it, I didn't even like the characters involved. And yet... It's brilliant. It completely won me over. (She's kind of oldschool, so if you want to see it, you need to go to her website, search for it, and enter some captcha to get a download link. No publicly available streaming copy.)

I love most of sisabet's vids, especially if they are cheesy like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPLYowCYN4A

Many vids shown at Club Vivid are enjoyable without knowing much about a canon because they're dance vids made to be bright and flashy and destined to play in a room full of drunk people.

This is one of my favorites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAfPCHKcusQ

Lots of unexpected music can be awesome as long as it works on some level (humor through an incongruous choice, lyrically perfect though musically inappropriate, or whatever). One of my favorites from last Festivids that I still rewatch is this Scarlet Pimpernel vid: http://archiveofourown.org/works/332965

[franzeska]

Oh, and FWIW, the vidding equivalent of "The pit of voles is nothing but purple prose badfic with mary sues" is "Youtube is full of vids with soft focus, too many effects, loooong clips, the same clips in every vid, and five+ minute Celine Dion songs."

On the one side, you have 'youtube vidders' who are like "Why should I care about spellcheck aspect ratio? It's a hobby!!!"; on the other, you have VVC/lj vidders who are shaking their canes and shaking their heads over the kids these days. (And on the other, other side, you have people going "Youtube is a useful tool, goddamnit, stop being such snobs.")

[franzeska]

But wait! You mentioned vidding, so I still can't shut up!

I would love to see more (and more!) people try out vidding. It doesn't have to be expensive, and I think it would be more welcoming to both newbiews and viewers with more different tastes if we could knock a bit more of the mystique out of it.


Ripping: OSX - Mac the Ripper (fully functional shareware); Windows & Linux I have no clue about, but there are plenty of similar programs

Clipping: OSX, Windows - MPEG Streamclip (freeware, but you need to buy the MPEG-2 Playback component for $20); Linux I'm not sure about, and some people don't need to clip depending on what kind of editor they're using

Audio editing: OSX, Windows, Linux - Audacity (freeware)

Video editing: The big options are iMovie/WMM vs. expensive pro programs vs. freeware. Blender is freeware for OSX/Windows/Linux. It's confusing and intended primarily for other uses, but vidders have adopted it, and their final products look great. Lightworks is freeware for Windows; I haven't checked it out. On the comes-with-your-computer side of things, old iMovie was pretty good, new iMovie is suckier, and WMM is notoriously dreadful. Piracy is usually not a great option for Macs, so the options are that expensive-ass Adobe suite, the discontinued Final Cut Express (what I use now), or the reasonably priced Final Cut Pro X ($299 and it's a bargain for the functionality). Windows offers much greater ease of piracy. Sony Vegas is the program I see mentioned most on Youtube, and I'll eat my hat if most of those vidders own it legitimately. For the less larcenous, Windows offers a greater range of products and prices than Mac (but I hear lots of them suck, so shop around). Adobe products are popular. I'm not familiar with the rest of the laundry list of NLEs for Windows. If you have a budget for nice software, there are options in what I consider a reasonable range (a few hundred dollars). If you don't want to spend that much, I would look for a free option rather than pay for a crummy product.

And you do want to get hold of a NLE (non-linear editing system) if you can. WMM and iMovie mean that you kind of have to start at the beginning and work to the end; any time you edit something, it messes up all of your timing after that in the vid. NLEs also let you have more than one video track, so some effects are easier and many more effects are possible in the first place. You can do quite a bit in WMM/iMovie, but the amount of time and frustration you'll save by getting another program is so worth it despite the steeper learning curve on most of them.

[kate]

OMG, seriously, I have been sweating my Ante Up fic this whole time, and the only treat I allowed myself was checking email, so watching these comments come in has been HUGELY inspiring. Much more responsive and grateful responses to come when I'm not completely braindead. But THANK YOU - for all the info and opinions beyond the inspiration. <3

[franzeska]

Man... I had all of these Grand Plans for vids for Ante Up... This fucking year, man! It's like the universe hates us all!