vidding &c
Today is my full day off this week, thank god. I opened a show over the weekend, which is great because it means TECH IS OVER, THANK CHRIST. I celebrated after the shows yesterday by taking myself out to the movies. Saw Zero Dark Thirty, which was quite good and very tense. Although I become completely distracted by the unexpected Captain Jack Harkness cameo, which made me giggle inappropriately. Seriously, that first scene with the CIA director, I kept thinking, man, that extra looks an awful lot like John Barrowman, but he was one of a group of faceless Suits around a conference table, and the camera never actually panned in on him, so I thought I must've been imagining it. Then, like half an hour later, there's another scene with the CIA director, and this time he actually had a couple of lines, and I nearly jumped up in my seat shouting I knew I recognized that jawline! GOOD TIMES. I was not expecting Barrowman in that movie!
I do have a lot of fandom stuff I need to be doing this week. Which is good! I like fandom stuff. Though I'm working on a vid that's giving me a huge headache right now for reasons completely unrelated to the vid itself -- the only source I could find for it is in a format that takes my laptop freaking forever to convert into something usable, so not only do I need to clip it all, every individual clip takes a good 2-10min to convert before I can load it into my vidding program. Which, ugh, I have really outgrown iMovie at this point. But while I HAVE Final Cut Express, I got a new laptop last summer and then, y'know, moved four times in five months, and I cannot fucking find the original CD-ROM with the necessary registration info, so I have this great vidding program installed that I can't fucking access. I'm like 95% sure the stuff I need is in one of the six boxes of books-and-assorted-miscellany that I didn't have room for in my current apartment, so are in storage upstage at my parents' house, but as they go upstate only on weekends and I WORK on weekends, I haven't been able to get up there to sort through the six boxes of books-and-assorted-miscellany to find the damn CD-ROM. And I'm still only beginning to learn how to USE Final Cut, so it's not like that will solve all my problems, but it is frustrating to have a program that I can't even open to play with.
Which is unrelated to the fact that every fucking clip I make takes, on average, five minutes to convert. Do you know how many clips I assemble in the process of making a vid? If I'm clipping a 2-hour movie, and I know specifically what I'm looking for, that's maybe 100 clips. If it's a TV show, and I know the general outline of the vid I'm making but don't know the show well enough to storyboard it blind...christ. For, say, One Mississippi, I had the benefit of knowing Doctor Who pretty much backwards and forwards (partly from having vidded it so many times already), so I could seek out the sort of clips I needed with a high degree of precision, and know that, oh, for this lyric I need this particular moment from episode X, so I'd take a few different clips from that scene and edit it out in iMovie. The folder I created for that vid holds 121 .mov files, for roughly a four-minute vid. Let's say that the vid I'm currently making only winds up needing 200 clips itself -- which is probably about right, since I'm much less familiar with the source (I've only watched it through once before) and don't have quite a strong concept in mind for the vid as a whole. Setting aside the time it takes me to rewatch everything and find the clips themselves, this added conversion time -- let's call it an even five minutes per clip, though it varies depending on the lengths of the clips themselves -- means that that's close to seventeen hours of time wasted JUST CONVERTING .MOV FILES. This is incredibly frustrating to me, because I can't actually do the vidding itself until the clips are converted and then uploaded into iMovie. And I can't continue clipping while one file is still converted, so I'm basically caught in the holding pattern from hell.
At least I can work on a fic beta while videos convert in the background. That's something.
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you'd like.
I do have a lot of fandom stuff I need to be doing this week. Which is good! I like fandom stuff. Though I'm working on a vid that's giving me a huge headache right now for reasons completely unrelated to the vid itself -- the only source I could find for it is in a format that takes my laptop freaking forever to convert into something usable, so not only do I need to clip it all, every individual clip takes a good 2-10min to convert before I can load it into my vidding program. Which, ugh, I have really outgrown iMovie at this point. But while I HAVE Final Cut Express, I got a new laptop last summer and then, y'know, moved four times in five months, and I cannot fucking find the original CD-ROM with the necessary registration info, so I have this great vidding program installed that I can't fucking access. I'm like 95% sure the stuff I need is in one of the six boxes of books-and-assorted-miscellany that I didn't have room for in my current apartment, so are in storage upstage at my parents' house, but as they go upstate only on weekends and I WORK on weekends, I haven't been able to get up there to sort through the six boxes of books-and-assorted-miscellany to find the damn CD-ROM. And I'm still only beginning to learn how to USE Final Cut, so it's not like that will solve all my problems, but it is frustrating to have a program that I can't even open to play with.
Which is unrelated to the fact that every fucking clip I make takes, on average, five minutes to convert. Do you know how many clips I assemble in the process of making a vid? If I'm clipping a 2-hour movie, and I know specifically what I'm looking for, that's maybe 100 clips. If it's a TV show, and I know the general outline of the vid I'm making but don't know the show well enough to storyboard it blind...christ. For, say, One Mississippi, I had the benefit of knowing Doctor Who pretty much backwards and forwards (partly from having vidded it so many times already), so I could seek out the sort of clips I needed with a high degree of precision, and know that, oh, for this lyric I need this particular moment from episode X, so I'd take a few different clips from that scene and edit it out in iMovie. The folder I created for that vid holds 121 .mov files, for roughly a four-minute vid. Let's say that the vid I'm currently making only winds up needing 200 clips itself -- which is probably about right, since I'm much less familiar with the source (I've only watched it through once before) and don't have quite a strong concept in mind for the vid as a whole. Setting aside the time it takes me to rewatch everything and find the clips themselves, this added conversion time -- let's call it an even five minutes per clip, though it varies depending on the lengths of the clips themselves -- means that that's close to seventeen hours of time wasted JUST CONVERTING .MOV FILES. This is incredibly frustrating to me, because I can't actually do the vidding itself until the clips are converted and then uploaded into iMovie. And I can't continue clipping while one file is still converted, so I'm basically caught in the holding pattern from hell.
At least I can work on a fic beta while videos convert in the background. That's something.
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth. Comment wherever you'd like.