Signal Boost: A bit of vidding meta -- cutting and synching

Nov 14, 2021 13:35

I went on a Fanlore binge, originally because was wondering if "vidlet" is a term that people tend to use, or if it's just me. I suppose kids these days call short fanvids "edits", but I hate that with a passion, because it seems so ambiguous. And maybe most folks would just call them vids even if they're less than a minute, but the amount of effort is dramatically different than for a full song video, so it just makes sense to me: fic - ficlet, vid - vidlet. Anyway, I dove into Fanlore and ended up at this only tangentially related Dreamwidth post by marnanightingale. It's about stuff that I was SORT OF already doing, some of the time, when I vid. Makes me want to watch some vids now and see if people really time clip transitions to the beat more than to lyrics. Also makes me want to take notes for future vidding. :)


marnanightingale posted: A bit of vidding meta -- cutting and synching
See, I used to do lights for live music acts, and while you won't necessarily learn anything about music doing that, the one thing that you absolutely must learn is how to find the beat of a song within the first few bars and hang onto it for dear life through any number of distractions; the singer can forget a verse, the guitarist can fall over drunk, the drummer can break a stick, somebody can pour cold beer down your back, half of your grid can short out, but you MUST stay on that beat until the end of the song.

And you must be able to take that beat and transform it into a light show that works, on the fly, using whatever lights you've got; it needs to come into your brain as music and come out your fingers as a thing of visual beauty. Ok, as a visual thing that does not suck.

When I started vidding, I think that is the one thing that saw me through any amount of technical ignorance, got me past any number of mistakes, and generally allowed me to pull off a vid I'm still not ashamed of on my first try; I can keep the beat, and I was already predisposed to think of a clip as a collection of variously coloured moving lights, with informational content.

So for what it's worth and with much disclaiming, here is

Ye Olde Lighting Tech's Guide To Cutting And Synching Footage

This entry was originally posted at https://thenewbuzwuzz.dreamwidth.org/234008.html.

fandom, links

Previous post Next post
Up