Vidding for an absolute beginner

[dhampyresa]

For Reasons Not Worth Explaining At This Juncture, I would like to be able to vid. Except I have no idea how to start :(

Can anyone help?

Comments

on visuals

[yhlee]

On visuals: I really, really struggled with this part so take with even more salt.

You will spend an insane amount of time reviewing your source (the video segments) and chopping them up. I believe Windows has or had some kind of program (avisynth maybe???) for automating the process of chopping up your ripped DVDs or whatever into individual clips; I hope someone else will weigh in on that, because I've only ever vidded on a Mac.

When you start laying down clips, you will usually (rule of thumb, not straitjacket) want to cut (change clips) "on" a beat. And "on" a beat is a bit of a misnomer. I think it was laurashapiro who taught me this, but because the audience hears the change in beat faster than the eye can process the change in scene when you switch out clips, you actually want to cut 2-4 frames BEFORE the beat. (This is assuming your video source is 24-30 fps. In the USA, I think movies are usually 24 fps and TV is 29.97 fps for weird arcane reasons that I have forgotten; I don't know about other countries. But don't take my word for it.)

You don't need to cut every beat, and sometimes you may want to cut twice in the same beat (on eighth notes) depending on tempo and other factors. Part of this also depends on how much action there is in the clip itself. A relatively static close-up on someone's face can be shown for a shorter period of time and still be legible to the viewer than a big explodey scene full of airplanes flying everywhere.

Most of the time you can stick to straight cuts without special transitions. A regular old cut is perfectly functional. Certainly people have done great things with effects and transitions, but you can still get a great vid without them.

Generally, for a Western audience, motion left to right reads as moving into the future, and right to left reads as moving into the past. You can get great effects by "continuing" motion so that, e.g., movement from left to right in one clip "continues" left to right in the next clip. I can't say more about this because I've really admired this kind of thing in others' vids but sucked at it myself. :p

If you have, say, two recurring characters, you want to be careful about what side of the screen they're on. So, for example, you might try to keep character A on the left and character B on the right. There's a filmmaking rule for this whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, but if you ever watch a conversation between two characters on TV, you'll see that the camerawork is set up so that characters are kept on the same side of the screen as they cut back and forth. (I learned about this the hard way, by messing it up and confusing the viewer...) If you then have an interlude in which neither character appears, you can then transition or switch the sides, just be careful about it if you're in one "scene" with the characters in question.

Also, a thing to avoid if possible is using clips where characters' lips are moving (usually during dialogue). This is called "talky face" and is usually pretty distracting in live-action source vids, unless you're doing lipsynching or something for comic effect. (I believe things are a little different for AMVs [anime music videos], where lip synching is more common because the source is easier to manipulate.) Some sources really make this difficult (apparently The West Wing was notorious for having characters talking all the time).

Re: on visuals

[dhampyresa]

The "on" beat tip is great as is the rest, thank you!

Re: on visuals

[yhlee]

No problem! It really helped me out when I was starting out. One of the things Laura told me was that when you're watching your own vid, you pick up on cuts faster than a new viewer will because you're used to your own material, so you have to compensate for that. It's not something I would have thought of on my own!