dhampyresa | Vidding for an absolute beginner

It would indeed be useful. Thank you for your help!

Okay, I have put out an inquiry on my DW and if people don't respond to that, I will start chasing down individual vidders via email or PM. =) Later this week I will try to chase down some meta/process posts for you by vidders I know of; unfortunately, I nuked my bookmarks/memories ages ago so I don't have a list of links ready offhand.

PLEASE TAKE EVERYTHING WITH A GRAIN OF SALT. I vidded for some years, but I really struggled with the form. And different vidders work differently--take what's useful to you, disregard the rest.

I'm going to start with the music end because that's easier for me, although obviously you can start from the concept/visuals end instead! You will probably choose a song for some combination of evocative/useful lyrics and mood. For your first few vids, I recommend sticking to popular music, which will almost certainly be in common time (4/4). It is helpful if you can hear the beat, because you will frequently want to be cutting to the beat (more anon), but not mandatory. Your vidding program will probably have a way to allow you to look at the song's waveform, and usually the high-amplitude peaks will correspond to the beats in the percussion/bass.

I personally recommend either sticking to a song no longer than 3 minutes 30 seconds or thereabouts, or else using an audio program (Audacity is free, prooooobably works on Win10, and should be sufficient for your needs here) to chop the song down to that length. There have been great vids that are longer, so this is only a very rough rule of thumb, but especially for earlier efforts, a shorter song will make your life easier. If you're going to edit a song down, it helps to know something about musical structure. [1] A typical pop/rock song will have an intro, a verse, a chorus, stanza, chorus, etc., possibly a contrasting segment (usually around the midpoint), and then eventually an outro/conclusion. If you're deleting a segment, you will probably (depending on the song) get the best results deleting, say, an entire stanza instead of deleting three of its four verses and then leaving the fourth just dangling there. Another helpful principle is that music is usually structured around powers of 2. A typical phrase will be eight measures long (again, helpful if you can count beats and measures), sometimes four. You will occasionally run into things that have six-measure phrases or whatever, so be careful. But if you have to guess, go with eight or four.

[1] I apologize if I'm just regurgitating stuff you already know! Feel free either to ask questions or to disregard unhelpful stuff. I am not currently set up to provide examples of chopping up music, but I might be able to do that later on if helpful.

In terms of lyrics, it may be tempting to interpret each phrase literally when it comes time to pair things with clips from the source. I have done this. :p Literal interpretation can indeed make for very powerful moments, but if you do it piecemeal (phrase by phrase by phrase), it can also make for a disjointed vid. You want to make sure that the vid's visuals and emotional narrative have a flow--sort of a character arc over the course of the entire vid, so to speak.

It can also be fun to listen for specific flourishes in the music--an electric guitar solo, or a big percussion flam, or whatever--and note those for special treatment with your clips. (I often think of vidding as being like solving a multivariable system of equations!)

[to be continued]

if you have to guess then me and my tin ear are fucked, lmao.

Thank you for this!

If you're willing to point me to a given song (Youtube, etc.), I can tell you what the phrasing is doing. I figure if I took 7 years of piano and 5 years of viola, I should at the last help my friends out with my misspent youth. :p

There are also tools that will help you determine the tempo of a song, if you need help finding the beat. They're less reliable if the song slows up or speeds up or does weird fermata things in the middle, though.

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).

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

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!

Vidding for an absolute beginner

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vidding overview: song choice and music

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Re: vidding overview: song choice and music

on visuals

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Re: on visuals