Vidding meme: Difficult vids

[starlady]

juniperphoenix asked, Which vid was the hardest to make?

Part of me wants to answer, "The last one," but realistically…I've had a pretty easy time of it in general, and none of them stand out to me as especially difficult. Most of the AMVs I made were technically pretty easy, partly because a) I was using Windows Movie Maker and b) I had no idea what I was doing. I got slightly better when I switched to iMovie, but I had no idea what I was doing still, which is why so many of them are teeny tiny file and picture size, because I was using the files I'd converted to play on my iPod because they converted to mp4. Oh, self.

In some ways one of the hardest to make was actually my very first one, "Yuna's Vertigo," which I am still very proud of, partly because it was the first time I'd done it and partly because I was working with FMV clips that I'd downloaded from web sites after they'd been ripped by other people. This was back in the dark ages when getting cut scenes off a PS2 involved black magic and about $100 worth of cables and only a few people actually did it (so if you did, your AMV automatically stood out). One of the unique clips I downloaded had some kind of progressive file corruption in it where it froze at the point I tried to cut it, and kept freezing no matter where I cut it. I wound up solving it with a diamond transition, which worked pretty well if I do say so myself. In many ways that AMV is the epitome of beginner's luck; I still like it a lot.

"Starman" was also kind of a pain in the ass, partly because that was when I started using After Effects for the titles, and After Effects is its own kind of special hell (I spent five hours trying to make an effects preset work before googling and finding out that preset didn't work for anyone), and also because the vid fell pretty far short of what I wanted. It was my first time working with cam rips, and I kind of wish I'd waited, but also, irony is kind of hard to get across in a vid unless it's pretty heavy-handed. I was trying for eviscerating sarcasm, and I didn't get there. If I did it over again, I'd definitely go for longer/more obvious intro titles, not to mention recutting the whole second half of the vid. Oh well.

Getting source for my last vid nearly did drive me to tears over trying to demux an MKV Blue-Ray rip that allegedly didn't have hardcoded subtitles. I wound up cutting my losses and just using the DVD rip, partly because I'd wasted nearly a month downloading the Blue Ray rip and then trying to demux it for clipping. MKVs are Satan's file type of choice, IJS.

Comments

[juniperphoenix]

I am in awe of anybody who willingly deals with video encoding issues. I've never attempted to make a vid, but just converting videos into the appropriate formats for streaming in TWC was enough to make me want to pull my hair out.

[starlady]

It's not normally the most time-consuming part of the process! I try to download in formats that my apps can deal with and only futz around with encoding at the very end when I'm exporting for upload, etc. BUT I also haven't done a lot with custom encodes (which I will have to learn if I want to submit a VVC vid ever? Joy).

And to be honest, I do kind of enjoy the fiddly process of fussing with various exported versions. I had more fun than I'd like to admit comparing encode settings when I was ripping the due South DVDs to get the best possible compromise between file size and quality this spring.