My work here is done!

I'm feeling a ltitle strange tonight -- I just finished my first ever computer vid. I'd sat on the couch and watched someone do it before, but had no idea what was happening. And I've watched people at work use iMovie to some small degree, but that was a while ago and they weren't doing anything like fannish vidding requires. But this was the first time I've ever done the whole thing myself, on my own (still spanking new and smelling like new electronics) computer, with only myself to rely on.

It's not much of an accomplishment -- I basically redid an older vid, a Buffy/Angel to Do What You Have to Do. Everyone calls it the Angelus arc vid, but I never really thought of it that way. For me it was about the idea in the song, about letting go even when you absolutely can't, and the Angelus arc just provided the story to tell it, but if that's how people see it, that's okay, I guess. It has such a strange history, anyway. But since I now had the S2 and 3 dvds, and friends with macrovision hacked players, I could finally get good source, and it's a relatively short song where I knew where every clip went and it used only a handful of eps. I think the longest time was spent trying to dump the clips down to a hi-8 tape, and putting them in. I got home late last night and dumped them in, stayed up way too late working on the first part, and then the rest of today alternating between breaking my back in the garden and working on the vid.

The cool thing is that I've wanted for years to fix a couple things in it I hated with a grand passion -- there was a smallish clip in the middle that just made me cringe every time I saw the vid, but when I was originally making it on vcrs, I was trying to use some super short clips and having electrical problems, and ended up inserting it so often that I risked cascade damage to the vid, so I had to give it up and just leave a clip I hated there. Now I have a much, much better clip, and could finally fade out the ending, which I couldn't do before on vcrs. Yay!

There were definitely some weirdnesses. It's hard to get a handle on it, for me, because this is a very diferent type of editing than I'm used to with decks. It was both a help and a hindrance that I was recutting an existing vid -- it helped me learn the program's peculiarities, but I had trouble getting things to work the way they had and look the way they had before. I'm actually a bit nervous about tackling a new vid, but feochadn and I will probably start making a new vid for Miracles now that I get what I'm doing a little more. Not a lot, though. I have to re-lay the music now that killabeez has filled me in on the formats (what would I do without her? Slit my wrists, probably), and I still have massive questions about things I don't get that happened during the process, like the random single-frame clips that were causing flashing problems and that I couldn't find or figure where they came from. I'm still not sure it's perfectly clean, but I keep watching it full-frame on my 17" monitor and it seems to be... I hope. It's sure dark. The darkness of computers is hard for me to get used to, especially for a show that's filmed in very dark formats, anyways.

I suppose this will be a total yawn for most of my friends, but I feel like I crossed over into another world, in a way. There are good things about computer vidding, and bad, but it's definitely an accomplishment for me, since I never thought I'd be able to get a computer I could vid with (of course, once I get that MasterCard bill...). Now if I could just figure out how to do real title cards (not the iMovie titles, which are just text, but ones with pics and everything!)... but that's for later.