Vid of woe
Feb. 15th, 2004 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynA long time ago, my dad asked if I could put his video footage into a movie. This was back when I was still vidding on VCRs (not that long ago, really), and I said yes, though I was kind of dreading it. I put it off for eons, and then when I got the computer with iMovie, had to keep borrowing his camera to dump clips to tape (it didn't have full passthrough), so promised I'd make it worth his while by making his movie. Which I put off for eons. Once he got me the mini-DV camcorder with passthrough for b-day/Xmas, I no longer had really good excuses, and when I lost my job a few weeks ago, decided it was time to get down to business.
God, what we fan vidders take for granted! I don't know how people *do* this on a regular basis. Give me a song, some clips from a show I love, and some complex visual narrative any day over palsied camera operators who don't know what they're doing and stultifying footage of people looking like torture victims as they have to talk to the camera being operated by someone who's deaf as a post. I was talking about this with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
talking_sock the other day, because she's also working on a home video project (and at least she shot the footage, so has some quality control), and we both could barely motivate ourselves to do these things we'd promised others we'd do. But, I whine, it's just so BO-ring! Trying to make something make sense when the camera is whipping around or jumping all over the place, or cutting people off in mid-speech, is just... arg.
As fannish songvidders, we're used to working with professionally shot footage, where things were filmed with locked down cameras or Steadicams or dolly tracking shots or cranes, where things are lit and edited properly, etc. Even though that film isn't made for vidding, it's pro stock that does what we need it to do. And we get to edit to the music of our choice, and make clips fit our timelines. Even the best home videographers usually don't have the kind of footage we work with, and I realize that I sure had taken that for granted. I've struggled with it for days and days, it's made my RSI worse, but in the end I knew that even though Dad would be happy with just about anything I gave him, as long as he could look at his pictures (he can't remember how to set up his camera through the VCR no matter how often I show him or write down instructions, so he can only view his footage on the little DV screen), I wouldn't be happy until I'd made it make some kind of sense.
I put the finishing touches on it today, added music from the Local Hero soundtrack, which worked wonderfully with much of the stuff he's "filmed" (oh, how loosely I use that term!), and even the stuff he shot with the night shoot button on so that everything came out green and white ended up looking pretty good. Until I burned it to a disc. For some reason, every time I burn a DVD or make it into a huge-ass high quality DV QuickTime file, the audio on the spoken word clips drops out of synch. I can't for the life of me figure it out, because it's fine in both the iMovie and the iDVD files. And burning DVDs is one damn expensive way for an unemployed person to test out problems, so I have no idea what on earth to do at this point other than junk the whole thing and start --sob! -- again. Neither iMovie nor iDVD offer much in the way of troubleshooting abilities (you really only have a few different tracks you can look at, so isolating an audio/video glitch you can't see is... well, not possible on my end), so all I can do now is give Dad a disc that has large segments of people talking to the camera all out of synch with their lips. Now, Dad being deaf and all, not a problem too much, but I'm going to have to make him sign a waver saying he won't show this screwup to anyone else. And the idea of trying this again just fills me with dread. I ended up with a half-hour movie of all his messed up, shaky, queasy-cam footage, and yet I can't seem to give it to him in a way that works. Sigh.
I'll take songvids any day, I'm telling you. Even the most diificult vids I've made (especially the recent ones I did on computer, like Atom Bomb), were a walk in the park compared to making a home movie out of footage from outer space. I guess it's a good thing that home movies really only get passed around to forgiving family members who mostly just want to see their vacation or their reunion or what have you put together in a linear and interesting way. Because, seriously, if you don't have that emotional investment, it's just creatively draining in the worst way. I felt like banging my head against sharp objects even *before* I ended up with a messed up project on my hands. I've had bad days and difficult vid times and disappointing results with songvids, but I've never wanted to poke things in my eyes before when working on one. I've been frustrated over the horrible bugs and the pop-up ads and the low-quality multi-generations-down tapes, but I've never had to try to piece together stuff where I couldn't even see what was going on.
So now I'm going to start the Firefly vid that scares me because it will be so challenging to make visuals map to theme. Because, really, piece o' cake.
God, what we fan vidders take for granted! I don't know how people *do* this on a regular basis. Give me a song, some clips from a show I love, and some complex visual narrative any day over palsied camera operators who don't know what they're doing and stultifying footage of people looking like torture victims as they have to talk to the camera being operated by someone who's deaf as a post. I was talking about this with
talking_sock the other day, because she's also working on a home video project (and at least she shot the footage, so has some quality control), and we both could barely motivate ourselves to do these things we'd promised others we'd do. But, I whine, it's just so BO-ring! Trying to make something make sense when the camera is whipping around or jumping all over the place, or cutting people off in mid-speech, is just... arg. As fannish songvidders, we're used to working with professionally shot footage, where things were filmed with locked down cameras or Steadicams or dolly tracking shots or cranes, where things are lit and edited properly, etc. Even though that film isn't made for vidding, it's pro stock that does what we need it to do. And we get to edit to the music of our choice, and make clips fit our timelines. Even the best home videographers usually don't have the kind of footage we work with, and I realize that I sure had taken that for granted. I've struggled with it for days and days, it's made my RSI worse, but in the end I knew that even though Dad would be happy with just about anything I gave him, as long as he could look at his pictures (he can't remember how to set up his camera through the VCR no matter how often I show him or write down instructions, so he can only view his footage on the little DV screen), I wouldn't be happy until I'd made it make some kind of sense.
I put the finishing touches on it today, added music from the Local Hero soundtrack, which worked wonderfully with much of the stuff he's "filmed" (oh, how loosely I use that term!), and even the stuff he shot with the night shoot button on so that everything came out green and white ended up looking pretty good. Until I burned it to a disc. For some reason, every time I burn a DVD or make it into a huge-ass high quality DV QuickTime file, the audio on the spoken word clips drops out of synch. I can't for the life of me figure it out, because it's fine in both the iMovie and the iDVD files. And burning DVDs is one damn expensive way for an unemployed person to test out problems, so I have no idea what on earth to do at this point other than junk the whole thing and start --sob! -- again. Neither iMovie nor iDVD offer much in the way of troubleshooting abilities (you really only have a few different tracks you can look at, so isolating an audio/video glitch you can't see is... well, not possible on my end), so all I can do now is give Dad a disc that has large segments of people talking to the camera all out of synch with their lips. Now, Dad being deaf and all, not a problem too much, but I'm going to have to make him sign a waver saying he won't show this screwup to anyone else. And the idea of trying this again just fills me with dread. I ended up with a half-hour movie of all his messed up, shaky, queasy-cam footage, and yet I can't seem to give it to him in a way that works. Sigh.
I'll take songvids any day, I'm telling you. Even the most diificult vids I've made (especially the recent ones I did on computer, like Atom Bomb), were a walk in the park compared to making a home movie out of footage from outer space. I guess it's a good thing that home movies really only get passed around to forgiving family members who mostly just want to see their vacation or their reunion or what have you put together in a linear and interesting way. Because, seriously, if you don't have that emotional investment, it's just creatively draining in the worst way. I felt like banging my head against sharp objects even *before* I ended up with a messed up project on my hands. I've had bad days and difficult vid times and disappointing results with songvids, but I've never wanted to poke things in my eyes before when working on one. I've been frustrated over the horrible bugs and the pop-up ads and the low-quality multi-generations-down tapes, but I've never had to try to piece together stuff where I couldn't even see what was going on.
So now I'm going to start the Firefly vid that scares me because it will be so challenging to make visuals map to theme. Because, really, piece o' cake.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 01:51 am (UTC)re: the audio sync issue, I remember having to fix this a few times when I was editing tapes we got from clients. In FCP, I did it by changing the audio settings, because frequently the DV footage had been shot in 12 bit audio, IIRC. I took a quick peek to see if iMovie would allow you to do the same thing, and though I did find a reference to that, it's not clear whether it's done the same way. But I did find this, which looks helpful:
http://www.basswood.com/techtoys/archives/000012.html (http://www.basswood.com/techtoys/archives/000012.html)
Do you have Quicktime Pro?
P.S. I did get your email, and you are most welcome! I'm sorry, I just got really behind this week with exams and concerts and such. Looking forward to seeing you soon. :-)
no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 11:47 am (UTC)I did a search for iMovie and audio sync problems but didnt come up with anything useful, but I don't think I remember seeing this on the list. I will definitely check it out! I do have QT Pro -- I wondered if that would help, but I wasn't sure, I guess because I've had a hard time understanding how to use QT. All this stuff it says it does, I can't seem to get to work quite right, probably because I'm such a dumbass.
I hope exams went well! Can't wait to see you this week! I've watched five Jeremiah eps so far!
no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 05:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 09:26 am (UTC)http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=42974
no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 11:51 am (UTC)snooze
Date: 2004-02-16 10:40 pm (UTC)