lim

Vidder lim/ blimvisible/ limvids

[limblogs]

[limblogs]

[alpha-andromedae]

Hardsubs and vidding: some ideas

At the intersection of C-drama fandom and vidding fandom is an interesting problem: what do we do with the hardcoded subtitles that are ubiquitous in Chinese media? I just made a vid for The Untamed that made me get creative about it. This post is about the handful of approaches that I found worked really well without taking a ton of effort. 

1. Zooming In 

The obvious solution! 

Before: 

After: 

This approach is especially good for clips with quick movement because the loss in quality due to the zooming in is less visible. 

2. Masking

This one is a little harder to explain, so let’s take a look at my timeline:

See the greyed-out clip on track V6 on top of the clip on track V5, and how there’s a subtitle at the playhead? Here’s what that greyed out clip looks like on its own, if I turn off the V5 track instead:

it’s a teeny tiny crop of the portion of the V5 clip that does not have the hardsub that masks just the frames with the hardsubs. As a result, you get this:

In this particular clip, the masking is entirely invisible because the camera is completely stationary. I used this technique in several other clips where you can actually see it if you squint, like so:

you can see the line and slight change in color. However, because in this clip you’re looking at LWJ’s face and hands, you’re not going to notice this little difference in the color. 

Lastly, here’s my favorite example, and oddly enough, the most visible one:

 I wanted to use as much of this little paperman as I could. I could’ve avoided the subtitles completely if I cropped out three or four extra frames at the start of the clip, but I wanted him to go across the entire screen. Since the background is almost completely stationary and the eye is drawn to the paperman, this is totally fine to overlay across the bottom of the screen and no one will actually notice it:

Basically, this approach is fantastic when the camera is mostly stationary and there’s other movement in the clip that draws the eye. It’s MUCH better than zooming in because you preserve the quality of the footage. 

3. TBD: a combination of masking and rotation via keyframes so that you can mask across movement

I ended up not having to do this (okay, being too lazy to do it), but this is possible in theory. Perhaps I’ll play around with it and write up another post if it works!

[onlymorelove]

“Context is what is above, below, around, and within the precise details selected by the writer to convey whatever the poem means to convey, and compression means increasing the pressure by choosing the best and fewest words for the lines to reach the ignition point.”

An interesting article relevant to not just poets but all writers, I think. This explains why writing short can feel particularly difficult. (It’s also fun.)

[thetransintransgenic]

[This is an original work of fanart in celebration. This is not a screencap of an actual fanfiction…. unless you chose to make it so.]

[hexenmeisterer]

apples to apples, but the green cards are songs and the red cards are fandoms or characters. the best vid concept wins the round

[pureflummery]

Title: Handlebars Song Artist: Flobots Vidder: Flummery Website: http://www.flummery.org Fandom: Doctor Who (2005) (Tenth Doctor) Length: 03:27 Summary: I’m the Doctor. Look me up.

 We saw that Fanlore posted about Handlebars as their Featured Article yesterday, and realized we’d never updated Tumblr when we updated our Youtube with vids we hadn’t put up yet.

So this seems like a good one to start with. :D

This premiered at Vividcon 2008 (a year before Waters of Mars aired).  In 2010, Mary Crawford asked for a “making of” for Handlebars. It’s here on Dreamwidth if you want to read it.

Other ways to view:

Right-click and save-as to download a copy (80 MB, xvid)

Also on AO3!

[limblogs]

[limvids]

🔔 HD REMASTER thanks to benefactors. Please watch this version over any others. And you can also download this in 1920 HD from limvids.net

Skin, an Altered Carbon vid by lim. Music: Lullabies by Yuna, Adventure Club Remix. Thanks to @astolat and @cesperanza

I’ve never put a warning on a vid before and I have no idea what to say, but please consider yourself warned and get someone to pre-watch if you are at all sensitive. It’s a vid not an ambush.

[limblogs]

Skin, an Altered Carbon vid by lim. Music: Lullabies by Yuna, Adventure Club Remix. Thanks to @astolat and @cesperanza

I've never put a warning on a vid before and I have no idea what to say, but please consider yourself warned and get someone to pre-watch if you are at all sensitive. It’s a vid not an ambush.

[limblogs]

[limblogs]

[limblogs]

got

Yeah... I think I’ll skip it? Just gonna leave it there and watch 101 this week instead. Remember why I loved it and try to finish my vids. Oh well!

[penrymoon]

GOT: A SUMMARY

[limblogs]

Clearing up my computer to take it in to be fixed, hence all these random pictures. The interesting question here is: 1) what leads these men to believe I am interested in their tedious opinions, thoughts, or feelings and 2) what makes them so impervious to their error? As is obvious to all of us, music can never be redundant in a vid* as that is necessary (but not sufficient) to the form. Even a vid without music has the absence of music as a key aspect (unlike, say, a poem or a tomato). I would be embarassed to expose such poor understanding, wouldn’t you? I’d be hiding under my bed for a week. I’m honestly fascinated by the lack of embarassment. I’m not even sure it’s a problem; it might be a gift!

(* Every speech vid must be put together like a living creature, with a body of its own; it must be neither without head nor without legs; and it must have a middle and extremities that are fitting both to one another and to the whole work.)

[limblogs]

Look what I found! I made This is How It Works, Us and My Brilliant Idea on this in 2006/2007. That is where I used to sit in our old house and I think I can just make out LiveJournal on the screen. Memories! (Rendering...)

[isagrimorie]

Things I’ve noticed while editing a vid for Thirteen: I am still kind of really amazed at how many people of color are in the show now. Can the show be better, of course but after years looking at the same color palette of people it’s so interesting to see variety. 

Speaking of color palette’s one thing I noticed about colors is how the Capaldi era is so. darn. BLUE. Especially Doctor Falls, I had to color correct a clip and when I fixed the saturation and colors, I was so surprised about the details we can’t see because of the color grading.

On the other hand, after The Ghost Monument I noticed the colors after that tended to be.. the best I could say is muddy. I don’t know if it’s the codec or what but after the gorgeous colors some of the clips have turned muddy/cloudy. It’s like desaturated colors, the blacks are less blacks. 

There are still some stand outs but I need series 12 to step up it’s color game again.  

I am editing a 3 minute video and struggling to finish the last minute, I don’t know how professional video editors do it for 2 hour or more movies/TVs but I doff my hat at them. 

This hard. 

Also, thank you to all youtubers, vidders from dreamwidth, and @limblogs for resources and even a vidding fanzine! I’m not at their level but their resources have been really helpful! 

[astolat]

About the AO3 Hugo nom!

I have seen many conversation threads going round on the subject and just wanted to pop up to say my own feeling is, I am uncomplicatedly happy and pleased by the Hugo nom, and if you have contributed to the AO3 in any way, I hope you too feel happy and seen and recognized by it, and we don’t need to pin down who has earned it or who it belongs to. 

Thankfully, the AO3 isn’t Twitter or Tumblr: we don’t need to figure out who has the legal right to strip-mine it for billions and run away after setting it on fire. :P Nobody does. Because we deliberately refused the lie, from the beginning, that a space like the AO3 was or could ever be the work of one or even a few people. 

The AO3 is not a statue that one artist has made. It’s a living space, a community garden. And the first group of us stood up together and said we wanted a garden for our community and talked about what it should look like, and many of us committed to build it, and many started the work, many left, many joined in along the way. Because of all the early people, we were first able to open the garden, with paths and beds and the organization to keep it going.

But that alone wouldn’t have made the garden. The garden is made new every day, by the people who stop in and plant a flower, or a whole bed of strawberries, and the people who come in every weekend and do the weeding and teach the gardening lessons, and the ones who run the annual fundraiser and the ones who go to the local community board meetings to protect it. And the beds and paths wouldn’t still be there if people weren’t maintaining them and adding new ones and figuring out better ways to lay them out and occasionally bringing in a whole new tree and putting up a gazebo to make things even better. 

And because the garden is there, many random passers-by can wander through and enjoy the flowers, and some of those people will stuff a few bills into the donation box or fill out the suggestion form, and some will come back often and some will come every day, and some will one day become caretakers and some will come in once and never again, and some who did huge amounts of work will move across the country and never see it again.

The garden is the work of and a place for all those people. It was built for the person who wanders through once and for the person who comes every day, for the person who contributes and the person who only comes long enough to enjoy the beauty and warmth they can find in a place built only for human pleasure and goes away enriched. And all the people who build it have made a choice to give their work to such a place and for that cause.

So if the question is, which of that work is the nomination recognizing? It’s recognizing all of it. You can’t separate one part of it from the other. The garden wouldn’t exist without all of it. And I am grateful for it all. <3  

[limblogs]

congrats to us all, each and every one!