just the vids ta no messin

vids by lim and some stuff about vids by lim now and again

[limblogs]

[limvids]

🔔 HD REMASTER thanks to benefactors. Please watch this following 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.

[limvids]

heads up

This blog has been flagged as explicit (?!) and whatever is gonna happen to it is gonna happen on December 17. Nice knowing you!

[secretxlittlexdarling]

Hi, sorry if you think im intruding but I was going through the vidding tag and I saw your post and I just wanted to say that, well, a year isn't that long in vidding terms. I looked at your stuff and you do have some raw talent there, but a massive chunk of vidders on YT have the better part of a decade in experience that got them where they are, and I think maybe you are just expecting too much of yourself through comparison, not to mention there are all sorts of other things that could be

(cont) keeping you from making the progress you want, live action vidding is extremely hard from what I know, especially with TV shows, so maybe you are using the wrong medium for your talents? maybe you are trying for the wrong kinda styles, maybe what you have tried so far, just isnt clicking for you so you get upset and think you arent good, but as long as you have fun, don’t worry if you arent where you wanna be,nobody is. if you enjoy it keep going.

Okay, so first of.. WOW. Thank you very much for this lovely message. I feel honored that someone has taken the time to do what you did.

I was very surprised by this message, but i will take it’s content to heart. Maybe using a different medium to learn some more. I would appreciate it if you could maybe give me some pointers? (Seeing as you gave me this really good advice)

And i think i will continue and get back on it. You learn for your mistakes, they say, right? 

Again, I can’t thank you enough for this message, because it really bought back some positivism into my whole picture and concept of vidding. And i will try to enjoy vidding more now instead of trying too hard to fit into a system. :) 

[limblogs]

Seconding this. DO enjoy yourself. You don’t need to vid like other people and tbh, you don’t need to be “good”. GOOD IS NOT REQUIRED. There are no grades in vidding and there’s nobody handing out certificates or jobs or money. You just do as you like and what you enjoy. ENJOY YOURSELF. Focus on the process - how vidding is for you as an experience. After all, that’s the part you’re actually gonna DO. Effects are not required, either. You know, when I started vidding in 2006 effects were very looked down upon, if you can imagine. People used to write polemics about them! So you see, these things are all fashion and flim flam. It’s nothing to do with you or how you vid.

Vidding is, or can be if you let it, all about you, and how you feel, and your emotional creative expression. It’s really selfish, which I get can be a pretty radical concept esp if you’re a girl, to deliberately spend so much time doing something so totally indulgent, and it’s natural to try to diffuse that by focusing on how you might please other people, or how other people experience or judge your vids, or some concept of quality, or social status, or the millions of other ways one might justify the time spent. And that’s all understandable. But if all that stops you vidding? It’s a cage. It’s a trick. Don’t fall for it.

And sometimes, it’s true, it can be too much. Maybe you don’t want other people to see always how you feel and what mad and weird shit goes on in your head. Feelings are complicated and contradictory and changeable anyway. Sometimes what you make turns out ugly or badly dressed, or you feel ashamed or embarrassed, or it’s just all too much and too raw and you feel exposed with all your messy desires. Sometimes I go with that and post, and sometimes I just don’t post that vid. It’s ok to not always feel like sharing with thousands of other people. But I still had the vidding of it, I still got mine. ;)

What’s interesting, though, and this is not a justification but an observation, is that I have found that when I have vidded wholly for myself, without reference to what anyone else might think, I have touched and connected with complete strangers, all over the world, in a way I have never done otherwise. Some of those people hate, truly hate, my vids, and some of them truly truly love them, and I don’t think you can have one extreme without risking the other. Art is a risky business, and if it isn’t then it aint art, it’s decoration.

[limblogs]

vidding tip #9817

If you have a big, complex show like Game of Thrones, it’s sometimes hard to instantly know the exact context of a clip. One fast way of easily seeing where a clip is from in the narrative/timeline of the show is colour coding. I use colour coding to section out music all the time but I just realised I should do it with seasons too. The colours are unimportant - just pick some differentiable ones - and label the season, so s1 is blue, s2 is red, s3 is yellow, etc.

Good news is you can do this in existing projects. Since 2015, there’s a checkbox in Project Settings, so go to File > Project Settings > General  and check  “Display the project items name and label color for all instances” . Premiere will then update the colours of every clip on every sequence timeline.

[limvids]

After discovering expo by accident I fell in love with your vids and rewatch them every now and then to just admire your technical mastery and how well thought out your video concepts are. Another thing I noticed is that you make really perfect and interesting song choices. How do you find new music and also decide when something is suitable and viddable?

I go on jags every now and again where I mine youtube or playmoss or 8tracks etc and sit and just listen to music for a long weekend. I get fixations, and then they pass. Twas ever thus. If I hear a viddable track I will grab it and save it for later, and they accumulate — there’s always more tracks than time. I had Expo in a playlist for a few years before I vidded it to Iron Man. The last vid I made (which sadly died on its arse, but I still love it quite unrepentantly) I just was grabbed by the snipping beat, which sounded to me so like cutting hair and then the whole thing just sort of unrolled from there very quickly. Obviously with that one I edited in the chant and the dialogue and other soundwork so I guess there had to be aural space in the track to get those in.

In terms of what is viddable, I would say the real key to a viddable song is clear arc. (A lot of my really favourite music I am unlikely to ever vid as it’s like, 1990s jungle (often constructed to be mixed into a much larger set), or Yo Yo Ma playing all 6 Cello Suites non stop — too long!). Some amount of bombast can be helpful, and some syncopation and interest in the beat — Imagine Dragons are a vid song goldmine for this reason — build, bombast, syncopation, strong lyrics — that’s what vidders are looking for.

Lyrics can be good of course, but I’m not at all sure they’re the keystone of a good vid track. I’ve done plenty with no words at all. It’s more the arc — it has to go somewhere, give you a build, a climax (usually the bridge) and then a resolution so you can take the character on a journey and the viewer through a swell of emotion. A chorus can be useful if you want to make a point and then remake the point with a different reading? Re-cycle the metaphor. It can be a bit of a weight though — I’ve junked vids near to done because I couldn’t cut down the choruses satisfactorily and had run out of facets to explore through the same musical motif/ lyric block. I quite often edit down the song to intensify it, and take out things like outros, which are often just included to give the radio DJ something to talk over — we don’t need that. We want to END with a strong \o/ and a big smile for the Russian judges.

These are my theories but the real truth is: if a song makes the hair on my arm stand up then I save it. If I feel a clench in my gut, then I go with it. Hahaha. That’s the truth! That’s how I know. Not very helpful, sorry.

[limvids]

Hello! I'm a very new vidder. I'm working on a vid based around the relationship of two characters from a film I really like. There are lots of sad moments, although overall their story has a happy ending. Basically I'm having trouble with the overall arc of the vid, the story of it. I want it to be a cohesive vid where the shots feel connected from a storytelling standpoint, but it's so hard! How do I make my vid feel cohesive? How do I connect my shots emotionally, not just technically?

Oh interesting questions! There are lots of answers and it depends? Some things to think about (may not all be useful to your particular vid).

1.  What is your vid about? What is the song? What story is the song giving you in the first place? This is crucial. Your song is the backbone, the spinal cord even — if your vid is not connected to its spinal cord, it will not move. Go back and listen to your song. What is it saying? How does it make you feel? Listen to your song 10 times, then 10 more. (at least!)

2. Consider the Kuleshov Effect. Include reaction shots to key points of the vid (a musical climax, a key lyric). Allow space in the vid to feel this reaction, this emotional response, literally linger on a face and allow the viewer to feel with that person. Humans are so interested in and keyed in to human faces, from birth, and we will empathise with almost anyone given half a chance and some sad eyed stillness.

3. If you can connect the character with some objects (object symbolism) then you can extend and amplify these emotions by showing the objects too? Does that make sense? I made a vid a bazillion years ago where I connected Snape (HP) to an old umbrella being blown about in a storm. The umbrella could rage and tumble and be torn apart by greater forces in a way I couldn’t (obviously) show happening to Snape. The viewer might not even really notice that Snape = the umbrella, but somehow still get that feeling when they watch it.

3a. If you are not great at body language there’s a useful book called Manwatching (or Bodywatching) by Desmond Morris. It’s pretty dated but has tremendously good descriptions of specific gestures, poses and attitudes.

4. In the end, shhh, don’t tell anyone but: humans are meaning making machines. We see faces in our toast (pareidolia). We hear emotions in the angry rev of a car, or the dark clouds of a thunderstorm.  We construct superstitions. We tell ourselves stories all the time about the world and try to make sense of it. So it’s perhaps a relief to know that at least some people will make sense of your vid whatever you do., haha!

[limvids]

Melisandre fanvid to Lucky by Aurora. 1:45

Still playing with this album! #fanvidfeed

Thanks to @cesperanza and @astolat

[limvids]

This isn’t about an application. This is about colour. You can use this information on a Mac or PC, and in any editing app: Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, FCPX, Hitfilm, Davinci, Avid Media Composer First (linked apps are all free)- anything. Hopefully by following along with this, you will get what you are actually doing with colour in an app and know what will happen when you make changes, instead of being limited to trial and error, which is always a part of vidding but can sometimes be frustrating.

This is the colour wheel I make in the video and you can grab that as a png, psd, or aep if that’s helpful:

Colour-Wheel.png  |  Colour-Wheel.psd | Colour-Wheel.aep

This is part of a series Vidding Tricks and Tips

[limblogs]

Hey so @astolat told me to make some videos about how I vid so… I’ve recorded some short videos in Adobe Premiere, specifically about using Premiere for vidding as opposed to other kinds of editing. I kept them short but have just talked as I go and not done them all polished and Youtube Voicey or anything, hahaha. Sorry! I don’t think we do that level of pep in Yorkshire. This one is about track mattes and how you can use em to quickly mask and layer right in Premiere without using stuff like masks and keyframes and tracing stuff, or using After Effects. I’ve done it with old effects so you can follow along in old versions like CS5 or CS6 too.

[limvids]

This is part of a series Vidding Tricks and Tips

[limblogs]

VFX Breakdown 2/2: Track Mattes

(Part one)

Track mattes are a basic compositing technique and worth knowing because you can use them for SO MANY THINGS. I can’t remember the last vid I made that didn’t use a track matte at least once. They are so fast and so useful. Anyway, in AE the Track Matte is in the timeline head on the drop down here:

And in Premiere it’s an effect you can apply called Track Matte Key:

Here’s the shortest tutorial I could find:

So here’s what’s useful to know if you didn’t watch the Adobe link up top (hahah I know you didn’t!): you don’t actually need an alpha channel to use a track matte. You can just set a Luma Matte and choose either black or white as the alpha.

So this means you can use any CONTRAST as a matte. So it means you can do this:

Or this:

But it also means you can do this:

Because of the contrast, right? The details don’t matter, just look for the contrast. If you can’t use the figure as the mask, use the sky, or the window. And remember it doesn’t matter which is dark and which is light because you can just choose Track Matte > Luma Inverted Matte.

Yeah, it’s just the same as channel masking in Photoshop. Same thing! By tinting your reference layer/matte to black and white and then slapping on some curves, you can boost up the contrast and make a mask. And here’s a tip: the alpha channel has a curve too (RGBA), so you can drop down to the visible layer (which now has alpha/transparency), add curves there too, and boost/refine the edge there.

So you can refine mattes with curves, and if you go too far, it’s easy to add edges back to the visible layer with Simple Choker: Effect > Matte > Simple Choker (or the matte layer if it has alpha).

And you can modify this edge however you need, procedurally, so you can reuse the same precomposed matte in different compositions, and have it doing different things. So going back to Time, unlike my video numbers, my fire numbers needed to move–fire does not have straight edges. So I put on a Turbulent Displace: Effect > Distort > Turbulent Displace . I played around with the complexity and amount and then put some animation in.

Quick tip: a fast way of putting animation onto an effect like this is with a time expression. So just alt click on evolution in the window and down in the timeline type in time*500. Try it out and see.

That is all I can think to say about track mattes. Oh except you can use them to make great custom wipes. Just animate a white solid moving across a black solid:

And you can set that as a track matte key in Premiere to make this:

[limblogs]

VFX Breakdown: Time

I began by tapping out a marker layer onto the music in Premiere, just by playing the music and hitting M in time. I needed 70 markers so I played it three or four times to make sure I’d distributed them well. Then I exported that track with markers intact and went into After Effects.

I used Typemonkey to generate the kinetic type from a .txt doc off the markers according to some basic parameters. I used League Gothic, which is similar enough to the Marvel font to be unmarked in this context. Typemonkey is great for speed but it’s not essential. To make a similiar effect for free you can use the plugin Sure Target 2.

I rendered that out to Photo JPEG, which is a good quality and smaller sized codec, and closed that project. Couple things here:

1. I could have carried on in that project but my advice is to make a new project PER EFFECT. You can import After Effects projects into each other. There’s no utility in having a gigantic project that is really slow and messy. Just get in, get out. Procedural discipline is key to working quickly and without pain in AE on a laptop.

2. I could have imported my TEXT.ae project into my new FIRE.ae project but then AE would be filming and rendering all those 70 3d text layers + camera + animations every time we previewed, so it was faster to render out a video and use that as the source instead. But don’t worry about locking down in this way. If you end up making changes to the rendered footage, it’s easy to replace any asset in AE at any time in two basic ways:

GLOBAL replace: in the project window, ctrl-click the asset and choose Replace Footage > File, and AE will replace every instance of that file in your project.

LAYER replace:  select the layer in the composition, then select the replacement asset in your project window. Hold down alt and drag the replacement onto the original layer in your comp. AE will apply all FX and keyframes to the new layer so nothing changes.

Then I mucked around a bit trying out different “looks”. These post-vid breakdowns always give the impression that one just knew exactly what to do and how to do it, but for me this is hardly ever true. So, step 3: playing around!

I made a few type treatments: blood, fire, smoke, ice, video. I’ll just run through the basic idea:

Fire

Making fire is a basic skill in compositing and it’s worth just acquiring anyway if you don’t have it. So just google making fire in “after effects” +tutorial . It’s also worth collecting some stock video of fire - this is all over the place. You can buy it quite cheaply or there are innumerable free downloads (credit needed).

Disintegration

Watch this tutorial. Pay attention to the procedural organisation. If you nest and compose your FX in a sensible order, then you can reuse projects over and over just by altering the SOURCE layer. (If you’ve ever done web design–think of comps as .classes to which you have defined property/value pairs and the ways you can reuse and combine them in a CSS cascade). 

Once I had my DISINTEGRATION.ae I imported that into FIRE.ae. I needed access to the effect, so I needed the project in this case, not a rendered video.

Smoke

Protip: Fire and smoke are the same thing in terms of motion, so you can make fire by colour correcting smoke and you can make smoke by desaturating fire.

You’re welcome! :D

Cryo Chamber

I modified the technique described in The Glass and comped in a porthole to mimic the cryo chamber. And this tumblr post seems to have run out of space so I will do track mattes in another post later. [EDIT: HERE IS PART TWO]

[limblogs]

Jaime Lannister / Brienne of Tarth vid by lim music: Conqueror by Aurora

love and thanks to @astolat and @cesperanza

(I’m on a kick with this album right now.)

[astolat]

guys GUYS lim vidded Jaime/Brienne I am so happyyyyyy *draws hearts all over this vid* 

[limblogs]

Bran Stark fanvid to Running With the Wolves, by Aurora

Game of Thrones, all seasons spoilers

Beta thanks to @astolat and @cesperanza x

note: a fo ben bid bont is a Welsh proverb. It’s originally from the Mabinogi. Bran the Blessed Crow says it to his company.

‘Lord,’ said his nobles 'you know the nature of this river, that no one can cross it and nor can it be bridged. What is your counsel concerning a bridge?’ they asked.

'None,’ he replied 'but, he who would be a chief, let him be a bridge.’

That was the first time those words were said and they are still said today. And Bran lay himself down across the river, and hurdles were flung over him, and his army went across him to the other side. ~ Mabinogi Second Branch

[limvids]

HD DL now up

[limvids]

Psst I recut that vid from last month - cut it WAYYYY down to like 1 min 30. IMO it’s better. (@astolat and @cesperanza disagree hahaha) What do you guys think?

[limblogs]

Game of Thrones fanvid to Bottom of the River, Delta Rae

Jon/Dany, Jon, Dany &c

Thanks to @astolat and @cesperanza for winkling this out of me on holiday. I am sitting at the table with a group of fans and having the best time. x

HD DL will be up here on limvids when I get home.

[limblogs]

excerpt from videlicet

[limvids]

limblogs:

https://vidders.github.io/articles/vidding/demystifying.html

OK so lemme expand a sec on matching.

So right now Fool For Love is playing in the other room; let’s break that down briefly. The scene is Spike telling Buffy about killing his last slayer and it’s a good example because it’s two fights cut together, into one, explicitly, so it’s easier to really see the matches. They are showing you the matches. The scenes are stitched together through these motion matches until they occupy the same space. By the eyeline match, they can have 70s Spike addressing 2000s Buffy and it’s perfectly coherent.

https://safe.txmblr.com/svc/embed/inline/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FvAKx9fHiAYM%3Fstart%3D120%26amp%3Bend%3D333%26amp%3Bversion%3D3#embed-58e29f4faa257208486630

Consider that these two scenes are really four scenes - that all fight scenes are really shot as (at least two) separate scenes cut together because the actors and the stunt doubles both act out the scenes and then their motions are matched and cut together to form one percept.

Now realise ALL continuity editing does this - even in the same scene with the same actors. You can connect any clip to any other clip, from anything, so long as there’s some continuity of form: in shape, colour, motion, eyeline…

https://safe.txmblr.com/svc/embed/inline/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FwfVpVfjtPN0%3Fstart%3D143%26amp%3Bend%3D152%26amp%3Bversion%3D3#embed-58e29f4faa26f001416677

Which reminds me, in Pteryx’s interview she talks about the Buffy titles, which have to be acknowledged as massively influential on vidding*.

https://safe.txmblr.com/svc/embed/inline/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FcLE38KQuyjM#embed-58e29f4faa279518226009

Just spend some time watching these credits and look for motion matches, graphic matches. This is like that, this is like that. Once you start seeing them you’ll notice this all over.

Dawn’s eyebrow takes up the motion line. The motion builds a tangible space by bouncing itself against “walls”. 

Watch it again with another eyebrow follow-through. Dawn is the key. :P 

See how the motion moves one way and then resolves back: the conceptual “room” must have some limits, some rigid bodies and colliders

Swing the pendulum. Trace the arc

*As well as the Friends titles; I mean, the Friends titles basically slowly teach you how to edit (very simply) to music- they start off with the characters literally dancing to the music and then gradually over the years replace each dance move with a clip from the show that dances in a similar way. There’s a reason making Friends Style Credits is a gateway drug.

https://vidders.github.io/articles/vidding/

[limblogs]

@astolat @bironicwastaken @cesperanza @teatotally @secretlytodream @thepteryx @stultiloquentia @meeedeee @artgroves @bradcpu @hollywoodgrrl

videlicet