vid farr

a tumblr about vidding.

[vividconofficial]

Yes!  The dates are set and preparations have begun — this year’s VividCon will take place the weekend of August 16-18!  Check out the announcement post on livejournal/dreamwidth for more information.

(Registration for the con will be opening at midnight U.S. Eastern Time between Saturday, February 16th and Sunday, February 17th. See when that is where you are.)

[vid-farr]

Jonathan McIntosh, the remix artist behind "Buffy vs. Edward," disputed ad placement on his video on fair use grounds and is now fighting a Lionsgate takedown. I'm very interested to see how this goes. 

[vid-farr]

It might not be 2013 yet in my time zone, but planning for VividCon 2013 programming/tech is underway in my living room! My enormous planning whiteboard of doom is already filled up with deadlines, meetings, and various color-coded notes. 

2013 is going to be awesome, y'all. I'm already looking forward to seeing the maaany amazing vids I know you guys will make. ♥

[vid-farr]

In the summer of 2007, I did a lot of vidding without headphones, with my (second story) bedroom window wide open. 

And one night, I heard my neighbor drunkenly say to his friend: 

"What IS this song?? Who keeps PLAYING IT? ALL THE TIME?"

This anecdote brought to you by the song I've had on repeat all day. I hope the walls between us and our neighbors are sturdy, and/or that they're really into Bad Company. 

[vid-farr]

New horror vid for Halloween! Download available here.

I Will Possess Your Heart The Woman in Black Choose Not to Warn

[vid-farr]

Vid commentary still delayed! What even is this week. Two weeks. What even is this two weeks? Wait, there's an error in there somewhere.

... annnnd maybe this point I just need to push everything on my queue back, in case, heh. I went directly from the flu into a thing with my back -- most money is on me having pulled some lower back muscles when I was curled up on floors and benches and the front porch in a omg-wtf-sick haze -- so now I'm coming to you live from inside a fog of muscle relaxers and painkillers. Hi! Hi! 

You know, maybe I could do a vid commentary like this. Except right now, I'm this cat and vids are this lizard, only with more back pain: 

So I have a feeling it would just turn into, "This is a vid I made one time. I like vids? Hey, you know what would be great? A vid about sunshine. Does anyone else hear that frog right now?"

A vid about sunshine might be pretty great though. Possibly I'm just saying that because I'm cold. I really hate muscle relaxers, you guys. Shit does not get done. Words do not even get done. Ask sisabet how long it took me to come up with a full sentence when she got home yesterday. It was a while. 

... right. That's my update! Fingers crossed my back stops this shit pretty much immediately, I'm never going to get my Haven vid finished before S3 starts at this rate. 

[vid-farr]

Vid commentary delay

This weekend's vid commentaries got delayed thanks to food poisoning. And then accidentally posted without commentaries on, whoops -- deleted now.

I'll be double-posting a couple times this month to catch up. Probably not this week, I have some coming up next week that'll be easier to double up on. 

Tomorrow's commentary should be American Tune (assuming I'm not still feeling weird and shaky by then). Let's Misbehave, Railway House and Change of Time are also in the queue for this week, among other things. Yay, vids? 

[vid-farr]

vid: Take It Off | Multifandom posting date: August 15, 2009 first shown in Club Vivid

Streaming password: janeway

[dawnofthesecondday]

The Llamanator 2 [x]

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I feel like this is a VividCon Premieres intro vid that got misfiled by accident. 

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vid: Everything's Not Lost | Doctor Who universe posting date: March 8, 2009

(Speaking of crying: I hadn't watched this vid in a while, and it made me cry today. THANKS, EUNICE. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY. ... That I made myself cry with a vid I made for you. Hee.) If anyone has any questions about this vid, feel free to hit my ask box.

[vid-farr]

vid: Dream Big | American Idol / David Cook posting date: November 20, 2008

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vid: Four Seasons in One Day | Heroes | Nathan Petrelli posting date: August 18, 2008 first shown in VividCon Premieres

Once the lesson about boring vids is learned -- there then tends to be an dramatic swing in the other direction "METAPHOR, METAPHOR, NO COKE, PEPSI" where the vidder totally rejects any and all opportunities to strictly allow the lyrics to dictate the clip choice and to consciously pay attention and seek this out in other vids -- without actually stepping back and thinking "That was a literal move here - why did the vidder make the choice to do this here?"

It took me a while to learn to allow any literalism through. I think this is the first (serious) vid where I started to use light touches of literalism in a careful, deliberate way, like at 0:18, contrasting "worlds above" and the literal aspect of Peter learning to fly with "worlds below" in a more metaphorical interpretation of Nathan's kinda skeezy world of politics. Once you've trained yourself to fear unchecked literalism, it can be really difficult to pull back and allow any literalism, but I got there eventually. I learned to embrace the Keanu. And that's it for Four Seasons in One Day, I think. If you have any questions about this vid, feel free to hit my ask box.

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vid: Ghost Song | Supernatural posting date: August 14, 2006 first shown in VividCon Premieres

Ghost Song was the first vid I ever released; I'd started poking around trying to figure out vidding in 2003, but this was the first vid I ever finished. (So of course I sent it directly to VividCon Premieres. No pressure.) In June of 2006 I was working on a broader Supernatural season 1 overview vid, Dean POV, to The Libertine by Patrick Wolf. I'd hit some snags on it, and while I was taking a break to let the vid gel, I put on the rest of the album that song was from and looped it a few times. At which point I realized -- Ghost Song is about Supernatural, TOO! I could make this RIGHT NOW! ... Heeey, I'm going to make this right now. I should send it to VividCon so I can have a vid in this year! That'll be fun! (I never did finish The Libertine, but who knows, I might make a vid to it someday. I get new vid ideas for songs from that album all the time -- maybe one day I'll complete the set.) My computer screen at the time was kind of small, so I wound up burning every export of my vid onto a CD, watching it on TV, and taking hand-written notes about edits I wanted to make. Sometimes when I'm going through old disc spindles I still find stacks and stacks of Ghost Song discs. I didn't have a beta on that vid. Well -- I did, sort of; I was living with my younger brother, and since Ghost Song was on the TV all the time he'd wind up seeing it anyway, so he started chiming in and telling me to change this or lose that. (Somewhere there's an AU where my brother then started vidding, himself.) What this is meant is that the first vid feedback I ever got was Thursday night of VividCon in the Outback, when AbsoluteDestiny told me he'd seen my vid (in tech) and liked it. Thanks, AD! (Hee.)

Two tech notes about this vid:

1. I angsted forever about the visual continuity break at 1:58 where Dean doesn't have sunglasses on, and then does. I may have spent more time debating that three-clip sequence than anything else in the vid. That seems funny to me now, but at the time, it was A Huge Issue. 

2. I absolutely could not figure out how to do titles like all the fancy real vids did. I had some kind of block re: doing titles in Premiere, and at the time I was too shy to ask anyone for technical assistance, so I finally wound up faking it in a fairly bizarre, backwards way: in Paint Shop Pro, I made a jpeg with my credits in one corner, and then I pulled my credits clip into VirtualDub and put the jpeg over it with the logo filter at a reduced opacity. That's why it looks sepia with washed out credits; it isn't an artistic statement, I just had no idea how to do it any other way until after the VVC deadline that year. 

And that's it for Ghost Song. If anyone has questions about this vid, feel free to hit up my ask box.

[vid-farr]

30 days of vid commentary: suggestions welcome!

I'm planning on doing a 30 vids in 30 days thing in September. I'll post a (previously released) vid of mine (or mine and ____'s) and give a few notes on it -- not a full commentary, but things like how the vid came about in the first place, how I chose the song (or how someone else chose the song), process notes, that sort of thing.

If there are any specific vids of mine you'd like me to include in this, let me know! (If the vid you're thinking of involves someone getting pregnant, trust it's already in my queue.) 

Suggestions, anyone?

[vid-farr]

Avengers aspect ratio! ongoing

[astolat]

vid farr: The Avengers aspect ratio

FWIW, the way I handled the Thor source (it's also 1.85:1) it in Anything For Love was:

- the Thor source was the best and largest of the sources I was using, so I made the sequence settings match that, both aspect ratio and resolution -- ie, clips taken from that source had no padding in previewing the vid

- other sources got padded with black on sides or top/bottom or both depending on their own resolution (I manually tweaked some with scale and crop)

- then I exported a single final .mov with those settings, matching the Thor source. 

- for the DVD version, I put that into a new sequence of 720x480 aspect ratio and just adjusted the video size/shape until a frame of Thor source looked good (it ended up with black bars at top/bottom obvs). 

- for the online version, I just used the original mov to make an mp4 with the same settings as the original. YouTube sucked it up no problem and automatically put on the right top/bottom padding.

Fun trivia fact: we were editing in FCP, so I converted the 1080p Thor blu-ray source to ProRes422 for editing. It came out to roughly 100GB and had to be split into 5 separate files to work at all. :P 

[vid-farr]

My practice is generally to pad out mixed ratios in multifandom vids where it doesn't matter so much, and resize/crop to match in multisource, single universe vids where I want it to look all of a piece. 

Also -- 100GB for Thor. Of course you did. I think that fact underscores the entire point of Anything for Love.