WisCon Vid Party

My process is a lot like chaila's, in terms of acquire/clip/vid/export. I now have sufficient computer power/skills to vid directly from most of my source files (usually mkvs or vobs) but I find that clipping is an integral part of my vidding process. To make that more clear: you can sometimes just import a whole file - an entire episode, or an entire movie - into your vidding program (like iMovie, WMM, Premiere, FCP, Vegas, etc) and vid from it directly. I did this for one of my Festivids vids this year, because it was a 27 minute source and I was using the entire thing. But in almost any other vidding situation, I need to clip as part of the creative process, which means I make smaller clips (sometimes 2 seconds, sometimes a minute or two) of just the stuff I want to use. So it goes:

1) Idea phase. Maybe I get inspired by a song, or sometimes I have a concept and go looking for a song. I have songs on my vidding playlist in iTunes that I just haven't found the right fandom/source for yet, and vid concepts/characters I just haven't found the right song for yet. Once I have a song+idea in mind (or when I'm auditioning songs for a concept) I listen to the song over and over. Like, I put it on a loop and listen to it for literally hours.

2) Acquisition phase. I am a completist, so I typically scrub through every potentially useful piece of footage. If I'm vidding a single source, this means I rewatch the whole show (with the sound off). If I'm making a multivid, I will acquire every single piece of potentially useful footage I can think of, ask my friends for suggestions for other pieces of footage, and use other resources to locate stuff. Two great tools for making multivids and sourceless vids (or any vids really!) are tvtropes and the imdb keyword search (in the search bar at the top, select "keyword" from the dropdown menu). So let's say you're trying to make a vid about a certain trope (like my vid The Price, which is about manpain, and uses a lot of similar-looking shots from across fandoms - men crying, women's graves, etc) or you're trying to make a vid about a book or comic book character using live-action footage stolen from other sources (if I were trying to make a vid about Cordelia Vorkosigan, say), or you're trying to make a vid that constructs backstory for your characters (like the vids that tell us what Natasha and Clint got up to in Budapest). You need specific shots: "men crying" or "women military fighters" or "spy tools". If you find the right trope on tvtropes, it'll deliver you a zillion potential sources. If you find the right keyword on imdb (and you're lucky, and someone's tagged things well) it'll also deliver a zillion potential sources. And both of those are also good ways to expand and diversify the types of sources you use - so if you're making a vid about hackers, and want to include anime, but don't know anime sources, tvtropes will set you up.

I download source in mkv (bluray rip preferred) or I rip it from DVD if I have to.

3) Clipping phase. Like I said, I scrub through all the available footage, looking for everything I could potentially use (often with the sound off. You see footage very very differently with the sound off, or at least I do. That's really important. Shows and films use musical cues and situational cues and dialogue and context in order to make you see the footage in a particular way! But if you turn off all those cues, you can open yourself to seeing it differently). While scrubbing through footage, I typically have my song going in my ears, on a loop, again, as this is the greatest source of vidder's serendipity for me. Many times I've found a hilarious/amazing match of song to footage, just because that part of the song happened to be playing in my ears while my eyes were looking at that scene. Listening to the song constantly while clipping helps me start to structure and organize the vid (who gets what verse, how do I deal with that one weird lyric, what the heck am I gonna do with the bridge, etc.). Like chaila, I give my clips really specific descriptions ("L101 - AP waiting around hospital room together P w cuffs closeup" is Leverage 1x01, Alec and Parker, including a closeup of Parker holding handcuffs) so that I can find everything later (sometimes I even search file names - so I might search for "cuffs" to find that one later) and I always always ALWAYS include the episode number, because there's nothing worse than needing to reclip for some reason and not being able to find that scene in the source a second time. I also develop shorthand descriptors so that I can easily find related or thematically similar clips - so if I'm looking for clips people shooting light from their bodies in my Avengers:EMH clip library, I look for keywords "carebear stare," and if I'm making The Price, looking for clips of dudes dropping things in slo-mo, I look for keywords "I was sad so I dropped something." How you organize clips makes a HUGE difference in how easily you can find them later, and how easily you can relate them to one another. By the same token, each vid I make has a bunch of folders, so that I can organize the footage generally. The Leverage vid I'm thinking about clipping for atm has folders like "Alec," "Parker," "Eliot," "Alec/Eliot," "Alec/Parker," "Eliot/Parker" "OT3 Domestic" "OT3 action" "OT3 on the job" and "OT3 general" so that it's easier to find stuff.

3.5) ETA: Music editing phase! I forgot this originally. I try to edit the song as early on as I can, because I like to know what space I'm trying to fill. I mostly just edit the songs to make them shorter, or to remove a verse that doesn't work, or to make the ending better (most of the time I don't like a gradual fade-out ending b/c it's a pain). I also once reversed the order of some verses in order to better fit the song to the narrative of the character.

4) I open every single clip I have made in Quicktime (or, well, depending on the number of clips. Sometimes I have to do it 50 or 100 clips at a time or everything crashes). I once again listen to the song on repeat. I play every single clip one after another. I look for similarities, things that should be next to one another, things that are framed similarly, etc. I play some clips backwards, to see if they'd be funny/sexy/whatever in reverse. I continue planning, structuring thematically, figuring out what lyrics/parts of the song correspond to what.

5) Outlining phase. Actually I do this all the way through. Once I've picked a song, I listen to it and write down the lyrics for myself in Word (I don't copy/paste from a lyrics site). Sometimes, for some vids, I'll write down time stamps as well, so I know how much time a lyric actually takes. You might want to put eight scenes on a particular lyric, but if it's only 2 seconds of vid time, ain't gonna work. If I'm being thorough (or vidding something instrumental!) I'll also write down all the instrumental sections as I hear them. Then, beneath each lyric/description, I write what I think I might put there. So while I'm clipping and reviewing, as I get an idea, I go write it down in my outline document. So here's the beginning of my outline document for my vid Silver Moon Black Dog:

beat beat beat beat beat beat beat beat (8x) (0:04)
-quick flashes of atmospheric imagery, Ankh-Morpork, hourglasses, etc

fiddle fiddle fiiiiiiddle, fiddle fiddle fiiiiiiiddle (0:07)
-maybe this is all nannying stuff, but with weird jumpcuts in it and some camera motion?

banjo comes in, three banjo trills backed by fiddle (0:20)
-nannying continues, or maybe monster under the bed

more banjo/fiddle back and forth (0:28)
-including Susan kicking the monster's ass and dragging it out in a bag

silver moon rising for what seems like the first time (0:33)
-aspect coming on her: walking through door, bone-face scream

. . . where the notes in the outline often correspond to the clip names in the clip library, eg "bone-face scream" is what I called that clip, so I can go find it later using the outline as a guide.

6) Vidding phase. This part's easy, because I just put the clips down on the timeline! I already know the song and the footage so well at this point that this is mostly assembly and troubleshooting and playing with effects. Sometimes what I thought would work doesn't work, and I have to figure it out again. Sometimes I have to go back and reclip stuff, or review a bunch of clips again to find something to fill a hole or make a bridge or whatever. I don't usually do much fancy stuff for title sequences, but anyway one of the big stressors in this phase is figuring out what the heck to do for the title sequence. I can almost never force myself to give up any of the song real estate for the titles, but other people are very good at making cool titles that go at the beginning/end of the song.

7) Publishing phase. Once the vid is done, I export in a few different formats, upload to youtube, and check the quality.

8) Subtitles phase. With the complete vid in hand, I create a subtitles file tailor-made to the video file (I open the finished vid in MPEG Streamclip, so that I can make the timing of the subtitles accurate down to the thousandth of a second without any fuss).

9) THIS IS WHY IT TAKES ME EIGHT YEARS TO MAKE A VID OH GOD

ETA: Also, I can talk more technically if ppl want, but generally speaking I use Handbrake, Mac the Ripper, MPEG Streamclip, Final Cut Pro, Sound Studio, Quicktime, and MS Word to get my stuff done.)