Links and stuff

[hazelk]

The good news is that one of the best screwball comedies ever The Lady Eve is finally being released on DVD on June 20th.

And there was an interesting article in Thursdays Guardian Supplement here. If your interests include either autism or animal welfare. Or both but that’s probably just me.


I have the viding bug again. I don’t know why I do this. Analytical not creative – spent my entire childhood taking things apart to see how they worked and now I do it for a living. Actually it pretty much resembles the love/hate /failure relationship I had with dressmaking a few years back. They both look as if you don’t actually have to ‘create’ anything. Not de novo anyway, which is the really scary concept. Just take pieces of something that someone else has already made and rearrange them until they look pretty/functional. Plus both seem similar to activities I feel reasonably comfortable with, namely buying clothes and dancing. But I suspect I probably prefer reading what people with an actual talent for fashion design/vidding have to say about the process to cackhandedly trying to do it myself.

And in both cases it’s so much harder to go from the pictures in your head to the thing itself. Case in point, not having access to my computer the last 5 days I actually storyboarded the second half of the current obsession instead of just having one half-baked song/story idea and making the rest up as I went along. Got back, made all the clips, started sticking them together and it really, really didn’t work at all. Way too complicated, I mean it might have made a fine essay on “Wesley’s relationships with women – the stranger in the strange land.” But all of the clips/quotes take so much longer in reality than they did in my head and no way it would make any kind of coherent sense to anyone not me in the room. Bah.

Curious about what non-free programmes like Final Cut Pro can do that iMovie doesn’t. Will they let you add clips anywhere on the timeline instead of having to build things up sequentially so that any changes shift the whole thing out of sync? Will they let you crop/zoom in on/ re-size clips easily in a ‘what you see is what you get’ mode? Can you fine tune clip speed rather than double/halve the speed?

Comments

[par-avion.livejournal.com]

Curious about what non-free programmes like Final Cut Pro can do that iMovie doesn’t.

Will they let you add clips anywhere on the timeline instead of having to build things up sequentially so that any changes shift the whole thing out of sync?

Yes.

Will they let you crop/zoom in on/ re-size clips easily in a ‘what you see is what you get’ mode?

Yes

Can you fine tune clip speed rather than double/halve the speed?

Yes. Although the newest version of iMovie has improved abilities in that area. It's probably less exact than Final Cut, but much, much better than that crazy rabbit/turtle sliding bar.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info. I should look into getting the iMovie update, anything better than the rabbit/turtle would be a big improvement.

[par-avion.livejournal.com]

I've upgraded to the latest iMovie, specifically for the better timing option. (The rabbit/turtle designer was on *crack* -- not only is it not subtle enough, when you use it and then export, it becomes a mess of pixelization). I'm still slightly frustrated with iMovie, although if I were actually making *movies8 I might not be. iMusicVideo it is not.

I've considered trying out the new (free) version of Avid. It lets you have two video tracks, for example. It's a stripped down version of a very powerful program. I may find it confusing, but it's free, so there's just the time investment to worry about.

http://www.avid.com/freedv/features.asp

[molly_may]

I'm frustrated with myself, because when I got home from work tonight The Lady Eve was on TV, but it was already half over so I decided not to watch it (I've never seen it!). So I turned the TV off, and when I turned it on again later, The More the Merrier, with Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea was half over. Note to self: Check the TV listings, just in case something you want to see is coming on.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

My eldest is a big help with TV schedules, one of his obsessions seems to be learning them by heart. I only found out about the DVD release beacause his other obseession is looking up (and memorising) the running times of random movies on Amazon. I think he must have a virtual DVD collection in his head all listed from longest to shortest.

[meri-sefket.livejournal.com]

Everytime you talk about vidding, you inspire me to try it out. But all I have right now is iMovie. Does it really suck so much that it's not worth vidding with?

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

There's a lot it doesn't do but what it does (lets you move through individual clips frame by frame to cut them up and stick them together smoothly) it does well and is nice and intuitive. The limitations are probably helpful in some ways, they really force you to think about what clips to use. So it's fun even if the product isn't as polished as it could be. You do need other freeware programmes to rip stuff of DVDs and convert it to an acceptable format. Have a go!