Vexercise 1 Check In (2021 edition!)

[lola]

Hi all! Here we are, it's been one week in--how are your pechakuchas going?

So many have been posted already, I'm kind of amazed!! For those of you that have already dived (dove?) in, what was the experience like? How did you go through the process of narrowing down your visual source, choosing your clips, choosing your music? Any tech issues or other challenges you ran into?

For those of you who haven't yet started (um, this includes me) where are you at with it? Do you have some things you're still trying to decide on--like focus, etc? I'm working with a new source and haven't yet decided on which eps I'm going to use, I might just mess around and see what feels interesting!

Comments

[amedia]

I've picked a fandom (Rat Patrol) and got instructions on how to download from YouTube, where there are beautiful crisp copies. That's all so far! RL is kicking my butt, but I'm determined to give the vexercises a shot.

[bonibaru]

YAY

[lola]

yay for crisp and easily downloadable copies!! excited to see what you make! :D

[amedia]

Okay, I'm honestly very excited about participating here but ... my pikachu really sucks. I could spend hours and hours trying to make it better, but I'm thinking ... I'm going to get better as I go along, right? And maybe I shouldn't try to force it? Maybe I could put a "dead dove--do not eat" tag on it.

Aargh, you know what, I'm gonna OWN it. I'm new at this, I'm having a great time, and if I wound up putting Troy and Dietrich into the same convoy ... well, now the slashers have a new euphemism. :-D

[amedia]

To talk a little more about the process, most of what I did was figure out how Filmora worked, partly by watching about half of an instructional video, and partly by trial-and-error. It was interesting how much I had to forget from using RipEditBurn and VideoReDo (what human factors people call "negative transference"), but once I got the hang of it, I found Filmora's interface easier to use and more precise. Mostly. Clipping music is definitely easier than with REB, but VRD does it by frame rather than second, so I found that odd. But I got used to it. (REB is audio-only, and VRD doesn't allow you to add a soundtrack, which is why I needed a different program for vidding.)

I initially thought I could cut out the clips I wanted using the window above and drag them down onto the timeline, but I couldn't do it, and that's when I watched the instructional video to find out how the software actually works. The one thing I still don't have the hang of is what to do with the leftover bits of episode after clipping out a piece - sometimes I just deleted them and reloaded the episode from the media box into the timeline to get the next clip (I can tell when I did that, because I kept forgetting to detach the audio; I finally gave up and did that at the end); other times I pushed them a few seconds away from the video draft so I could poke through them for more scenes, and when I made the next cut, I would yeet the intervening material up onto another line. Navigating back to the draft once I made the cut was tricky, and I still think this is not the easiest way to do it. I was SOOOO tempted to open VideoReDo, make the cuts in that, save the files and re-import them, but that would have felt like cheating. Plus VRD would have remuxed the files and they would have lost some quality.

I only downloaded four episodes, and one of them didn't have what I was looking for, but I managed to find the kind of thing I was looking for and string some clips together. The hardest part, creatively, was figuring out what I wanted and how to find something close to it in a limited source. I had downloaded episodes more or less at random and by great good fortune one of them began with a guy speaking over a radio, which I wanted, and this show pretty much *always* features trucks and jeeps careening over the landscape. Having a limited source also meant that I didn't spend hours scrubbing through footage for *just the right moment*, which I could totally have seen myself doing otherwise, and I just don't have the time. So that was good!

The six-second limit was very interesting to work with. I found myself trying to cut very carefully to make the scenes fit logically, and there were several scenes I decided against because they cut away to something irrelevant after 4 or 5 seconds. There was still a stray cut near the end of one of the clips where Dietrich picks up his binoculars again, but I was too tired to go back and see if I could start cutting the scene a second earlier.

Finally, I picked the second song mostly because it references the Sahara, and partly because I wanted a sharp contract to the first song, but there were some surprising congruences between the lyrics and the images that made me really happy. It looks like a Troy/Dietrich vid, at least for about the first half. I initially planned to use the refrain, but the second half of the first verse seemed to work a lot better.

[extrapenguin]

Some stuff that might be useful as someone who has Been There (last year):

- Pechakuchas sort of limit out a lot of the "easy" ways to make a vid snazzier, so don't be too hard on yourself on this!
- As someone who also clips from the episode in the video editor, I generally go through the whole episode at once and clip all the bits I might potentially need, then stuff those at a few minutes further down the timeline to pull in as needed before deleting the rest.
- Video editors generally have a way to make the clips longer/shorter. Try right-clicking and seeing if there's an option akin to "edit duration", or simply dragging the edge one way or another (in a direction in which there's room).

I hope that helps!

[amedia]

Oh, this is super helpful! Thank you so much for sharing your experience—this is one of the things I absolutely love about fandom is how supportive people are.

Clipping the bits in advance sounds like it be a lot easier—I’m definitely going to try that on the next one. 💖

[lola]

Yes, I absolutely want to echo--in some ways the pechakucha is designed to make the actual act of editing easy--as in, you only need to worry about getting ten clips on the timeline. But a lot of what makes a vid look like a vid involves much smaller clips than six seconds, cutting out all the extraneous stuff, playing with speed of clip/shot duration. But none of that is part of the pechakucha, since it's basically taking one step at a time.

The six second restriction is gone after the pechakuchas, so I think you'll find that a bit more satisfying. That said, the limits in pechakuchas can be freeing (only so much you can worry about), and then when people come back to do them after having made other videos, there can be a sort of new challenge of how can it look more like a vid despite the restrictions. But for your first pechakucha, it's really just about filling that timeline, setting it to music, so you've made a thing!!

I often make pechakuchas that I'm just *dying* to go back in and edit more, breaking the six second limit... and sometimes after the fact I do, and turn it into something more truly vid like :D

[amedia]

I liked the simplicity of the ten clips of six seconds each--it definitely cut down on the decision-making, to say nothing of the work! In that sense, I think the word "freeing" is absolutely right.

so you've made a thing!!

Once I got past the brief freakout, I found myself actually quite pleased and happy with the final result. :-) I made a thing!!! Wheee! And now I want to make more things!