Multivid check in!

[lola]

Hello all! Resurfacing from the two days of vid immersion that was vidukon to see how everyone is doing with their multivid adventures? If you're anything like me, you started with dreams of using five or more sources, and then before too long made peace with a concept that only uses two...

Or maybe you're using dozens!

If you've dug in beyond choosing your sources, what challenges have you faced so far? Tech issues like aspect ratio? Conceptual issues?

How are you approaching connecting your sources? And have there been unexpected pleasures along the way?

Looking forward to seeing the multivids come in over the next week plus!

Comments

[caramarie]

I am pretty accustomed to dealing with different aspect ratios at this point, but I *hate* differing frame rates. Particularly because I often don't realise they're different until I render something, and then half the vid's gone all ghosty :( In this case the difference was 29.97 fps vs 30 fps, so I could easily make the one run at the other rate, but it's still a pain.

[lola]

Ugh, yes, frustrating, but it sounds like you've got it under control?

[caramarie]

Yeah, I just freaked out when I did the initial render! But it was okay ... it's mixing music videos with stages that has caused me most issues in the past.

[naye]

I am currently crying in aspect ratio. (My sources are all over the place and even after the excellent Vidukon panel on these things I'm still all "???" about how to make it work.)

[lola]

Hmm mm, what are your sources, and what source are you using most? Oh and remind uswhat program you're using? Maybe collectively we can help!

[naye]

I've got two movies and two TV shows and they're from three different decades and it's a mess. XD

But I'm currently experimenting with running them through HandBrake to fix things like mis-matched frame rates and sizes, and I think it's working...? I vid in Adobe Premiere, and my test clips worked much better together after HandBrake than before! So I just need more time to fiddle with settings I think.

(Oh yeah, and I'm totally cheating on Guardian again because I had an idea for something else and I feel the source rule is a good one to break when inspiration strikes!)

[seekingferret]

I have found jarrow's worksheets from his 2011 Vividcon presentation on aspect ratios to be invaluable references: https://vividcon.livejournal.com/272274.html

[naye]

Thank you! That looks really handy to have.

[seekingferret]

I'm stuck. I don't have any good multifandom ideas involving Grey's that are of appropriate scope to make in a week or two.

I had an idea to maybe do a fixit for Alex Karev's departure from Grey's using Katherine Heigl footage from Knocked Up as Pregnant Izzy, but I'm not really seeing how it works.

[lola]

Yes, I was having this issue too! I ended up scaling back from overly ambitious ideas to something much more simple. I think this might be the hardest vexercise to do in two weeks! Especially since we're used to seeing Multivids that are of a much larger scale (thinking of some of the amazing multivids at vidukon!)

But tell us more about your GA/KU constructed narrative concept! Maybe brainstorming here will help?

Plus you could always use baby!Katherine Heigl in Roswell? Ahh, happy memories :)

[seekingferret]

I don't know how much you follow Grey's. The big disappointment this season was the way Alex Karev was written off the show in the spring, after the actor playing the part, Justin Chambers, left in the fall. They spent six or seven episodes being evasive about where he was, and then they had this incredibly terrible episode in which he wrote letters to the rest of the cast explaining that he had left because his ex-wife from ten seasons ago had unfrozen his sperm from twelve seasons ago and had his children, and he had just found out. There was very little footage to support this narrative, because Chambers seems to have only agreed to do voiceovers, not to appear on camera any further, and the ex-wife from ten seasons ago was Katherine Heigl's Izzy Stevens and hadn't been on the show since the beginning of season six. So they used flashbacks and out-takes and some new constructed shots without faces to try to represent the story, but it really, really didn't work..

And I was sort of wondering if I could use pregnant!Katherine Heigl from knocked up to sort of fill in the missing visuals from that terrible Season 16 episode, but I flipped back through the movie and she gives birth at the very end of the movie and so you see very little of her interacting with children, or anything that I was looking for.

Oh, but this was actually helpful to type out! I realize I've been trying to think of how to use the vid to fix Alex's storyline, and the source in Knocked Up is no good for that, but I think maybe I could use it to tell the story of Izzy after she leaves the show, which is a different vid idea altogether but it might be interesting.