Video Making Guide
By Sazzy
(
Original: September 2006
Updated: May 2008
I’ve had quite a few queries
over the time I’ve been making vids on everything
from what software to use to how to rips clips to what format to output them
in. So with a little prompting I decided
it was probably a good idea to finally write one single guide that I can refer
people to.
This is intended to be a
guide to the process of making videos from initial idea to final product. I’m concentrating more on high level concepts
and processes, rather than loads of technical detail that will make your brain
hurt. That said, obviously I have to
include some specifics, but you’re free to email me and ask about anything
that’s not clear! I also concentrate
primarily on Voyager vidding, but the techniques
discussed could be used to make videos for any sort of fandom.
One thing I
should mention that though this guide might seem clinical at times, vidding is actually a very personal (and creative) thing.
These are just meant as some handy hints and tips, but in the end you should
just go with what you feel and what pleases you. Each video is the
imaginings of your imagination and ultimately only you can tell what you want
to do with it.
I’ve divided the guide up
into some sections as follows:
1. Choosing a song
Ok, so you’ve decided you want to make your own video, but where do you
start? In 99 cases out of 100 I personally start with the song.
Nearly always I will hear a song and something about it will cause me to link
it to J/7 (or whatever subject you’re interested in). It’s very, very
rare that I’ll think…”I want to do a video where Janeway gets jealous of Seven
and then wins her over”…(or something similar) and
then go looking for a song to suit.
However, don’t just pick the first song that tickles your fancy. Once you
start really listening to lyrics and trying to associate them with your chosen
subject, you’ll quickly realise you can turn pretty much any song into a video
(just look at Fast Food!). You should pick something that really means
something to you and inspires you for your first effort. It should also
be a song that you’re not going to mind hearing over and over and over and over
again (believe me, you may well never want to hear it again once you’re
finished!).
One other thing to bear in mind is who your audience is. If you’re doing
it purely for yourself then pick what you damn well please! However, if
you’re hoping to get other people interested in watching it, you might want to
consider how well known the song is. If you pick something by some really
obscure artist that no one else will ever have heard of, you’re decreasing the
chances that people will want to watch/sit through your video. There’s
definitely something to be said for the sing/hum-along factor in keeping people
hooked just as much as whatever visuals you choose. I know I’ve started
watching other people’s videos in the past and had to really force myself to
watch to the end because I didn’t know/like the song.
I tend to favour songs that have a bit of pace, or at least something dramatic/angsty about them, because this gives much more
opportunities for interesting visuals to accompany the song. Slow love
songs may be beautiful and heartfelt and scream J/7 to you, but as videos they
can be pretty samey and a bit dull (the editing has to match the slow pace of
the song, and you’re going to have to use the same scenes as a hundred and one
other videos – they sit by the fire, Janeway kneels before Seven etc etc ).
Something else to consider is access to the song. For most video editing
software you’re going to need to have it in mp3 (or some other common)
format. The video editing software I use doesn’t allow encrypted things
such as the m4ps you get from iTunes even though
you’ve legally paid for them. However, this doesn’t mean iTunes (or similar pay services) are out of the question as
a source – you can always burn the track to cd and then rip it back onto your
PC as an mp3 to get round the problem. Of course the best source is your
own collection of music on cd (if people still have
them!) and another favourite of mine is WinMX.
This is a file sharing program (in the form of Kazaa
or old Napster just without the horrible spyware).
WinMX has suffered a bit since I first wrote the
guide, so the number of tracks available on it isn't as good as it used to be,
but it can still be a useful source.
2. Planning your video
You’ve now chosen your song and already you probably
have a few ideas flashing through your mind about what happens in the video
you’re going to make - so you need to write these down!
Actually that’s not strictly true. Iin fact I
don’t often write my ideas down these days, but in the beginning I nearly
always used to, so it’s probably a good thing to do when starting out.
Notes are a good thing to make sure your video doesn’t just wander along
aimlessly, or start fabulously before petering out into nothingness. One
thing to consider is what the overall theme/story/mood of your video is meant
to be right at the beginning. It’s not much good having something that
veers between comedy and dark angst (unless that’s what you really
intended!).
The story/theme/mood doesn’t have to be anything too deep and meaningful –
“Janeway kicks ass” is a perfectly acceptable theme! Alternatively it can
have its own mini plot, e.g. Roxanne where Seven
flirts with various men, making Janeway increasingly jealous before Janeway
snaps and hunts her down for a confrontation. Beware of making these
plots too complicated, though. It may make perfect sense to you at the
time, but remember the casual viewer won’t have been considering your video and
song over and over for hours on end. I realised this with my Achilles
Heel video when I watched it back. The multiple timelines were straight
in my mind, but anyone else would have wondered what the hell was going on! (hence the addition of the helpful subtitles after the video
was finished).
Another thing to think about is who’s meant to be singing it? I.e. is the
singer Janeway, is it Seven, or is it just sung about
them by an anonymous third party? You can switch between viewpoints
during the video if you want to, but as with the above note on convoluted
plots, this might get tricky for the viewer to understand. Your watchers
shouldn’t need a reem of subsidiary notes to
understand what’s happening in your video! The song and images should be
self explanatory for the most part.
A few other considerations are what the timeline of the video is meant to be
(is some of it told in flashback? Is it set over a certain season?) and whether there are recurring themes/lyrics where you want
similar things to happen each time.
How you make your notes is up to you. My preferred method (which I don’t
actually employ anymore!) was to get the lyrics to the song and then put them
in a table with a spare column to the right where I could note down what
happened in conjunction with those specific lyrics. Sometimes that was
just something general, e.g. Janeway is watching Seven (which I would later
need to find a matching scene for), sometimes that was a specific scene if I
had one in mind already, e.g. Janeway kneels before Seven in Voyager Conspiracy
(as you can imagine that one cropped up in a lot of notes!).
I personally found writing it out like this would make sure the whole video was
consistent. If you just go straight to editing, chances are you’re going
to lose track of where you’re going – it’s good to have a goal in mind.
Planning also helps keep the excitement/tension up in your video. If you
just start at the beginning and work through as you go, you might use all the
best/exciting scenes up and have nothing to stick at the end of your
video. Or even worse you might get fed up and finish it in a hurry with
filler for the last couple of minutes.
An alternative to making notes is to edit as you go. I’ll mention this in
a bit more detail in the section on making your video. Even if you’re
going to do this it’s probably a good idea to at least know what the vague
story/theme/mood and the viewpoint of your video is meant to be before you
start.
3. Video editing software
This is the software you use to actually join your
visuals together with your audio to make your video and create an output
file. It’s what you’re going to need unless you intend using the power of
your mind to broadcast your masterpiece to the world.
Here I have to admit to being no expert (that is in video editing software, not
using the power of my mind to broadcast to the world, in which, of course, I
have loads of experience). I’ve used only two different applications to
make by videos - the stunningly basic (some might say crap) WinProducer
and more recently the stunningly fabulous Sony Vegas .
The most commonly used application by other vidders
is Windows Movie Maker, primarily because it’s free if you have Windows XP,
rather than because it’s actually that good. I don’t have first hand
experience of WMM, but I’ve heard it’s meant to be rather prone to
crashing/seizing up randomly and making you want to put a fist through your
screen as you realise you didn’t save that scene you were editing for the last
3 hours. That said, it’s probably your best bet if you’re new to vidding and don’t want to shell out for an application –
just make sure you save your work regularly!
A couple of other alternatives that will cost you…*gasp*…money (unless you’re
one of those naughty hacker types) are Adobe Premiere which comes in two forms
– Elements (about $100) and Pro (seriously expensive) – and Pinnacle Studio
(also about $100). Just google either of these
if you want to splash the cash! The aforementioned Sony Vegas also costs
money unless you have any nice friends *innocent whistle*
I’m sure there are a multitude of other applications too – just use your
friendly neighbourhood google for more details.
4. Getting Clips
You’re not going to get very far without some source
material to create your video. There are a few ways you can go about
getting the necessary clips:
a. Download existing videos and chop them up
b. Rip whole episodes yourself
c. Rip specific scenes yourself
(N.b. “rip” means convert all or part of a dvd into a compatible file format to import into your video
editing software, e.g mpeg, avi
etc. You can rip video too, but since I have no experience of this I’m
going to concentrate on dvd)
a. Download existing clips and chop them
up - this may sound a bit naughty and cannibalistic, but actually it’s a
good place to start, especially if you just want to have a play around.
Most vidders won’t mind you doing
this with their videos as long as you don’t take great lumps of their videos
and just re-present them to different music. Be aware of taking their
editing too, such as use of slow motion, greyscale, transitions or spliced
scenes (two scenes put together to make a new one). Once you’ve
downloaded their video and imported it, most video editing software will cut it
up for you automatically into smaller scenes that you can refine.
b. Rip whole episodes yourself – if
you do have the dvds then
you can create your own source material. This can be time consuming, but
at least you’ll know your video is 100% original. I don’t actually know
the best software for ripping whole episodes since I actually use method c
below. This is because my video editing application doesn’t do that handy
thing I mentioned of cutting large scenes automatically up for you. The
prospect of having to drag 40 minutes of video through the timeline every time
I wanted to find something was not very appealing!
c. Rip specific scenes yourself –
This is the method I use mainly for the reason given above. Also with
smaller files, you know what each one is about and you get exactly what you
want without lots of extra unwanted stuff (endless scenes of Chakky looking wooden, Tuvok
looking stoic etc). The downside is that if you realise you need
something else you’re going to have to go back to the episode and rip that
specific bit.
Since I use c, that’s the one I’m going to talk about here. When I talk
about ripping specific scenes, I mean ripping one or two minutes of footage
from a particular episode, e.g. the Delta Flyer Scene from the end of Voyager
Conspiracy (though actually that one’s about 5 minutes long, but you get the
point!), and saving it as an avi (in my case, though
you can save it as other formats).
Of course the first stage is deciding what you actually want to rip, and that’s
down to your video and what you need. This is where your knowledge of
Voyager is going to come into play unless you want to watch all 170 odd
episodes in search of the perfect scene of Janeway smiling. Over time
you’ll obviously build up a library of clips that you can re-use but when you
start out, you’re just going to have to go by what you remember (or what you
might have seen in other videos) and rip accordingly, e.g. you know you want
the Delta Flyer scene from Voyager Conspiracy, them sitting by the fireside in
Omega Directive etc.
An alternative to this is to painstakingly work your way through all the dvds and rip all the scenes you
think might come in handy at some point. This is what I did once I got
the dvds but it takes a
long, long, long time! (I hate to think how long, but it was done sporadically
over a period of months). So now I have a library of over 1000 clips (at
which point the task becomes remembering what’s in each one!) that I can just
use when I want to make a new video. Even then I sometimes have to go
back and rip new scenes. If you’re going to take this approach I
recommend making some formal notes of what the key things in each clip are in
some document/spreadsheet/database that you can refer back to, e.g. Janeway
smiles, Janeway drinks coffee, Janeway fires Betsy etc. I did this for
some of mine but then got lazy and now I have to try and just remember which
clip I need when I’m looking for something specific.
Naming your clips consistently is also going to help locate the right
images. I gave mine a naming convention of a prefix for the episode, a
prefix for who was in the scene and finally a descriptive name, e.g.
imp_J7_Sickbay (from Imperfection and features a J/7 sickbay encounter) or
kg_J7_NaziExplosion (from Killing Game, featuring J/7 running from the
exploding building) or ng_J_QuartersMood (from Night,
Janeway’s all moody in her quarters) or end_ship_InConduit
(from Endgame, the ship flies down the borg conduit)
etc.
So how do you create all these lovely files? Well, there’s
lots and lots of ripping software out there, but the one I use is called 1
Click DVD Ripper. I’m not claiming this is the best by any means, but it works
for me. There is a charge if you want the full version (about $30), or
you can get the free version which rips 30% of what you want. You might
think this sounds a bit crap – what good is 30% of what you want? – but you can
fool the application if you’re only requiring small bits of an entire episode
by telling it you want more than you really do (e.g. if you want the scene at
1:00 – 2:00, you just tell it you want 1:00 – 4:00 and you get what you
originally wanted!). I just got fed up of having to make all these
calculations since I was ripping so many clips and shelled out for the proper
thing.
http://www.1clickdvdripper.com/
I’m going to give a brief guide to using 1 Click here, so you can skip this bit
if you’ve got your own ripping app, or you’re just bored by what I have to say
;)
1. Put a dvd in your cd drive
2. Play the dvd in your dvd
playing software for a couple of seconds (or force it to be played if this
doesn't start automatically - you need to do this to initialise the decoder for
some reason)
3. Stop the dvd being played
and close the playing application.
4. Double-click on 1 click dvd
ripper
5. You get a window with "1 click dvd riper" in the main bit and "wizard"
"start" and "burn cd" buttons at
the bottom
6. Click the "wizard" button
7. Select the "Open IFO or VOD" option, then
click the three dots button to browse for the file you want
8. Navigate to your cd drive and pick the appropriate
".IFO" file. This is important - don't pick one of the
".VOB" files - you want the IFO!! E.g. if you are trying to rip from
the first episode on the dvd, then select
"VTS_01_0.IFO", if you want episode 2, then pick
"VTS_02_0.IFO" etc The IFO file is like the index to the
episode, whereas the .VOB files are the raw video.
9. Once you've picked your file you go back to the 1 click dvd ripper screen and click next.
10. Now you have the "step 2: Input Settings" screen. You don't need
to anything on here apart from click "next"
11. Now you are on "step 3: segment select". Select the "choose
a segment by time" and enter the time segment you want. Now click
"next". Note that 1 Click isn’t spot on perfect – you’ll find
that it’s often a few seconds out one way or the other. So be generous in
specifying the time limits of the scene you want (add on a few seconds at
either end).
12. You are now on "Step 4: Output Setting". By the "output file
path" input box is another three dots browsing thing. You need to select
this and enter a file name, otherwise it won't work properly. Once you've entered
the file name click on "save" and you're back on the "step
4" page again with your file name now filled in. You MUST use the browse
button to do this. It won't work if you just type in the file name. In terms of
the settings for the resolution/size etc here are my recommendations, but you
can play around if you want stuff bigger.
a. Movies (2.34
or 2.4 : 1, widescreen) – though they’ll say 16:9 on the back of the box this
isn’t strictly true – they’re wider than that – hence you still get some black
bars even if you watch them on a widescreen TV. Therefore I recommend you
select the “Medium” zoom level when ripping widescreen movies to minimise black
bar-age (you can edit out the rest in your editing program if you want). So
settings are:
Resolution
(size): 640 x 480
Zoom: Medium
File type: mpeg-2
(SVCD)
b.
Widescreen TV programs
(1.78 : 1) – this is proper 16:9 widescreen, hence widescreen TV programs take
up all your widescreen TV with no bars.
Therefore, no need for the medium zoom level:
Resolution
(size): 640 x 480
Zoom: None
File type: mpeg-2
(SVCD)
c.
Non-widescreen TV
programs (4:3, i.e. Voyager):
Resolution
(size): 640 x 480
Zoom: None
File type: mpeg-2
(SVCD)
13. Click "finish" and you should be taken back to the main window
14. Click "start" and off it goes!
For subsequent scenes from the same episode you don’t need to go through this
whole process again – you can just select the segment (step 11) and the output
file (step 12) without having to go through the whole wizard again by using the
menus up top. Make sure you browse to change the output file name as
described in step 12 above each time.
One more thing I’ve found is that you have the region 2 discs,
then season 4 of Voyager doesn’t have all the required .IFO files on each
disc. It only has one for the first episode on that disc, meaning there
are about 20 episodes where it’s a lot of hassle to get a clip. You can
do it using the .VOB files, but it’s very tiresome and not something I’m going
to go into here. If you do have this missing .IFO problem then contact me
for some help if you need it!
5. Creating your video
So finally you have some clips and an idea of what you want to do, so it’s time
to get down to making your masterpiece!
As mentioned before there are a couple of ways you can go (especially if you
don’t have a specific written plan for the video) when you get to the stage of
actually putting the scenes to your chosen music:
I personally
prefer the latter of these for the main reason that I’ll often have key points
in the song where I know exactly what I want to happen – they’re defining
moments of the video. I like to get these right
first and then build the rest of the video around them. Often one of
these key moments will be the end. Having this in place near the start of
the process also helps define where you’re going with the video and avoids a
common problem with videos I’ve watched where they seem to lose course halfway
through.
However, a lot of other people like the start at the beginning approach (maybe
due to ease of use with their chosen video editing software). It’s
entirely up to you how you do it! I do sometimes start at the beginning
when I have a very defined plan for the video since I
know I’ll get to my dramatic moments eventually.
How you actually edit your video is also entirely up to you and your song, I
can’t tell you how to do that here! However, I will offer a few tips from
experience of watching and creating videos:
1. Outputting your video
You’ve finally
finished your first version of the video and you want to see what it looks
like, which means you need to output it to a single movie file.
Obviously each video editing application has its own methods for doing
this. In general you need to specify some output parameters of your video
such as the file type, frame rate, kbps, size etc.
Here’s the important bits I use in Sony Vegas,
though it’s usually just best to go with whatever your software is defaulting
to:
File type: mpeg-1
Size: 320x240
Frame rate: 25 (this is PAL, NTSC is 29.9)
Video bit rate
(constant): 1700 Kbps
Audio: 224 kbps, 44 Mhz
Pixel aspect
ratio: 1.0
Widescreen for
You Tube – same as above except for:
Size: 640x360
If you want
people to download this off a site of your own, you might want to convert it
into .wmv after this as an
mpg is quite large. For this I use
Windows Media Encoder which is free from Microsoft with the following settings:
File type: .wmv
(this is the most commonly used, though some people use .rm)
Size: 320x240 (this is standard 4:3
size – your ripped clips might not be this size and you might want to adjust
this slightly to stop everyone looking fat or thin!)
Frame rate: 25fps (this is the PAL
frame rate, NTSC is 30 though I’m not sure how much this
matters when you’re dealing with computers!)
Audio format: 64 Kbps, 44 Mhz
Video Bit Rate: 250 Kbps
p.s. don’t ask me any complicated questions about
frame sizes and PAL and NTSC etc, because it’s all just as confusing to
me! I just played around until it looked ok and worked!
I’m afraid you can’t output the video at the same lovely high quality you
created your clips at (unless you’re doing it just for yourself), since most
people aren’t going to bother sitting around while a 50Mb+ video downloads.
You should aim for something roughly 10mb in size as a maximum (depending on
the length of the video). I find that a 3-4 minute song comes out
somewhere around the 7-9 Mb mark with the settings I use.
You can play around with the settings on your particular application until you
get the output size and quality you want.
7. Releasing Your Video
You’ve finally done it – you’ve got your video and
it’s finished – now to release it on an unsuspecting world! But
wait! Just hold on a minute…
I know you’ve been working at this thing for ages and now you just want to
share it, but I speak from experience when I say hold onto it for now. If
you keep it to yourself for a couple of days and then watch it again, I can
guarantee you that you’ll spot at least 10 things you want to change. I
personally keep mine back for weeks (sometimes months) re-watching them
periodically and tweaking until I get them just right.
Of course you could keep doing this ad infinitum – there comes a point where
you just have to let your baby go and be free!
Once you are satisfied that you’ve tweaked it enough then you need to find
somewhere to let people get at it. You have a few options:
a. Create your own website
b. Get someone else to put it on their website
c. Put it on a video sharing site (i.e. YouTube)
d. Put it on a file download site
A bit more on each of these:
a. Create your own website – not as
hard as maybe it sounds with all the tools now available, but if you just want
a free site then there are often restrictions on both the size of files
allowed, that might exclude your videos, and the bandwidth (which affects how
many people will be able to download it). As an example my site is paid
for and I have a limit of 80Gb bandwidth a month that
I regularly exceed! (though I do have nearly 200
videos on there!). In general if you’re searching around you want
something (either free of paid for) that offers as large a bandwidth limit for
the price you’re willing to pay. If you have your own site you might want
to zip up your files to prevent people watching them direct off the page (and
killing your bandwidth), or use some other way to force them into downloading
it to their own computer before watching (I don’t do this, which is probably
the cause of my bandwidth nightmare!). Note that you could combine having your
own site with c. (putting it on a video sharing site). In this case you create the basic pages, but
the videos are hosted on the video sharing site and the links (and player)
embedded in your pages. This is
relatively easy as the video sharing site should give you a link which you can
just cut and paste into your page to achieve the embedding. (p.s. thanks to annika for making
me think of this last point!)
b. Get someone else to put it on their
website – much easier than a. since it’s free (unless your friend is really
tight!)
c. Put it on a video sharing site –
Basically this means YouTube. If you've been living on the moon for the
past couple of years then a very brief bit about it. It’s really
easy to use – you just need to create an account (don’t worry it’s all free),
and you can start uploading as many videos as you want. The only downside
is that people will have to watch them off the YouTube
site or from links embedded in other web pages. There are ways to
download the video and take it away (if for example they want to transfer it to
some portable device), but these aren't as immediately accessible as options a
or b. Still this is the best place to start if you don't have your own
site and I use it in conjunction with my site due to the large number of
visitors.
d. Put it on a file download site –
there are a few of these around too like PutFile and YouSendIt, where you just upload your file and then receive
back a link that you can give to other people for downloading purposes.
The main drawback here is that there’s usually either a number of downloads or
time limit after which people won’t be able to access the file.
Whichever method you choose you’re going to want to
advertise your new creation. If you’re talking Voyager or J/7 then some
places you might want to plug it include:
www.voyager-conspiracy.co.uk/forum -
general J/7 forum
http://j7faction.com/community -
another general J/7 forum
http://www.groups.yahoo.com/
– groups to join include Janeway7, janeway7ers, VoyagerMusicHub,
KissMeKate
http://www.trekbbs.com/
And there you have it – just wait for all that lovely feedback (or not!).
Don’t be disappointed if you don’t get much beyond – “that was great” or “I
loved that video”. Though you’ve probably watched it 101 times and know
every nuance of editing and timing, most people will watch it once, enjoy it
(or not) and not really think of it again. It’s rare you get detailed
feedback on how profoundly moved someone was by the way you faded between
Janeway and Seven at 1:43, or how they felt elated by how you matched the surge
in music to a triumphant moment or how they really understood Janeway’s pain
from the story you told. Still, you had a good time making it (right?) so
who cares what anyone else thinks!