Vidding Meme! :D

[beccatoria]

Shamelessly stolen from frayadjacent and chaila! Give me a number (or a few) and I will try to answer things! Some numbers are missing because my intelligent predecessors went through combing for questions they didn't think they'd be so interested in, but I'm, um, lazy, so I just copy-pasted one of their lists and ran with it. YAY ME.

1. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-vid.
2. Is there a genre or style you've yet to try your hand at, but really want to?
3. Is there a genre or style you wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole?
4. How many vid ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?
5. Share one of your strengths.
6. Share one of your weaknesses.
7. Point to a section from one of your favorite vids you've made and explain why you're proud of it.
8. Which vid was the hardest to make?
9. Which vid was the easiest to make?
11. Is there a section of canon above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?
12. What's the best vidding advice you've ever come across?
13. What's the worst vidding advice you've ever come across?
14. If you only could vid one show/movie for the rest of your life, which show/movie would it be?
15. Do you work mostly from start to finish, or do you vid sections out of order?
16. Do you use any tools, like clip notes or storyboards?
18. Describe your perfect vidding conditions.
19. How many times do you usually revise your vid before posting?
20. Choose a section from one of your earlier vids and talk about whether and how you'd do it differently now. (Person sending the ask is free to make suggestions).
21. If you were to revise one of your older vids from start to finish, which would it be and why?
22. Have you ever deleted one of your published vids?
23. What do you look for in a beta?
24. Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you?
25. How do you feel about collaborations?
26. Share three of your favorite vidders and why you like them so much.
27. Do you accept prompts?
28. Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your vids being canon compliant?
30. How do you feel about crack?
31. Which is your favorite site for posting vids?
32. Talk about your current vids in progress.
33. Talk about a comment or review that made your day.
34. Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?

Comments

[frayadjacent]

Huh, that's interesting that you need distractions while vidding! I definitely like to have something to entertain me while clipping. This isn't difficult because Mr Adjacent likes to play music or have streaming sitcoms going, and that's about the right level of distraction/entertainment for me. But when I'm editing I strongly prefer to be alone or at least, like you, not have someone near my screen. Preferably for hours! This doesn't happen much, though I might be able to set up an office of sorts in our new apartment.

What about vidding has changed for you so that you do it in short chunks? Is it necessity or is it a preference?

I still very much prefer to download vids, so I'm always glad when vidders give me that option. In fact I don't watch "YouTube vidders" much not for aesthetic reasons but because I rarely want to stream my vids. This is partly because WiFi in Australia is slow but also because I tend to accumulate vids to watch at a time when I'll have the opportunity to not be disturbed. Plus it's easier to find them for rewatching. :D

[beccatoria]

WOW late reply - it's partly because, well, that's a really interesting question and one I didn't have an immediate answer for. But it's four days later now and I still don't have an answer that completely satisfies me, so instead I will list the things that I have considered as contributory to the change in my style.

- I plan less meticulously, which means I more often reach places in the vid where I don't have a strong precise idea for what clip I'm using next. Even when I did plan meticulously, plans shifted, but at least if I just wanted to get some more progress done I had something I could put down. Now I more often go, "Okay and then I'm not 100% sure what needs to go next. I should let this sit in my brain a while and mull over the lyric for a ten minutes while I do xyz..."

- I use higher quality source which means that playback isn't as smooth so I render chunks to check timing more frequently. Sometimes sort of obsessively... Again that necessitates breaks in vidding.

- I make more technically demanding vids. Not always, but more often I have complex effects requiring multiple tracks. It's just more fiddly and time-consuming than it used to be and can bog down the vidding process so again, breaks help.

- Somewhat sadly, it's been a long time since I've had one major, primarly fandom in the way I used to have with BSG or Farscape. As a result, even when I feel I know the source pretty well, I don't know it that well. I don't know it as well as "I've already vidded this eighteen times..." well. Because I don't clip, that means more time scrubbing through source looking for clips I might want to use.

- I vid in physically different spaces than I used to. My set up used to be more physically isolated from the people I lived with. Like I was in a corner and they couldn't easily see what I was doing. Now I'm more often in spaces where someone could glance over at my laptop, etc. I feel MASSIVELY self-conscious about that and tend to go get on with something else in those situations. I should add that's not a reflection on my husband (the only person I currently share a living space with). He knows I vid and thinks it's cool and would never like, poke his head over my shoulder all, "Whatcha doing...?" because while he thinks I shouldn't be self-conscious, he'd never try to make me feel more so. But...doesn't matter. I'm shy. I don't like vidding when people can see unless they're also vidders.

- I actually have more free time than I used to in some ways. My free time tends to be concentrated in like, whole days where I'm not doing anything and then whole days where I'm busy rather than a few hours in the evening. I think I've slid from three hours of solid vidding in an evening to like, three hours of vidding split across a six hours of idleness?

I think a combination of all those factors is probably why my style changed. But I wouldn't really attribute it to any one over another. Actually, that was pretty comprehensive, wasn't it? :p

ON TO STREAMING:

I feel better about streaming now than I did basically because I finally got decent wifi so it's not a big deal most of the time. And I do find it convenient to watch a vid before I decide if I want to download it for future rewatching. But downloading is definitely my preferred method of vid-watching/keeping for vids I actually want to watch/keep. Also streaming is just so transitory these days. :(

[frayadjacent]

Yeah, that all makes sense! And I totally feel you on the self-consciousness. I'm the same way. I have gotten to the point where I can vid in public (usually more like clipping, though, because I can't focus intently in public) but only if my screen isn't visible to anyone.

Speaking of clipping: I know you don't, but I'm curious what your non-clipping looks like. For my WIP I have the episodes imported directly in the NLE, and so instead of clipping (in the sense that I usually think of it) I scrub through the episodes, select a rough edit of a clip I want, and drop it on the timeline in roughly the area I want it. I'll go through some chunk of episode(s) as time/patience allows, dropping clips on different tracks if need be, until I get to editing that section. Do you do something like that?

I've realized that I can also import my BtVS DVD rips into the NLE once I get back to vidding Buffy. But since I know that footage so well I could probably work more from the idea, I.e., "I want this clip here and I know exactly where to find it". However I tried that briefly and was totally overwhelmed and didn't even know where to start and put the project on hold. Lol.

The first method still relies on looking through the footage. I don't need to know exactly what goes where as long as I know what kind of clips I generally want to go in a given section. Then looking through the episodes is how I find the clips that are of those type (or find they don't exist, or find that there are other cool clips that do something else that I haven't even thought about, etc). But the second method requires a much clearer idea of what to do, which seems really hard? Like it's hard to imagine planning a vid in any kind of detail without looking through the episodes first. Though I might be able to do it to some extent with Buffy. If I don't get totally overwhelmed first. :D

[beccatoria]

It basically looks like your Buffy description. I started vidding shows I knew so well I could just go "well I want this clip and I know where it is." I've always had NLEs that let me drop sections of an imported clip onto the timeline, so I import whole episodes and then scrub through the episodes til I find what I'm looking for and drop it down. The scrubbing through (even though I literally just catch a few frames here and there, or get distracted and start watching for a few minutes) reminds me what's there and also helps me find tonal, incidental clips.

I will be honest I don't always have a game plan going in. I usually have like...a starting clip or two, and then I wing it? Like I genuinely find, having started, ideas present themselves. Editing structures reveal themselves. Ideas feed ideas?

But it can be overwhelming when you don't know the source so well which increasingly is what happens to me and I think it's part of why I've slowed down. I end up reviewing more for inspiration before picking the next clip, etc. I mean, in totality, I suppose that's just time I'd otherwise have to spend clipping but it still feels slower.

Then again, I recently thought, "Shit I should just clip for this, it'd really help me do this faster, because I want it to be real and I can't stand how long it's gonna take me otherwise," and I got so far as opening the first episode in my clipping programme and PANICKED.

Like it suddenly seemed so overwhelming and I couldn't face deciding what I should clip vs what I shouldn't, like what if I need that thing I've decided not to clip! So I gave up and went back to my old style. Which is going slowly, but it's going?

...I have the worst vidding method. *facepalm*

[frayadjacent]

ha ha, we both got overwhelmed and gave up by the opposite things.

I really do want to get back to that BtVS project and use a method more like yours, because I know that show so well and it would just be so much faster than going through all the episodes and clipping. Which I did for all my previous BtVS vids. Clipping for Tightrope took like 3 months or something. That was all I did, vidding wise, and I did it probably 3-6 days per week. /o\ I DON'T NEED TO DO THAT AGAIN.

[goodbyebird]

I don't like vidding when people can see unless they're also vidders.

Phew! I sincerely plan to absorb all your vidding mojo next time I visit, good to know that's a thing I can do ;)