Vidding for Dummies, aka Vidding Tech for People Who Hate Vidding Tech
On my last post, bop_radar and I started a little discussion on our vidding processes, and it’s prompted me to want to ramble a bit. I am the first to admit I dislike/don’t understand vidding tech, and that it is frequently a barrier to creativity for me. But tech is an inescapable part of vidding, and I have to bite the bullet and work through it in order to tell the stories I want to tell.
One of the numerous things that makes entry into vidding difficult for those not technically-inclined is that there is no one tried-and-true way to vid. Every vidder does it differently; every vidding set-up (hardware and software) is slightly different. So you have to stumble your way through tutorials and trial and error, and find what works for you.
Below is a description of what works for me. I am undoubtedly doing a couple of things flat-out wrong. You may point and laugh. :) I’m putting this out there for the vidding newbies who have a suddenly-acquired passion for a hobby that seems destined to drive them mad with frustration. I’m saying, "look at me; if a schlub like me can fight through this tech stuff, then so can you."
What I am physically working with, a.k.a. Hardware:
1.) Sony VAIO laptop
Intel Pentium processor 1.60GHz
512MB of RAM, 80GB memory
2.) Western Digital My Book External Hard Drive (1 terabyte)
Software:
Windows XP Home edition
DVD Decrypter and VirtualDubMod from the AMV app
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 (purchased)
LlamaEnc
How I play vids:
Windows Media Player (came with PC)
K-Lite Mega Codec Pack (includes Media Player Classic)
VLC Media Player
First of all, we owe a great debt of gratitude to those vidders who have come before us and who have chosen to share their knowledge and expertise. In particular, the memories of vidding, A & E’s Technical Guide to All Things Audio and Video, and the links at viddingnewbies all warrant careful study. Take your time to digest this wealth of information, and try not to get overwhelmed. I’m a big proponent of getting your bearings but not overthinking. Just jump right in there and start vidding. There is nothing wrong with starting with the free software that came with your PC (sorry-I don’t know anything about Macs), i.e., Windows Movie Maker. I am not ashamed to admit that I used it for my first 10 vids. If I hadn’t, I would have never started vidding at all. Everything else was just too intimidating at the time. People have made kick-ass vids on WMM, trust me. WMM is free and easy and has the added advantage of letting you ignore the codec issue for a little while. WMM can digest xvid and divx files, which is what you will typically find in your average downloaded *kofftorrentkoff* media file. So pick a song, grab some episodes of your favorite show, and start slapping together some clips. It might suck, but then again, it might not.
I stopped using WMM when it could no longer provide the few subtle tweaks that I wanted to make to my footage and when I got tired of having to vid in such a strictly linear fashion (having to lay down each clip in succession in order to keep the sequence). That’s when I switched over to Premiere Pro. Whoa. That was something new and scary. Premiere Pro is a powerful program, but not all that user-friendly or intuitive. For those of you who don’t want to deal with Premiere Pro, I have heard really good things about Sony Vegas. Supposedly it is easy-to-use and lets you do all sorts of nifty effects. I’ve never used it, though, so I won’t go into any detail about it here.
Premiere Pro was very intimidating when I was first starting out with it. I bought a couple of "teach yourself Premiere" manuals, and that helped me orient myself, but I still find the interface scary, and there are loads and loads of features that I haven’t even explored yet. I’m not a fiddly type of person: I don’t enjoy playing with the software just to see what it can do. I learn the bare minimum that I need for each project, apply it, and then promptly forget about it. I’m so bad that sometimes I couldn’t even tell you how I did something, and I would be hard-pressed to replicate the process if someone put me on the spot.
One of the biggest obstacles to working with Premiere in the beginning was figuring out how to import source. Premiere is very finicky about which codecs it will work with, and xvid and divx ain’t it. So there goes all the easy dragging and dropping from my WMM days. I finally figured out that Premiere likes the Huffyuv codec. The drawback to converting your source to Huffyuv is that the resultant files are freaking HUGE. I’m talking 6GB for an 11 minute chunk of footage. Here’s where I could have learned avisynth (see A&E guide above) to save myself some space. But I look at avisynth code and my brain seizes up in sheer terror. I took the path of less resistance and simply went out and bought myself a gargantuan external hard drive to accommodate the mammoth huffy-encoded files. (I sometimes have more money than sense.) I adore my external hard drive, though. First of all, it means that I never have to rip Smallville again. I keep all of the six seasons of VOBs on the external, and there they stay, ready to be re-used and recycled with each new project.
At this point, you may be asking yourself, what’s with the talk of codecs and VOBs and avisynth? How do I get started with vidding, for crying out loud? OK, I guess I should just get down to the nitty-gritty. Here’s how I start a vid project (I’m assuming I don’t already have the footage on my external drive):
Ripping source
Rip song from music CD as a WAV file. I use Windows Media Player to do this.
Grab a DVD, put it in DVD drive. Choose "Rip with DVD Decrypter" from autorun options
Once DVD Decrypter opens, Edit>Select Main Movie Files
Choose destination (F drive for external). Click green arrow for go. Rinse and repeat for subsequent discs.
DVD Decrypter creates VOB files. Premiere won’t read VOB files without avisynth intervention, but luckily for me, VirtualDubMod will, so I use it to convert the VOBs to huffy-encoded avis.
Converting source
Open VirtualDubMod, File>Open: find first VOB you want to work with. Double-click. The program will ask you about audio streams. I just choose the first option, since I don’t care about the audio stream. The file will take a couple of minutes to open.
Go to Streams>Stream list>Disable audio stream (it will become cross-hatched)
Go to Video>Filters>Add>deinterlace, blend fields. >Add>resize (720x480)
Go to Video>Compression, Huffyuv v.2.1.1.
For clipping, I scrub through the file, set the beginning and end points around what I don’t want, and hit delete. I do this sort of "rough clipping" for every single episode I might possibly use in the vid before I move on to the next stage. It can get boring, but it is a vital step in the vidding process for me.
Once done with clipping, Save As>whatever you want to name it, e.g., sv601huffy, choose external as destination. Depending on the size of the clip, this will take some time to convert. Watch Dr. Who DVDs to kill some time.
Remember how I said that I do some things flat-out *wrong*? This could be one of those instances. This conversion process creates anamorphic footage (vertically squished) from television shows. However, there are a couple of ways of getting around this in post-production (which I will explain later), so I leave it be.
Once I’ve got all my source converted, it’s time to open a new Premiere project. I don’t do anything fancy here, I just use the automatic presets for new projects: on the load preset tab, I twirl down DV-NTSC and choose Widescreen, 48kHz. Then I name the file whatever and save it whereever I want.
Importing source into Premiere
Import song WAV file into Premiere (File>Import)
Import huffy-encoded AVI files into Premiere (File>Import).
As I mentioned above, the huffy avi files are anamorphic, and it irks me to work with them when they look that way, so I pretty them up. I right-click on the individual clip file, choose Interpret Footage>Conform to: D1/DV NTSC widescreen 16:9 (1.2). Then they look spiffy and normal.
Once I’ve got all of my source imported and interpreted, I put the music on the timeline and edit it as needed. The music is the backbone of the vid, so I like to have that squared away before anything else.
Then I start clipping. The clipping I did above in VirtualDubMod, I called my "rough clipping." I usually leave in more than I think I’ll actually need for the vid, and I scrub through fairly quickly. In Premiere, I do much more finely tuned clipping. I creep through the footage and grab "microclips," some of which are no more than a couple of frames long. This is where I find a lot of stuff serendipitously, clips I never thought I would use in the initial quick run-through. What I’m looking for in this stage are clips that are related lyrically or thematically to the song, or clips that have some sort of interesting color, lighting, or movement in them. This "microclipping" process can take as long as 2 months and can be very tedious, but I cannot skip it. It makes me feel confident that I haven’t missed a single worthwhile clip. Once I’m done with this process, I’m done. I almost never go back and clip more, or grab new episodes. I put all of the heavy-duty work in at the front end, which makes the actual editing go surprisingly quickly. Some people might use bins for their equivalent of "microclipping," but I just insert the clips on the timeline on the video track after the music ends. That is, if the song is 2 minutes long, I’ll start inserting clips around 2:20. As I said, I’m very anal about having my "microclips" laid down before I start editing, so this can translate into a very long timeline. For a fast-paced, 3 minute-long vid, I will have a 50-minute long timeline. I render as I go along, so the playback is nice and smooth. I find something immensely satisfying and visually intuitive about seeing the clips laid out in a long line. In the editing process, I cherry pick through the timeline, and copy and paste my choices above the music track.
~Interlude. Vidding magic happens…~
Once I get my vid as good as it’s gonna get, it’s time to export it out of Premiere. The first run is to export the uncompressed DV avi file
File>Export>Movie>Settings>File type: Microsoft DV AVI, >Range: Work Area only (I set the work area before I export)
Name it whatever and Save
The DV avi is your original, pristine source file. Make derivative avis from this. Because it’s uncompressed, it’s quite large. A 3:30 minute vid will be circa 800MB. If you end up deleting other source files, save this one. ETA: Whoops! Apparently I am spreading misinformation here. As one commenter told me below, DV is not uncompressed. Ah, well, it's good enough for my purposes. :)
Making a WMV file
File>Export>Adobe Media Encoder
Transcode Settings: Format, Windows Media
You can use a preset, or adjust the settings in Audiences. I use:
Basic Video Settings
Frame rate (fps): same as source
Pixel aspect ratio: D1/DV NTSC widescreen 16:9 (1.2)
Frame width: 720 frame height: 480
Maximum bitrate: 2533.90
Image Quality: 100
Audio format: 64kbps, 48kHz
This will make a big, shiny file. For my "Objection (Tango)" vid, which is 3:40, the wmv file was 116MB. Huge, but I love it. If you want something smaller, you can fiddle with the frame width and height, or with the image quality.
Making a web-quality avi from the DV avi
Open VirtualDubMod and pull in the DV avi file.
Streams>Stream list, right-click on the available stream, choose full processing mode, right-click on it again and choose Compression. Choose MPEG Layer 3 from the list, 56kbps, OK.
Scrub through the file and check for interlacing (horizontal lines). If I see any (and don’t ask me why it happens when I already de-interlaced in the first VirtualDubMod go-round), then I go to Video>Filters>Add>deinterlace, blend fields. Do this before you re-size (for whatever mysterious reason, the end result is better if you de-interlace before you resize)
Now remember I mentioned that the initial conversion process produces anamorphic footage? Well, here’s where it rears its ugly head again, in the DV avi. But if you just re-size the file, the aspect ratio is magically fixed. I don’t know why it works, I just thank goodness for it. So go to Video>Filters>Resize, 624x352, check out the preview. Voilá, all is righted.
Now for compression. I use xvid these days because it’s simpler, but astolat had a cool tutorial for divx that I used to use.
Video>Compression>XviD MPEG-4 Codec (the first one on the list is the one I’ve always used), OK
Then save-as whatever you want. This will produce a fairly hefty file. For my "Tango" vid, it was 62MB. Frankly, I’m not sure how to get a smaller one. It’s something I have yet to learn. :)
Creating con-ready files from your DV avi
Basically, LlamaEnc does all of the work for you. All hail LlamaEnc!!!
Open program, import your DV avi file. For me, I have to click on the Anamorphic button. But then the squished-ness is magically repaired. I love it. I scrub through the preview to make sure that things look okay, and that there is no interlacing.
Then I name it by the LlamaEnc naming conventions, even if the vid is not intended for Vividcon. I can always rename the files afterwards. Then I save it, and press Encode!
And then I go watch some more Dr. Who DVDs.
And there you have it, the sum total of my vidding tech expertise. It’s not much, but it’s mine, and it works for me. Let me know if you have any questions.
One of the numerous things that makes entry into vidding difficult for those not technically-inclined is that there is no one tried-and-true way to vid. Every vidder does it differently; every vidding set-up (hardware and software) is slightly different. So you have to stumble your way through tutorials and trial and error, and find what works for you.
Below is a description of what works for me. I am undoubtedly doing a couple of things flat-out wrong. You may point and laugh. :) I’m putting this out there for the vidding newbies who have a suddenly-acquired passion for a hobby that seems destined to drive them mad with frustration. I’m saying, "look at me; if a schlub like me can fight through this tech stuff, then so can you."
What I am physically working with, a.k.a. Hardware:
1.) Sony VAIO laptop
Intel Pentium processor 1.60GHz
512MB of RAM, 80GB memory
2.) Western Digital My Book External Hard Drive (1 terabyte)
Software:
Windows XP Home edition
DVD Decrypter and VirtualDubMod from the AMV app
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 (purchased)
LlamaEnc
How I play vids:
Windows Media Player (came with PC)
K-Lite Mega Codec Pack (includes Media Player Classic)
VLC Media Player
First of all, we owe a great debt of gratitude to those vidders who have come before us and who have chosen to share their knowledge and expertise. In particular, the memories of vidding, A & E’s Technical Guide to All Things Audio and Video, and the links at viddingnewbies all warrant careful study. Take your time to digest this wealth of information, and try not to get overwhelmed. I’m a big proponent of getting your bearings but not overthinking. Just jump right in there and start vidding. There is nothing wrong with starting with the free software that came with your PC (sorry-I don’t know anything about Macs), i.e., Windows Movie Maker. I am not ashamed to admit that I used it for my first 10 vids. If I hadn’t, I would have never started vidding at all. Everything else was just too intimidating at the time. People have made kick-ass vids on WMM, trust me. WMM is free and easy and has the added advantage of letting you ignore the codec issue for a little while. WMM can digest xvid and divx files, which is what you will typically find in your average downloaded *kofftorrentkoff* media file. So pick a song, grab some episodes of your favorite show, and start slapping together some clips. It might suck, but then again, it might not.
I stopped using WMM when it could no longer provide the few subtle tweaks that I wanted to make to my footage and when I got tired of having to vid in such a strictly linear fashion (having to lay down each clip in succession in order to keep the sequence). That’s when I switched over to Premiere Pro. Whoa. That was something new and scary. Premiere Pro is a powerful program, but not all that user-friendly or intuitive. For those of you who don’t want to deal with Premiere Pro, I have heard really good things about Sony Vegas. Supposedly it is easy-to-use and lets you do all sorts of nifty effects. I’ve never used it, though, so I won’t go into any detail about it here.
Premiere Pro was very intimidating when I was first starting out with it. I bought a couple of "teach yourself Premiere" manuals, and that helped me orient myself, but I still find the interface scary, and there are loads and loads of features that I haven’t even explored yet. I’m not a fiddly type of person: I don’t enjoy playing with the software just to see what it can do. I learn the bare minimum that I need for each project, apply it, and then promptly forget about it. I’m so bad that sometimes I couldn’t even tell you how I did something, and I would be hard-pressed to replicate the process if someone put me on the spot.
One of the biggest obstacles to working with Premiere in the beginning was figuring out how to import source. Premiere is very finicky about which codecs it will work with, and xvid and divx ain’t it. So there goes all the easy dragging and dropping from my WMM days. I finally figured out that Premiere likes the Huffyuv codec. The drawback to converting your source to Huffyuv is that the resultant files are freaking HUGE. I’m talking 6GB for an 11 minute chunk of footage. Here’s where I could have learned avisynth (see A&E guide above) to save myself some space. But I look at avisynth code and my brain seizes up in sheer terror. I took the path of less resistance and simply went out and bought myself a gargantuan external hard drive to accommodate the mammoth huffy-encoded files. (I sometimes have more money than sense.) I adore my external hard drive, though. First of all, it means that I never have to rip Smallville again. I keep all of the six seasons of VOBs on the external, and there they stay, ready to be re-used and recycled with each new project.
At this point, you may be asking yourself, what’s with the talk of codecs and VOBs and avisynth? How do I get started with vidding, for crying out loud? OK, I guess I should just get down to the nitty-gritty. Here’s how I start a vid project (I’m assuming I don’t already have the footage on my external drive):
Ripping source
Rip song from music CD as a WAV file. I use Windows Media Player to do this.
Grab a DVD, put it in DVD drive. Choose "Rip with DVD Decrypter" from autorun options
Once DVD Decrypter opens, Edit>Select Main Movie Files
Choose destination (F drive for external). Click green arrow for go. Rinse and repeat for subsequent discs.
DVD Decrypter creates VOB files. Premiere won’t read VOB files without avisynth intervention, but luckily for me, VirtualDubMod will, so I use it to convert the VOBs to huffy-encoded avis.
Converting source
Open VirtualDubMod, File>Open: find first VOB you want to work with. Double-click. The program will ask you about audio streams. I just choose the first option, since I don’t care about the audio stream. The file will take a couple of minutes to open.
Go to Streams>Stream list>Disable audio stream (it will become cross-hatched)
Go to Video>Filters>Add>deinterlace, blend fields. >Add>resize (720x480)
Go to Video>Compression, Huffyuv v.2.1.1.
For clipping, I scrub through the file, set the beginning and end points around what I don’t want, and hit delete. I do this sort of "rough clipping" for every single episode I might possibly use in the vid before I move on to the next stage. It can get boring, but it is a vital step in the vidding process for me.
Once done with clipping, Save As>whatever you want to name it, e.g., sv601huffy, choose external as destination. Depending on the size of the clip, this will take some time to convert. Watch Dr. Who DVDs to kill some time.
Remember how I said that I do some things flat-out *wrong*? This could be one of those instances. This conversion process creates anamorphic footage (vertically squished) from television shows. However, there are a couple of ways of getting around this in post-production (which I will explain later), so I leave it be.
Once I’ve got all my source converted, it’s time to open a new Premiere project. I don’t do anything fancy here, I just use the automatic presets for new projects: on the load preset tab, I twirl down DV-NTSC and choose Widescreen, 48kHz. Then I name the file whatever and save it whereever I want.
Importing source into Premiere
Import song WAV file into Premiere (File>Import)
Import huffy-encoded AVI files into Premiere (File>Import).
As I mentioned above, the huffy avi files are anamorphic, and it irks me to work with them when they look that way, so I pretty them up. I right-click on the individual clip file, choose Interpret Footage>Conform to: D1/DV NTSC widescreen 16:9 (1.2). Then they look spiffy and normal.
Once I’ve got all of my source imported and interpreted, I put the music on the timeline and edit it as needed. The music is the backbone of the vid, so I like to have that squared away before anything else.
Then I start clipping. The clipping I did above in VirtualDubMod, I called my "rough clipping." I usually leave in more than I think I’ll actually need for the vid, and I scrub through fairly quickly. In Premiere, I do much more finely tuned clipping. I creep through the footage and grab "microclips," some of which are no more than a couple of frames long. This is where I find a lot of stuff serendipitously, clips I never thought I would use in the initial quick run-through. What I’m looking for in this stage are clips that are related lyrically or thematically to the song, or clips that have some sort of interesting color, lighting, or movement in them. This "microclipping" process can take as long as 2 months and can be very tedious, but I cannot skip it. It makes me feel confident that I haven’t missed a single worthwhile clip. Once I’m done with this process, I’m done. I almost never go back and clip more, or grab new episodes. I put all of the heavy-duty work in at the front end, which makes the actual editing go surprisingly quickly. Some people might use bins for their equivalent of "microclipping," but I just insert the clips on the timeline on the video track after the music ends. That is, if the song is 2 minutes long, I’ll start inserting clips around 2:20. As I said, I’m very anal about having my "microclips" laid down before I start editing, so this can translate into a very long timeline. For a fast-paced, 3 minute-long vid, I will have a 50-minute long timeline. I render as I go along, so the playback is nice and smooth. I find something immensely satisfying and visually intuitive about seeing the clips laid out in a long line. In the editing process, I cherry pick through the timeline, and copy and paste my choices above the music track.
~Interlude. Vidding magic happens…~
Once I get my vid as good as it’s gonna get, it’s time to export it out of Premiere. The first run is to export the uncompressed DV avi file
File>Export>Movie>Settings>File type: Microsoft DV AVI, >Range: Work Area only (I set the work area before I export)
Name it whatever and Save
The DV avi is your original, pristine source file. Make derivative avis from this. Because it’s uncompressed, it’s quite large. A 3:30 minute vid will be circa 800MB. If you end up deleting other source files, save this one. ETA: Whoops! Apparently I am spreading misinformation here. As one commenter told me below, DV is not uncompressed. Ah, well, it's good enough for my purposes. :)
Making a WMV file
File>Export>Adobe Media Encoder
Transcode Settings: Format, Windows Media
You can use a preset, or adjust the settings in Audiences. I use:
Basic Video Settings
Frame rate (fps): same as source
Pixel aspect ratio: D1/DV NTSC widescreen 16:9 (1.2)
Frame width: 720 frame height: 480
Maximum bitrate: 2533.90
Image Quality: 100
Audio format: 64kbps, 48kHz
This will make a big, shiny file. For my "Objection (Tango)" vid, which is 3:40, the wmv file was 116MB. Huge, but I love it. If you want something smaller, you can fiddle with the frame width and height, or with the image quality.
Making a web-quality avi from the DV avi
Open VirtualDubMod and pull in the DV avi file.
Streams>Stream list, right-click on the available stream, choose full processing mode, right-click on it again and choose Compression. Choose MPEG Layer 3 from the list, 56kbps, OK.
Scrub through the file and check for interlacing (horizontal lines). If I see any (and don’t ask me why it happens when I already de-interlaced in the first VirtualDubMod go-round), then I go to Video>Filters>Add>deinterlace, blend fields. Do this before you re-size (for whatever mysterious reason, the end result is better if you de-interlace before you resize)
Now remember I mentioned that the initial conversion process produces anamorphic footage? Well, here’s where it rears its ugly head again, in the DV avi. But if you just re-size the file, the aspect ratio is magically fixed. I don’t know why it works, I just thank goodness for it. So go to Video>Filters>Resize, 624x352, check out the preview. Voilá, all is righted.
Now for compression. I use xvid these days because it’s simpler, but astolat had a cool tutorial for divx that I used to use.
Video>Compression>XviD MPEG-4 Codec (the first one on the list is the one I’ve always used), OK
Then save-as whatever you want. This will produce a fairly hefty file. For my "Tango" vid, it was 62MB. Frankly, I’m not sure how to get a smaller one. It’s something I have yet to learn. :)
Creating con-ready files from your DV avi
Basically, LlamaEnc does all of the work for you. All hail LlamaEnc!!!
Open program, import your DV avi file. For me, I have to click on the Anamorphic button. But then the squished-ness is magically repaired. I love it. I scrub through the preview to make sure that things look okay, and that there is no interlacing.
Then I name it by the LlamaEnc naming conventions, even if the vid is not intended for Vividcon. I can always rename the files afterwards. Then I save it, and press Encode!
And then I go watch some more Dr. Who DVDs.
And there you have it, the sum total of my vidding tech expertise. It’s not much, but it’s mine, and it works for me. Let me know if you have any questions.