(grin) I know my video doesnt have the comedy value or special effects of the others, or even the ineteresting background. What I was really trying to do, while I was learning HOW to create a video, was provide a one-take continuous routine which included all suitable dance-styles, no repeated flourishes, and showed how it was possible to perform (mostly) smooth transitions between them, turn to face the camera, etc. It's a technical piece rather than a consumer production but I'll try and jazz up the next one for you to make it a little more memorable
Awww! I'm sorry! Really it's cause I watched it at work while I was distracted. That and I know Javier, Balgosa's first video was shown on the big screen at Fan Fest (Not to mention it gets posted every other week on the corr forum....) and mine is.. well.. mine. I did forget some of Balgosa's too! Cheeky Cheeky and ... ummm.. his fourth one escaped my memory.
Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking But my smile still stays on My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die I can fly - my friends
Don't worry, Tiaga, I didn't take offense. When ranked against the other vids mine's almost not worthy of a mention. Very nice job putting this thread together babe, and a Sticky too ! Lets hope we can get a bunch more added to the list
Actually for my next video I'm thinking of getting a room full of dancers with no dancing skill at all. Want to get as many people falling at once as I can manage.
Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking But my smile still stays on My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die I can fly - my friends
the butterfly link doesnt exactly work but you can get it from this link i noticed:
http://lianne.angeltowns.net/butterfly.wmv
oh also . i have a LOT of these videos on my computer. If anyone would like to host a lot of these vids and has the bandwidth, i dont mind uploading em sometime. So far ive collected EVERY vid that played at Fanfest or that was listed to play except i cant find "Hawtpants Make me Wanna Dance".
Balgosa Windspire ---------------------------------------------------- -= Helios, Tatooine - Scylla =- Director of: Windspire Entertainment DJs on: WNUB Radio - Friday Nights 7pm CST
Updated (If someone call fill in the ?s I'd appreciate it) and added a little bonus! Some brief tips for those interested in trying their hand at this.
Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking But my smile still stays on My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die I can fly - my friends
I'm the mac person here, and I'll admit it. I use Final Cut Pro to edit videos, which is why my videos are all QuickTime based.
For the record, as you pointed out Tiaga, just about any computer based editor is non-linear. WAAAAAY back when they didn't use computers to edit, you would edit directly to videotape. Meaning you pick your next piece of footage, cue it up, then dub it onto the edited reel directly, doing transitions and stuff by hand using a special piece of hardware. This is called 'linear' because if you then wanted to go back and, for example, add in a clip or a few frames of video near the beginning of your piece, you then had to re-edit the ENTIRE thing over again from that point on. Yuck!
Enter computers. Anytime you can arrange clips onto a timeline and shuffle them around, you are non-linear editing. And thank GOD.
As for Final Cut Pro, that 'Pro' on the end adds to the price. They do have a lower end version with most of the features called "Final Cut Express' which is about $400-$500 I believe.
As stated, I have access to this program because I am involved with an interactive media company that already owns it. The program is amazingly powerful, but when cutting SWG videos, you'll hardly scratch the surface. We're not cutting film here, we're not compositing 20 layers of video, we're not doing high def or any of that other crap. Simply stated, this app is severe overkill and I would not recommend buying it just to cut videos for SWG.
It does come with a neato package called LiveType. The opening credit sequence for Cantina Crawl 6 is a good example of what that app can do with a minimum of effort.
The very best tool for video editing is, believe it or not, what you already have. Your creativity. Take a look at what the Windspire guys did, and the tools they worked with. What makes a good video isn't cuts, fades, wipes, effects and cool titles. It's the ability to touch someone, make them laugh, make them cry, make them happy. Any editing package and any tools can be used to do this. Everything else is just glitz.
Very well put, Javier! (Can I plagiarize... er... copy some of that?) Mac's aren't a bad platform for video work, really, but there are things easily found, and as you said (And I agree) SWG videos will barely even start to scratch the surface. The effect in my video that most people comment on was, as far as the editing goes, a series of simple disolves - even the most basic program could have done it. Might even have been able to get VirtualDub to do it.
Balgosa, to my knowledge, uses Movie Maker 2. The Solar Flair video I know for sure does. (Recognized the effects from my brief stint with them. Think I remember seeing some MM effects from Balgosa's videos too.) And their videos aren't any less for it.
And Javier, what's this about video? It's all about razors and film! The term "cutting room floor" isn't just an analogy you know. (Teasing.)
To my knowledge, the things I did in my video I don't think I could have done in MM:
The credit scroll... Very few programs think to let you have a really really really long text screen that you can get it all onscreen at once. And I really wanted to do that little detail that is so rarely done. To do that, I had a layer that was normal width, 10x height, used a titler to do a simple bottom to top scroll, then applied a perspective to it. While I'm not terribly familiar with MM, I can't picture it doing that.
The rapid cross-disolve close-up sequence. Dance With Me had 7 video layers. Of those, 2 were title layers (One regular sized, one super-sized with curley fries and a coke) and a layer I had as just a static image of my logo. Of the remaining four, I believe that all 4 are visible briefly during the cross-disolves. I know for sure at least 3 are. Can't do that without video layers, and I wanted the slight overlap in the disolves for effects.
Some of the transitions, especially the "custom" ones... But... So what? They are transitions. The derez transition I did because I committed an editing faux pas and needed to break things up somehow... The blur I did because I felt a disolve was too "gentle" and a cut too sudden.
Oh yeah, the zoom in the closing shot I probably would have had trouble doing. The pose at the end.. While the dance DOES stop and pose like that... It's very brief. So that's a freeze-frame with simulated zoom timed to match what the camera had been doing.
My next video... Well, I've got a few things up my sleeve for that one, and I KNOW that anything short of a pro package wouldn't be able to do what I want with relative ease. But I like toying with the technical size of things.
Anyway, Javier is absolutely correct... The best tool is your mind. If you just want to express your creativity without reading poorly written stereo instructions, Movie Maker is a perfectly good program, and has proven itself multiple times here. I post the others for completeness, and in case anyone else feels the urge to explore the possibilities. If anyone does.. You're in for one heck of a ride. But I wouldn't recommend shelling out money for anything, that's why I looked for a free alternative.
For the record, I do have a tiny teensy weensy bit of a background to draw on. (Which is why I know I had an editing faux pas.) But I really mean that tiny. I don't do anything like this professionally. The experience comes from my high school, which had a TV studio. I was on the crew for the televised morning show pretty much all 4 years I was there. I started on camera (Freshman always get camera so they can be bossed around) then moved up to CG/effects the next year. (CG = character generator - IE titles, not computer graphics, though technically it was that too.) We had a *gasp* linear editor there, a "video toaster" (Look it up) which was used for CG/effects and a few other things, and other misc stuff you'd find in a studio (Studio quality stuff, not something cobbled together... Well, not something cheap cobbled together.) My last year we got a mac with a whopping 20 gigs of storage (HUGE back then) and Adobe Premiere, thus my brief stint with it. I used it to totally butcher and deface the "Rambo" logo for a creative writing class project, and that's about it. It confused me. (We also had a lot of hiding places there for the videos that if anyone outside saw, many people would get in lots of trouble, possibly expelled/fired. Yes, the teacher running things was in on some of it. No, I'm not talking about pr0n either.)
Inside my heart is breaking, my make-up may be flaking But my smile still stays on My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies Fairytales of yesterday will grow but never die I can fly - my friends
Sorry, I did not post a thread about the video, I actually followed up to another thread about videos, including the link, and then posted to this thread. Do you want me to start a thread?
It's just La'lepa, so far. I haven't come up with a name for my "production company," such as it is.
As far as tools, I use Fraps and Windows MovieMaker 2. Actually, most of that first video was made with MovieMaker 1, which is extremely bare-bones. I got MM2 after the video was about 90% done, so most of what you see is basic MM1 stuff. I tried VirtualDub, but found it very confusing after being spoiled by the drag-and-drop simplicity of MovieMaker.
La'lepa Ofo
Master Dancer :: Master Swordswoman :: Force Sensitive AFKing is not entertaining - support real entertainers
