Start Vidding on a Mac - A tutorial for computer Luddites - ;-)
Disclaimer: I’ve only been vidding a grand total of four months and am not a computer expert myself. Hence, this is an intuitive viewpoint gained from trial and error. Also, though everything is explained in detail for the sake of thoroughness, it may be a little overkill for some. I’m not trying to insult your intelligence, truly!
Before you start: Find as many vids as possible that you enjoyed watching and watch them again to get a feel of how they’re put together. Also keep an eye on the pacing, scene transitions and any effects that are non-pacing related. Do this with many vids by many different vidders to get the best results. And realize that whatever cool tricks they may have added? You probably won’t be able to do with iMovie. If you still want to make a vid (and personally, my favorite vids are the ones that have good pacing and almost no effects), keep on reading.
Next, you should have obtained these things:
*A Mac computer running Leopard (10.5) or Snow Leopard (10.6)
*Quicktime X, Quicktime Pro, or any basic video editor software
*iMovie 6 HD
*AVI, WMV, or MOV files of the episodes/movie you plan on vidding
*25+ Gb extra space on your hard drive
Now, the tutorial itself:
Part 1 - The Tools
Step 1: iMovie 6 HD Overview
When you open the application, hit “Create New Project” and select your video format. Use DV Widescreen to get the best results; DV is doable, but creates square letter-boxed vids. Once your file is named and saved in a folder, look at your program. There are five buttons on the right side that change what you view in the sidebar, and three tracks for clips/audio on the bottom of the screen. The first thing you need to do is import your song (choose “Import” in the File menu, or use the keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-I). If the song is in iTunes, you follow the pathway of Music > iTunes > iTunes Music > Artist > Song to import. This should take about a minute to import, and the song should then go in the second track at the bottom of the screen. (If your song needs editing of some kind, this should be done previously, as iMovie can only clip a song roughly.)
Next, you need your video.
Step 2: Getting your video into iMovie
All video files will be imported into iMovie as DV files for editing, no matter what format they originally came from. DV files take about 4 times as long to load as the actual length of the clip; therefore a one minute clip takes about 4 minutes to load. Yes, this is forever. It helps to have all your video clips for the vid in a folder before you start importing; then, you can import the folder, and as it may take a couple hours you can do something else in the meantime.
So, with that in mind, you will need to extract the specific clips you want from the episodes to avoid having to import the entire episode (a nightmare of a wait!). To do this, open your full episode files in your video editor. (If you have the latest Mac upgrade, this is really simple in the program Quicktime X. You select the “Trim” (Command-T) option from the “Edit” menu, and then move the little wipers on the bottom of the file to select which part of the file you want to select. Once you have a rough cut of the scene, click “Trim”, and then DO NOT SAVE. Choose “Save As” in the “File” menu to keep your clip AND the episode it came from.) After you have saved a whole bunch of scenes to use for your vid, import them into iMovie (and as I said before, it’s easier to import a whole folder of clips than one at a time). Since the clips are imported into DV format, they become very large in filesize, which is why you need around 25 Gb of free hard drive space to vid. Once the vid is done, though, you can export it to a normal file size.
Once imported, your clips will appear in the right sidebar of the main iMovie window under the sub-heading “Clips”. From there, you can click and drag them to the video track on the bottom of the window. Make sure that the tip of the cursor is centered on the video track when dragging, otherwise the video just bounces back to the “Clips” sidebar. Anything in the video track can also be dragged back to the “Clips” sidebar. Likewise, anything that ends up in the Trash bucket (lowest right corner of the main window) can be dragged to either the video track or the “Clips” sidebar.
Troubleshooting note: If your computer has limited memory, it may freeze the program while importing a large file or many smaller files. This only happens as soon as the file is finished, though, so if you “Force Quit” iMovie and restart, you will not need to reimport the clip. However, since the program had not processed it, the imported clip will be in the Trash until you drag it to the “Clips” sidebar. Usually the program will prompt you to look in the Trash after a freezing incident.
Important term to know: The line that shows where you are playing or paused in your vid is called the “playhead”. It shows the timestamp in terms of minutes, seconds, and frames (more about that in a second).
Next, let’s get familiar with your options in this application.
Step 3: What you can do in iMovie
Sadly, iMovie was not designed for fanvidding, and so your options are very limited. This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless you like fancy tricks in your vids. However, given how few options there are, it’s not hard to get to know them. Let’s get to know your essentials:
Split Video Clip at Playhead (Command-T)
From the “Edit” menu. This is almost the only tool you need in iMovie. Once your scenes are in the video track, all you have to do is trim them to the right length, depending on the rhythm of your vid and song. Note that the default visual size of the clip on the video track is relative to how long all the clips/songs you have in the vid timeline; the default is to show all clips onscreen. When editing, you may need to drag the slider in the lower left corner of the screen to zoom in on a certain clip or clips, especially if you are only trimming a few frames. Which leads us to frames.
There are 30 frames per second in each video file, and often smooth editing comes down to a matter of 2 or 3 of those frames. It is not usually difficult to trim a clip within 5 frames, but anything smaller and you may have trouble. Make sure that the clip is properly zoomed in upon on the timeline (using the lower-left-corner slider), and if you have to, use your spacebar key to pause/unpause clips as fast as you can until you move the playhead along the couple frames you need. Once the clip is trimmed, you can either delete the unneeded footage, or drag it to the “Clips” sidebar if you think you might need it later in the vid. Anything deleted may be recovered unless you empty the Trash. Next feature:
Show Clip Volume Levels
Another essential, found in the “View” menu. All your video files will be imported at full volume, which is probably quieter than the song you chose, but not quiet enough. At some time in the vidding process, you will need to make all the clips silent by choosing this tool. The audio level will appear as a purple line that you can drag up and down. Click at the beginning of each clip to make a smooth change, and once the volume is changed, choose the same option from the “View” menu to hide the purple line so that you can edit the clips themselves more freely.
Next, let’s look at some editing essentials in the right sidebar. To view all your editing options, click on the “Editing” button just over from the “Clips” button. There will be another set of buttons at the top, default to “Titles”.
Titles
This simply means any credits. The options are not very expansive, but they are functional. You simply choose what kind of title (you can preview everything), type what you want into the text boxes, change the font/color/size if you want to, and finally adjust the speed. Once your title is ready, you move the playhead to wherever you want to put your credits and click “Add”. The default option is for the title to be a separate scene, but if you uncheck the checkbox that says “Over black”, the title will play over a scene in the video like post-theme-song credits in most TV shows. The next button at the top is “Transitions”.
Transitions
These are exactly what they sound like. You can preview each option at various speeds (measured in frames) to see what they do to your scene transitions. One note, the length is somewhat limited. You can do a 2 or 5 frame transition, but not a 3 frame one (no matter how delicate you are with moving the length slider). Once you have assembled the transition you want, simply click and drag it down to the video track. After it is placed, if you click on it you may adjust the settings while the transition is still in place, and then click “Update” to enact your changes. The next button at the top is “Video FX”
Video FX
These options change the look of your clips. Most of the options are fairly cheesy and intense, but if you play around with the levels, you can create some pretty effects with most of them. Unlike titles or transitions, these affect the entire clip you have selected in the video track.
The most important option you should know about is:
Fast/Slow/Reverse
Unlike the other options under “Video FX”, this is useful for while you are trimming clips. If your clip is a little too short, you can adjust the speed with the slider. Be careful—the tiniest movement of the slider can produce visible changes to the clip appearance and length. You will usually only need to move it a tiny bit left or right, and even then, you may need to re-trim your clip once lengthened/shortened. The “Reverse” option should be self explanatory.
The other button on the top is “Audio FX”, but most vids will not need this.
Important note about “Video FX”: By applying one of the effects to a clip, you are essentially adding a “filter” over the clip. If you wish to delete the effect, you click on the clip and hit “delete”. The effect will be deleted and the clip will stay. This is true if you want to delete a clip as well, though. If after editing a clip you wish to trim it or delete it fully, you will have to hit the “delete” button at least two times to delete both the effect and the clip itself. This can occasionally be a pain.
Step 4: Using the Tools to Vid and What Happens Next
Once you have trimmed, affected, silenced, and completely prepared your clips, you need to arrange them. The song (and any other sounds you might have imported as sound effects) can be dragged around the vid, and the clips can be dragged around in relation to the song. At any point, you can hit play and see/hear the vid you have created so far. Remember to save often!!!
Once your vid is completed, it is still in an view-and-edit format, so you need to export it into a view-only format. Go to the “File” menu and hit “Export”. The simplest option is to export it as a Quicktime video, which is the default setting. Use the “Full Quality” option if you want it to be full sized, but this will be a very large video in both pixels and filesize. If you click the “Expert Settings” option, you will be prompted with another window. On this window, click “Options”. On the next window, click “Settings” in the “Video” subheading. Here you can adjust the quality of the video; “High” is the setting I normally use, and it creates vids that are usually less than 100 Mb. Once this sends you back to the previous window, click the “Size” option in the “Video” subheading. You can letterbox your video here by choosing any of the preset options, or you can create your own size with the “Custom” option. It involves a little basic math, but you can calculate proportions fairly easily to end up with a proper widescreen vid. My favorite size is 652 x 360.
Once you have your options ready, and your file name chosen, simply click “Share”. It will take around 8 - 12 minutes for your video to export. If you chose the “Full Quality” settings and the resulting DV file appears too large, you may either re-export the video, or open the video in Quicktime and choose “Save As” to transform it into a smaller MOV file (~50 Mb or so).
Now...hopefully that’s all the technical details you need to know for now. If you're completely new to vidding in general, not just Mac programs, below is something to give you an idea of how to think about creating vids.
Part 2 - The Art
Remember what I said in the beginning about watching vids you liked for inspiration? If you have a specific video that you want to make, try to look for videos in the same kind of genre—similar tempo, story style, etc. It helps to get an idea of how to put a video together. If you already have an idea about those things, here are the steps you can follow next:
Step 1: Absorbing Your Song
Listen to the song you want to vid. Listen to it several times before you open up iMovie. Once you have the vidbunny firmly in your head, listen to the song and envision the basic structure of your vid (if you’re familiar enough with the source material for this to work). Listen to it again with the same idea in mind. Think about what clips you’ll probably need, and listen to the song again for the rhythm.
There are three obvious ways to vid to rhythm. One is to vid to the rhythm of the lyrics. Not every line is sung with the same emphasis, and you may want to hold certain shots longer on held words or pauses, and you may want to speed up the shots if the singer has a point in the song where they sing fast. Two is to vid to the music, the speed of the background harmony and beat, which will probably have a consistent rhythm (but not an even one, usually). Three is to vid to the actual beat. Nearly all songs you will want to vid have a beat that is measured in 4 counts. This count may be fast or slow depending on the song, but it’s an underlying format like a heartbeat, and it’s a little easier to vid to than the other rhythm options because it’s steady throughout the song. You can vid every 4 beats, every 2 beats, every beat, whatever. It depends on how fast the count is. You don’t have to choose just one; it depends what feels right as you’re vidding, and what looks right. Consistency is good, but you don’t need to follow it rigidly.
Step 2: Storyboarding
Next, you will need to storyboard. Hopefully you’re vidding because you have both an ear and an eye for video as a medium—it’ll make this step come naturally. Go find the lyrics to the song you’re using, and put it in a word processor. If you’ve listened to your song enough times, you should have a feel for whichever rhythm you’ll be vidding to, so you should know how often you’ll need to change clips among the lyrics. If you have a story for your vid beyond just the lyrics, write out in a paragraph or two how your vid is going to go. Example: “Verse 1, ______; chorus 1, ______; verse 2, _______” etc.
For the more specific storyboarding, one way you can visualize your vid is like this: Divide the lyrics into sections of words, and add in something like “(instrumental)” for any place in the song where there aren’t words, but you’ll obviously need a shot there anyways. At each line break, you mark down a short description of what clip you’d like to use. Some specific clips should come automatically to mind; others, you might go “I need Character X doing something with Y”, and so you’ll need to track down an example. Either way, you start plotting down these points. Once you know all (or most) of the clips you’ll need, you have to go get them.
Step 3: Gathering Clips
Hopefully you’ll know most of the clips you’ll need to use through listening to the song over and over, and brainstorming. If so, this will mostly be bookwork. What I do to make it simple is gather all the short descriptions (from the storyboard) of the scenes I’m going to use and then put them into chronological order. Then I go through the episodes and pull each scene, name it according to the episode (and a number if there’s more than one per episode) and then put them in a folder. If you know all the clips you need, this may only take 2-3 hours. If you don’t, or you aren’t sure where the clips you want are, this process can take half a day or more. But believe me, it’s worth having all the clips ready at hand before you start vidding. It’s also worth it to wait however long it takes to import all the clips before you start editing. Once you get into the groove, it’s frustrating to have to stop and wait ten minutes to upload a new clip. Just like when cooking, you want all your ingredients at hand before you put the pan on the heat. So, after you have your clips in your program, then what?
Step 4: Assembling Your Vid
Three words are essential to vidding: pacing, pacing, pacing. If your clips are timed slightly off, or they last too long, or they don’t follow a good rhythm, it doesn’t matter how magnificent your vidding vision is: viewers won’t care. This is all subjective, so all I have to offer are a few guidelines that I use:
*Try not to let a clip last any longer than you have to without a change in angle ("have to" could mean for dramatic effect or if you have a slow song). I aim for less than three seconds, because I like crisp vids. Meaning, a clip can be from a single scene and be longer than 3 seconds, but if the camera angle changes halfway through, it’s really more like two 2-second clips. Why this guideline? One, most songs have a quick rhythm, and long shots drag them down. Two, your viewers have already seen the full scenes that all your clips are from, so they don’t usually need to see the whole thing again to get whatever point you’re making. Some vids call for languid speed, but most work better with upbeat pacing.
*Whenever possible, try to use shots where the characters are doing something. The clip may not be long, but if the character is standing still and being filmed with a steadi-cam, it’ll feel twice as long as it actually is. If the camera is moving, or the character is moving (even as simple as turning their head), or better yet if there’s actual action going on...the pacing will feel much faster, and faster is usually better. (BSG is a great fandom for vidding, since even “talky” shots are filmed hand-held and are therefore always moving a little. Stargate, on the other hand, is a pain to vid with all sorts of briefing room/science lab banter scenes filmed with static cameras.)
*Don’t forget transitions. They don’t need to be obvious, and in fact too many obvious transitions and the viewer will probably get lost in the special effects, but unless you want your vid to be “snappy”, you need something between shots. Using the transition “Cross Dissolve” at a speed of 2 frames is almost invisible to the naked eye, but it smooths out normal transitions very well. “Fade In” or “Wash In” (and “Fade Out” and “Wash Out”) can be used for emphasis, or the beginnings and ends of vids, or even between sections of the same vid.
Beyond that...everything is intuition. Some people vid out of order, some (like me) vid from beginning to end. However you choose to assemble your vid is up to you. Whatever you do, “Save” often!!! And make sure to continually go back and watch the stuff you’ve already vidded to make sure that your pacing stays consistent as you vid. And on that note, the last step:
Step 5: Polishing Your Vid
Let your vid sit. And sit, and sit some more. Inevitably, some of your scene choices will haunt you, and you’ll be itching to go back and edit them. Same with pacing; there’ll be that one transition that’s just a couple frames too fast, and it’ll bug you forever if you’ve already posted the vid by then. While your vid is sitting, make sure you watch it frequently. Watch it to get the feel of the whole vid, watch it for the little things, watch it to make sure your changes were an improvement. Give it plenty of time. And having a beta is always a good idea as well, or at least someone to watch it and give you a general thumbs up or down.
One important note: If you realize that one of your scenes was cut too short, and you need a couple extra frames on it to make the editing match up, this is not very easy to fix with iMovie. If you haven’t emptied the Trash in a while, you could pull up the rest of the shot that you clipped, and add in those couple frames. However, you cannot merge the two shots into one big shot, so there will be a tiny shot in between your other ones. This makes transitions difficult. What’s easier is to take the time to reimport the entire clip and recut the shot. But remember, until you empty the Trash, all your edits are still there and ready to be used if you need them.
So...that’s all I know. I haven’t used all the options in iMovie yet, and I probably never will, since I’m a simplistic kind of person. But everything’s easy to get to, and nothing’s permanent, so playing around is not difficult at all. Have fun with it! There are times I wish for a better program, but iMovie works well and it’s free and the vids come out nicely. For a beginning vidder, that’s all you can ask for. :-)
Disclaimer: I’ve only been vidding a grand total of four months and am not a computer expert myself. Hence, this is an intuitive viewpoint gained from trial and error. Also, though everything is explained in detail for the sake of thoroughness, it may be a little overkill for some. I’m not trying to insult your intelligence, truly!
Before you start: Find as many vids as possible that you enjoyed watching and watch them again to get a feel of how they’re put together. Also keep an eye on the pacing, scene transitions and any effects that are non-pacing related. Do this with many vids by many different vidders to get the best results. And realize that whatever cool tricks they may have added? You probably won’t be able to do with iMovie. If you still want to make a vid (and personally, my favorite vids are the ones that have good pacing and almost no effects), keep on reading.
Next, you should have obtained these things:
*A Mac computer running Leopard (10.5) or Snow Leopard (10.6)
*Quicktime X, Quicktime Pro, or any basic video editor software
*iMovie 6 HD
*AVI, WMV, or MOV files of the episodes/movie you plan on vidding
*25+ Gb extra space on your hard drive
Now, the tutorial itself:
Part 1 - The Tools
Step 1: iMovie 6 HD Overview
When you open the application, hit “Create New Project” and select your video format. Use DV Widescreen to get the best results; DV is doable, but creates square letter-boxed vids. Once your file is named and saved in a folder, look at your program. There are five buttons on the right side that change what you view in the sidebar, and three tracks for clips/audio on the bottom of the screen. The first thing you need to do is import your song (choose “Import” in the File menu, or use the keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-I). If the song is in iTunes, you follow the pathway of Music > iTunes > iTunes Music > Artist > Song to import. This should take about a minute to import, and the song should then go in the second track at the bottom of the screen. (If your song needs editing of some kind, this should be done previously, as iMovie can only clip a song roughly.)
Next, you need your video.
Step 2: Getting your video into iMovie
All video files will be imported into iMovie as DV files for editing, no matter what format they originally came from. DV files take about 4 times as long to load as the actual length of the clip; therefore a one minute clip takes about 4 minutes to load. Yes, this is forever. It helps to have all your video clips for the vid in a folder before you start importing; then, you can import the folder, and as it may take a couple hours you can do something else in the meantime.
So, with that in mind, you will need to extract the specific clips you want from the episodes to avoid having to import the entire episode (a nightmare of a wait!). To do this, open your full episode files in your video editor. (If you have the latest Mac upgrade, this is really simple in the program Quicktime X. You select the “Trim” (Command-T) option from the “Edit” menu, and then move the little wipers on the bottom of the file to select which part of the file you want to select. Once you have a rough cut of the scene, click “Trim”, and then DO NOT SAVE. Choose “Save As” in the “File” menu to keep your clip AND the episode it came from.) After you have saved a whole bunch of scenes to use for your vid, import them into iMovie (and as I said before, it’s easier to import a whole folder of clips than one at a time). Since the clips are imported into DV format, they become very large in filesize, which is why you need around 25 Gb of free hard drive space to vid. Once the vid is done, though, you can export it to a normal file size.
Once imported, your clips will appear in the right sidebar of the main iMovie window under the sub-heading “Clips”. From there, you can click and drag them to the video track on the bottom of the window. Make sure that the tip of the cursor is centered on the video track when dragging, otherwise the video just bounces back to the “Clips” sidebar. Anything in the video track can also be dragged back to the “Clips” sidebar. Likewise, anything that ends up in the Trash bucket (lowest right corner of the main window) can be dragged to either the video track or the “Clips” sidebar.
Troubleshooting note: If your computer has limited memory, it may freeze the program while importing a large file or many smaller files. This only happens as soon as the file is finished, though, so if you “Force Quit” iMovie and restart, you will not need to reimport the clip. However, since the program had not processed it, the imported clip will be in the Trash until you drag it to the “Clips” sidebar. Usually the program will prompt you to look in the Trash after a freezing incident.
Important term to know: The line that shows where you are playing or paused in your vid is called the “playhead”. It shows the timestamp in terms of minutes, seconds, and frames (more about that in a second).
Next, let’s get familiar with your options in this application.
Step 3: What you can do in iMovie
Sadly, iMovie was not designed for fanvidding, and so your options are very limited. This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless you like fancy tricks in your vids. However, given how few options there are, it’s not hard to get to know them. Let’s get to know your essentials:
Split Video Clip at Playhead (Command-T)
From the “Edit” menu. This is almost the only tool you need in iMovie. Once your scenes are in the video track, all you have to do is trim them to the right length, depending on the rhythm of your vid and song. Note that the default visual size of the clip on the video track is relative to how long all the clips/songs you have in the vid timeline; the default is to show all clips onscreen. When editing, you may need to drag the slider in the lower left corner of the screen to zoom in on a certain clip or clips, especially if you are only trimming a few frames. Which leads us to frames.
There are 30 frames per second in each video file, and often smooth editing comes down to a matter of 2 or 3 of those frames. It is not usually difficult to trim a clip within 5 frames, but anything smaller and you may have trouble. Make sure that the clip is properly zoomed in upon on the timeline (using the lower-left-corner slider), and if you have to, use your spacebar key to pause/unpause clips as fast as you can until you move the playhead along the couple frames you need. Once the clip is trimmed, you can either delete the unneeded footage, or drag it to the “Clips” sidebar if you think you might need it later in the vid. Anything deleted may be recovered unless you empty the Trash. Next feature:
Show Clip Volume Levels
Another essential, found in the “View” menu. All your video files will be imported at full volume, which is probably quieter than the song you chose, but not quiet enough. At some time in the vidding process, you will need to make all the clips silent by choosing this tool. The audio level will appear as a purple line that you can drag up and down. Click at the beginning of each clip to make a smooth change, and once the volume is changed, choose the same option from the “View” menu to hide the purple line so that you can edit the clips themselves more freely.
Next, let’s look at some editing essentials in the right sidebar. To view all your editing options, click on the “Editing” button just over from the “Clips” button. There will be another set of buttons at the top, default to “Titles”.
Titles
This simply means any credits. The options are not very expansive, but they are functional. You simply choose what kind of title (you can preview everything), type what you want into the text boxes, change the font/color/size if you want to, and finally adjust the speed. Once your title is ready, you move the playhead to wherever you want to put your credits and click “Add”. The default option is for the title to be a separate scene, but if you uncheck the checkbox that says “Over black”, the title will play over a scene in the video like post-theme-song credits in most TV shows. The next button at the top is “Transitions”.
Transitions
These are exactly what they sound like. You can preview each option at various speeds (measured in frames) to see what they do to your scene transitions. One note, the length is somewhat limited. You can do a 2 or 5 frame transition, but not a 3 frame one (no matter how delicate you are with moving the length slider). Once you have assembled the transition you want, simply click and drag it down to the video track. After it is placed, if you click on it you may adjust the settings while the transition is still in place, and then click “Update” to enact your changes. The next button at the top is “Video FX”
Video FX
These options change the look of your clips. Most of the options are fairly cheesy and intense, but if you play around with the levels, you can create some pretty effects with most of them. Unlike titles or transitions, these affect the entire clip you have selected in the video track.
The most important option you should know about is:
Fast/Slow/Reverse
Unlike the other options under “Video FX”, this is useful for while you are trimming clips. If your clip is a little too short, you can adjust the speed with the slider. Be careful—the tiniest movement of the slider can produce visible changes to the clip appearance and length. You will usually only need to move it a tiny bit left or right, and even then, you may need to re-trim your clip once lengthened/shortened. The “Reverse” option should be self explanatory.
The other button on the top is “Audio FX”, but most vids will not need this.
Important note about “Video FX”: By applying one of the effects to a clip, you are essentially adding a “filter” over the clip. If you wish to delete the effect, you click on the clip and hit “delete”. The effect will be deleted and the clip will stay. This is true if you want to delete a clip as well, though. If after editing a clip you wish to trim it or delete it fully, you will have to hit the “delete” button at least two times to delete both the effect and the clip itself. This can occasionally be a pain.
Step 4: Using the Tools to Vid and What Happens Next
Once you have trimmed, affected, silenced, and completely prepared your clips, you need to arrange them. The song (and any other sounds you might have imported as sound effects) can be dragged around the vid, and the clips can be dragged around in relation to the song. At any point, you can hit play and see/hear the vid you have created so far. Remember to save often!!!
Once your vid is completed, it is still in an view-and-edit format, so you need to export it into a view-only format. Go to the “File” menu and hit “Export”. The simplest option is to export it as a Quicktime video, which is the default setting. Use the “Full Quality” option if you want it to be full sized, but this will be a very large video in both pixels and filesize. If you click the “Expert Settings” option, you will be prompted with another window. On this window, click “Options”. On the next window, click “Settings” in the “Video” subheading. Here you can adjust the quality of the video; “High” is the setting I normally use, and it creates vids that are usually less than 100 Mb. Once this sends you back to the previous window, click the “Size” option in the “Video” subheading. You can letterbox your video here by choosing any of the preset options, or you can create your own size with the “Custom” option. It involves a little basic math, but you can calculate proportions fairly easily to end up with a proper widescreen vid. My favorite size is 652 x 360.
Once you have your options ready, and your file name chosen, simply click “Share”. It will take around 8 - 12 minutes for your video to export. If you chose the “Full Quality” settings and the resulting DV file appears too large, you may either re-export the video, or open the video in Quicktime and choose “Save As” to transform it into a smaller MOV file (~50 Mb or so).
Now...hopefully that’s all the technical details you need to know for now. If you're completely new to vidding in general, not just Mac programs, below is something to give you an idea of how to think about creating vids.
Part 2 - The Art
Remember what I said in the beginning about watching vids you liked for inspiration? If you have a specific video that you want to make, try to look for videos in the same kind of genre—similar tempo, story style, etc. It helps to get an idea of how to put a video together. If you already have an idea about those things, here are the steps you can follow next:
Step 1: Absorbing Your Song
Listen to the song you want to vid. Listen to it several times before you open up iMovie. Once you have the vidbunny firmly in your head, listen to the song and envision the basic structure of your vid (if you’re familiar enough with the source material for this to work). Listen to it again with the same idea in mind. Think about what clips you’ll probably need, and listen to the song again for the rhythm.
There are three obvious ways to vid to rhythm. One is to vid to the rhythm of the lyrics. Not every line is sung with the same emphasis, and you may want to hold certain shots longer on held words or pauses, and you may want to speed up the shots if the singer has a point in the song where they sing fast. Two is to vid to the music, the speed of the background harmony and beat, which will probably have a consistent rhythm (but not an even one, usually). Three is to vid to the actual beat. Nearly all songs you will want to vid have a beat that is measured in 4 counts. This count may be fast or slow depending on the song, but it’s an underlying format like a heartbeat, and it’s a little easier to vid to than the other rhythm options because it’s steady throughout the song. You can vid every 4 beats, every 2 beats, every beat, whatever. It depends on how fast the count is. You don’t have to choose just one; it depends what feels right as you’re vidding, and what looks right. Consistency is good, but you don’t need to follow it rigidly.
Step 2: Storyboarding
Next, you will need to storyboard. Hopefully you’re vidding because you have both an ear and an eye for video as a medium—it’ll make this step come naturally. Go find the lyrics to the song you’re using, and put it in a word processor. If you’ve listened to your song enough times, you should have a feel for whichever rhythm you’ll be vidding to, so you should know how often you’ll need to change clips among the lyrics. If you have a story for your vid beyond just the lyrics, write out in a paragraph or two how your vid is going to go. Example: “Verse 1, ______; chorus 1, ______; verse 2, _______” etc.
For the more specific storyboarding, one way you can visualize your vid is like this: Divide the lyrics into sections of words, and add in something like “(instrumental)” for any place in the song where there aren’t words, but you’ll obviously need a shot there anyways. At each line break, you mark down a short description of what clip you’d like to use. Some specific clips should come automatically to mind; others, you might go “I need Character X doing something with Y”, and so you’ll need to track down an example. Either way, you start plotting down these points. Once you know all (or most) of the clips you’ll need, you have to go get them.
Step 3: Gathering Clips
Hopefully you’ll know most of the clips you’ll need to use through listening to the song over and over, and brainstorming. If so, this will mostly be bookwork. What I do to make it simple is gather all the short descriptions (from the storyboard) of the scenes I’m going to use and then put them into chronological order. Then I go through the episodes and pull each scene, name it according to the episode (and a number if there’s more than one per episode) and then put them in a folder. If you know all the clips you need, this may only take 2-3 hours. If you don’t, or you aren’t sure where the clips you want are, this process can take half a day or more. But believe me, it’s worth having all the clips ready at hand before you start vidding. It’s also worth it to wait however long it takes to import all the clips before you start editing. Once you get into the groove, it’s frustrating to have to stop and wait ten minutes to upload a new clip. Just like when cooking, you want all your ingredients at hand before you put the pan on the heat. So, after you have your clips in your program, then what?
Step 4: Assembling Your Vid
Three words are essential to vidding: pacing, pacing, pacing. If your clips are timed slightly off, or they last too long, or they don’t follow a good rhythm, it doesn’t matter how magnificent your vidding vision is: viewers won’t care. This is all subjective, so all I have to offer are a few guidelines that I use:
*Try not to let a clip last any longer than you have to without a change in angle ("have to" could mean for dramatic effect or if you have a slow song). I aim for less than three seconds, because I like crisp vids. Meaning, a clip can be from a single scene and be longer than 3 seconds, but if the camera angle changes halfway through, it’s really more like two 2-second clips. Why this guideline? One, most songs have a quick rhythm, and long shots drag them down. Two, your viewers have already seen the full scenes that all your clips are from, so they don’t usually need to see the whole thing again to get whatever point you’re making. Some vids call for languid speed, but most work better with upbeat pacing.
*Whenever possible, try to use shots where the characters are doing something. The clip may not be long, but if the character is standing still and being filmed with a steadi-cam, it’ll feel twice as long as it actually is. If the camera is moving, or the character is moving (even as simple as turning their head), or better yet if there’s actual action going on...the pacing will feel much faster, and faster is usually better. (BSG is a great fandom for vidding, since even “talky” shots are filmed hand-held and are therefore always moving a little. Stargate, on the other hand, is a pain to vid with all sorts of briefing room/science lab banter scenes filmed with static cameras.)
*Don’t forget transitions. They don’t need to be obvious, and in fact too many obvious transitions and the viewer will probably get lost in the special effects, but unless you want your vid to be “snappy”, you need something between shots. Using the transition “Cross Dissolve” at a speed of 2 frames is almost invisible to the naked eye, but it smooths out normal transitions very well. “Fade In” or “Wash In” (and “Fade Out” and “Wash Out”) can be used for emphasis, or the beginnings and ends of vids, or even between sections of the same vid.
Beyond that...everything is intuition. Some people vid out of order, some (like me) vid from beginning to end. However you choose to assemble your vid is up to you. Whatever you do, “Save” often!!! And make sure to continually go back and watch the stuff you’ve already vidded to make sure that your pacing stays consistent as you vid. And on that note, the last step:
Step 5: Polishing Your Vid
Let your vid sit. And sit, and sit some more. Inevitably, some of your scene choices will haunt you, and you’ll be itching to go back and edit them. Same with pacing; there’ll be that one transition that’s just a couple frames too fast, and it’ll bug you forever if you’ve already posted the vid by then. While your vid is sitting, make sure you watch it frequently. Watch it to get the feel of the whole vid, watch it for the little things, watch it to make sure your changes were an improvement. Give it plenty of time. And having a beta is always a good idea as well, or at least someone to watch it and give you a general thumbs up or down.
One important note: If you realize that one of your scenes was cut too short, and you need a couple extra frames on it to make the editing match up, this is not very easy to fix with iMovie. If you haven’t emptied the Trash in a while, you could pull up the rest of the shot that you clipped, and add in those couple frames. However, you cannot merge the two shots into one big shot, so there will be a tiny shot in between your other ones. This makes transitions difficult. What’s easier is to take the time to reimport the entire clip and recut the shot. But remember, until you empty the Trash, all your edits are still there and ready to be used if you need them.
So...that’s all I know. I haven’t used all the options in iMovie yet, and I probably never will, since I’m a simplistic kind of person. But everything’s easy to get to, and nothing’s permanent, so playing around is not difficult at all. Have fun with it! There are times I wish for a better program, but iMovie works well and it’s free and the vids come out nicely. For a beginning vidder, that’s all you can ask for. :-)
28 comments | Leave a comment