Akemi42

Welcome to my vidding journal! Most of my posts here will be public and everything will be vidding-related.

To watch what I make, please join the akemi42_vids community.

I promised I would get this Star Trek vid done before I started playing around on the Mac and Final Cut Pro. Now I am done so I can play!

Some new classes were also announced at 911 media today. I am trying to decide between Beginning Final Cut Pro or Integration-Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut Pro. The beginning class seems like it might be a bit basic, but I don't know if I can get comfortable enough with FCP in time for the more exciting integration class.

My new MacBook Pro shipped to me on Friday and I have finally had a chance to start transferring files. Here are the specs on my new toy...

2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB
128GB solid-state drive

I got the 13 inch version because I wanted something small to carry and I have a nice big monitor I can connect it to for vidding.

I have a copy of Final Cut Pro installed, but need to finish 2 more vids with Vegas before I start playing around. So for now I am just doing all the normal "new computer stuff" like transferring files and downloading software. I have to admit that Google Chrome for Mac is not as good as the PC version. There seems to be no reasonable way to manage bookmarks. So for my Mac lappy, I am back to Firefox.

Once I get vidding another worry I have is disk space. Right now my PC has a two 512 GB hard drives plus an external 1.4 TB hard drive. Right now the external hard drive is almost full of VOB files and chopped up clips in .avi form. I am planning to vid on the laptop by temporarily transferring the files I need from the external hard drive to the lappy hard drive (which is all fancy and solid state). However some of my projects are so big. For example, I have 208 GB worth of Harry Potter footage. I have 99 GB of House footage. My Star Trek footage is only at 39 GB so I could reasonably execute my plan with a Star Trek vid. I am going to learn to start picking and choosing the clips I need...and possibly also deleting some stuff.

And one quesiton for vidders who use Macs: do DVD Decrypter and Virtual Dub Mod work on a Mac? If not what software do you use to to rip and clip?

Now that I am done with my first vid of 2010, let's take a look back to 2009. I am aware that I am about 26 too days late on this one, but I think it is still timely as long as we're still in the month of January. Vids I made in 2009...

1. This Will Make You Love Again (Harry Potter, January)
2. Creep (Twilight, February)
3. I Like Birds (Watchmen, March)
4. Dance with the Devil (Death Note, March)
5. Crazy (Watchmen, March)
6. A Very Emo Blue Man (Watchmen, March)
7. Never Let Me Down Again (Watchmen, April)
8. The Man Who Sold the World (Watchmen, April)
9. Hero (Watchmen, April)
10. Tonight (Watchmen, April)
11. Sally, Laurie, and Eddie (Watchmen, April)
12. Vampires Are Alive 2 (Twilight, May)
13. Hurt (Watchmen, May)
14. Blue (Watchmen, May)
15. Everything You Want (Watchmen, May)
16. I Walk Alone (Watchmen, August)
17. Heroes (Harry Potter, August)
18. Death of a Superhero (Watchmen, August)
19. Snarry Games 2009 Tribute Vid (Harry Potter, October)
20. New Moon Trailer Remake (Twilight, October)
21. Evil Angel (Watchmen, October)

Crap, that is over 50% Watchmen vids! I can't believe that I have not made a House vid since Nothing Better. Let's face it: 2009 was the year of Watchmen for me. I blame Zach Snyder for releasing 50,000 versions of the film. Seriously, I was so inspired by this fandom that I even used poor quality bootleg footage because I just NEEDED to vid (e.g., vids 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, and especially 3 above).

( The vidding meme questions )

Meme taken from laurashapiro. Oh and I am sure there will be more Watchmen vids to come...

Ever since I started vidding in 2006, I have been producing vids like crazy...even if they are not all that great. I think I have been regularly doing one per month or at least averaging that amount, but for a variety of reasons, the past few months have been a dry spell.

And I'm back! Check out my latest Harry Potter vid here.

Now back to ripping DVDs and filling up the 80 GB left on my 1.4 TB drive. The next vid from me may be made on a Mac

I have just realized that my creativity and rate of producing vids has seriously decreased since VividCon. I think this is based on a few things...

1. My general lack of time due to my job
2. My experience at VividCon
3. Tech upgrades for my system
4. Having too much footage to rip (House, Star Trek, a bunch of Korean movies)
5. The crappiness of the deleted scenes from Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince

At the end of this month it will be my 30th birthday and I might be getting a MacBook Pro! Right now I am looking at all the specs trying to determine if any type of notebook will be appropriate for vidding. I am especially geeked because this group offers Final Cut Pro 6 classes in Seattle.

I hope this will help get me out of my creative funk.

In recent weeks, I have been thinking long and hard about buying a Mac. Instead I decided to spent 1/4 of the money I would spend on a sexy Mac on upgrading my current system. I now have Windows 7, a new motherboard with integrated video card, a 2.8 GHz dual core processor, 4 GB of RAM, and Sony Vegas Pro 9.0!

The problem is that all of the good source material is coming out NOW. I just got Watchmen: Ultimate Cut and have to go through the whole bloody 3.5 hours just for those 5 seconds of Walter begging for the newspaper. Star Trek is on its way. The HBP comes out shortly thereafter. I am also busy ripping Season 4 and 5 of House because I was not happy with the quality of footage I had earlier.

So yeah, despite all my new techy stuff, it might be a while before I get a new vid together.

I have been in a bit of a creative rut lately in terms of vidding. Usually I make a few vids a month, but I have been slowing down. Part of it is work. Part of it is trying to rip Seasons 4 and 5 of House. That is taking forever and right now I have over 99 GB of House footage...and this is after I have done some pruning too!

Despite my hassle with disk space, I managed to finally finish a vid I have been wanting to do for a long time about the Comedian. It is for vid_the_grid so here is my obligatory table...

1.	Saint	2.	Sinner	3.	Child	4.	Hero
5.	Mentor	6.	Trickster	7.	Wise Man	8.	Parent
9.	Scientist	10.	Warrior	11.	Joker	12.	vidder's choice

The vid can be found here. I almost used the "sinner" prompt for this one, but "wise man" just fit a bit more. Please let me know what you think.

A few minutes ago I posted the Tribute Vid for the 2009 Snarry Games. It was over four years ago that djin7 allowed me to make a tribute vid with all the art from the first year of the Games and four years later, I am still at it. And I don't know of any other art fests that have such a thing on a regular basis. There has been so much great art, so many YouTube accounts deleted, and even a trademark infringement issue. I feel so honored to be part of it all.

It's kind of hard to make a vid with a fixed amount of source material especially when it does not always fit together thematically, but I have had fun doing it. If you're interested, you can see them all here.

perosha just notified me about this news about the Warner Group deal. My gut reaction was "yay." Hopefully fewer vids will fall victim to muting and YouTube will once again be a place for vidders to share their work. Then I thought about it.

I concluded that YouTube probably realized that the lack of a deal with Warner was killing their business so they caved and agreed to pay an insane licensing fee. No one came to the realization that vidding is fair use because this wasn't really about vidding as much as it was about Death Cab for Cutie getting the vid on their official site removed. However I will point out that there are YouTube vidders (like these wonderful girls) who spoke out against the massacre.

So if YouTube just paid up, will this cause more content owners to play hardball in the future? Or is it a sign that things are starting to move in the right direction and that control on user generated content that utilizes copyrighted material will relax? What does this say for the future of YouTube as a place to share vids?

The main problem is that YouTube will probably never be the community it once was. It seems like everyone has left and those who stuck around do not trust the site. Additionally I bet I will have to re-upload all my vids to benefit from this deal. Pain in the ass.

On a somewhat related note while driving home I heard Ted Sarandos from Netflix say the following during an interview with On the Media...

"The DVR is going to be the savior of network television. I mean this is a device that less than two years ago everyone was suing to try to stop. So what I challenge content owners and cable satellite executives to think about is: what are the things that they are going to talking about as positive two years from now that they are trying to kill today?"

Good question. Maybe one day content owners will realize that vids are free advertising. *counts how many times someone has told me they bought a song because I used it in a vid*

I just finished Y: The Last Man and one of the little subplots involved a quote which made my vidding id feel all warm and fuzzy. This playwright is talking about comics...

"This format has all the advantages of film and none of the drawbacks. It's the cheapest way to get our unfiltered vision into as many hands as possible."

So how many vidders out there love comics?

Tonight on paintchat we were discussing looping "the handshake" and I decided that this needed to be done in video form. The result is, of course, pretty awful, but I did have to make a cute little intro.

Apologies for bizarre effects, cheese, and hasty audio editing. Watch the vid here.

I am sure that if I had been around before digital video editing, that I would have been too impatient to vid. Sometimes I just need to get a vid done NOW! I will be going on weeklong vacation next week and am obsessed with getting this Rorschach vid done, but I have no time to do it. I hate that sometimes I vid sloppily because I just want instant gratification. This goes on my long list of things to do better.

If you want to watch it, I just put up a new Watchmen vid here on akemi42_vids.

I know at least one other person has already made a Watchmen vid using this song, but I had to make one! And I had to wait for the Director's cut because I needed more footage of Hollis. I decided to use up my "hero" prompt for vid_the_grid...

1.	Saint	2.	Sinner	3.	Child	4.	Hero
5.	Mentor	6.	Trickster	7.	Wise Man	8.	Parent
9.	Scientist	10.	Warrior	11.	Joker	12.	vidder's choice

Please comment (especially with concrit). I know I added a bunch of people to this journal after VVC so I would love to hear your thoughts...even if they are brutal.

Since I know I will be making a million Watchmen vids anyway, I thought staking a claim on vid_the_grid might be a good idea. So he's my prompt table...

1.	Saint	2.	Sinner	3.	Child	4.	Hero
5.	Mentor	6.	Trickster	7.	Wise Man	8.	Parent
9.	Scientist	10.	Warrior	11.	Joker	12.	vidder's choice

At first I picked the Random table, but then dr_oil convinced me that the Archetype one would be more interesting. Some will be a challenge, but I agree.

If anyone else is interested in doing vid_the_grid, the introductory post is here.

Once a week has passed, I promise I will stop posting about this con, but bop_radar made a very detailed post that did a good job summarizing a lot about what I felt. It is really good to know that I am not the only one who felt this way.

I picked up effects sampler pack from NewBlue the other day and am experimenting. I vid using Vegas and I tend to use the same effects over and over. So far I really like the shaky camera and smear transition in the pack I purchased.

Has anyone had experience with these or other effects packages?

I continue to think about this term and found the Fanlore entry on "feral" rather interesting. Note that the entry indicates that the term is specific to vidding; the examples listed are feral fandom, feral vidder, and feral fan. I have never heard someone called feral fan fic artist or a feral writer. :P

I am going to suggest a non-exhaustive list of alternative terms to replace the word "feral" and I'll just start using these instead.In the context of a vidder I prefer...

1. Self-taught vidder
2. Self-made vidder
3. Autodidact

In the context of a fandom, I would like to suggest the following alternatives...

1. Modern fandom
2. Post-internet fandom
3. Gateway fandom (applies to some cases but not all I guess)
4. High accessibility fandom

I would replace the term "feral" for a fan with the following...

1. New fan
2. Emerging fan

I think all of these are more descriptive and less offensive, but maybe I just don't get it. I dislike labeling individuals in general because doing so often causes one to assume things about another person that are not always true. Please let me know what you think and if you have other suggestions.

The VividCon panel notes are stressing me out so I am going to stop reading them now. Instead time to watch Almost Unreal by karli_meaghan. It always warms my heart.

Tomorrow (after work of course) I want to get to work on another Watchmen vid with that sexy Blu Ray footage. I can't

Poll #1446694 Next Watchmen vid?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7

Check all the ideas you like

First off, I want to make it explicitly clear that I enjoyed VividCon and am very happy that I attended this year. I met some amazing people there and the experience got me thinking and finally posting it this journal!

That being said, I did leave the con one day early. I left because (1) I did not have a vid at any of the shows and was sorta bitter about this; (2) I didn't relate to a lot of the fandoms for the vids shown at the con; (3) I wasn't having as much fun as I have had at HP cons; and (4) I didn't feel like I could fully speak my mind.

Disregarding #1 (which is sort of a dumb reason to leave but I am being honest), I liken my VVC experience to the stereotype of an American visiting Paris for the first time. I am from the America of fandoms. Harry Potter is freaking huge! Like America, it so damn big that it has factions and subdivisions (LOL at the idea of the State of Snarry or the Republic of Wizard Rock). Like America, HP is very centered around a mainstream concept that everybody knows. Just like a lot of people in America don't have passports, a lot of HP fans are ONLY HP fans and don't travel the world of other fandoms or go to other cons. Like America, HP is relatively young. For the record, by young, I mean "not around in the early 1990's" as opposed to "full of young people."

VVC and the part of the vidding fandom who attend VVC are the fandom convention equivalent of Paris. I guess in my analogy the vidding fandom in general is France because not everyone who lives in France also lives in Paris...and not everyone who vids goes to VVC. Like France, vidding is relatively old and has serious history. Just like the average Parisian typically speaks French and is knowledgeable about French history, the average VVC attendee usually knows some amount of vidding history and has some level of vidding skill. Like the average Parisian, the average VVC attendee probably has a fandom passport and plays in a bunch of different fandoms.

Some Americans are really put off by visiting Paris. There are complaints about the people being rude, the streets being confusing, and the food being "strange." Some people go once and swear they will never go back. As I said before, I am talking stereotypes here. Personally I love Paris and have never had a bad experience there. I think this is largely a matter of luck.

At VVC, I felt like an unlucky American in Paris. I didn't know all the history and didn't relate to the fandoms. I didn't know many people and no one knew me...but most people knew each other. Some conversations I tried to participate in about fandoms or people I did not know sounded like French to me. I also felt really "patriotic" about Harry Potter fandom and this seemed to be looked down upon by some people.

My expectations for VVC were largely based on my HP convention experiences. One big shock for me was being labeled a "feral vidder." There is no label like this in the HP world. This term was applied to me a few times and at first I didn't mind at all. I thought it was really funny actually. However, the more I thought about it, the more it started to bug me because it implies that I am somehow unrefined and sloppy because I have not been part of the VVC community. It disregards the importance of the fact that I have been part of the HP vidding community. Just because I met most of my vidding friends on YouTube and accio_vids instead of at VVC does not mean my community is any less of a community. I liken this to the sort of Parisian snobbery a lot of Americans complain about. Not everyone in Paris is like that, but if you meet someone who is or that attitude is inadvertently conveyed to you, it is not a pleasant experience.*

My experience was also like visiting Paris because it rocked. I saw great vids and met great people. After all, Paris does have the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, delicious food, and the best shopping in the world. There's a reason people fly across the world to go to there.

I am not planning to be like those Americans who write off Paris as a bad place and never visit again. I plan to keep in touch with people I met at VVC and try to be active in the VVC community. I might even go again. Maybe next time if I think more about context (and perhaps study some French) I will have a better trip.

*Note: tjwritter helped me embrace the term "feral" recently. When I told her about its meaning in the VVC community, she responded with something like, "Well, I think as a vidder, I would see being wild and untame as a compliment!" I decided that she was right.