Gone in 6 Seconds: Iron Chef that explores Clip Length Restrictions

The Bentovid Discord Server was my first and continues to be my best home for AMV editing. While in my heart it will always be AMV Sashimi, there’s room for all editors in The Box. One great thing about Bento is the opportunities for video editing both as a competition during RICE and as a form of pure creative expression during other activities. My newfound fascination is a channel called telephone videos, where you edit a short project (minimum 10 seconds, no max) based on the current “chain” of videos, keeping the source, song, or somehow making sure your video is inspired by the one that came before it. This is a standing channel in the discord that anyone can participate in at any time. In addition, any member can host a challenge or event about a subject or topic that interests them. I’m running an Iron Chef (abbreviated IC, or sometimes called Iron Editor, IE) in July where your secret ingredient is a font, and the goal is to create a video inspired by the font you receive. I love text work in videos, so I’m excited to see where people take it.

Recently, a great editor named Seasaltmemories hosted a challenge that focused on clip length. Every clip on your timeline had to be exactly 6 seconds long, with a minimum video length of 60 seconds. There could be multiple scenes within your six second clip, but you couldn’t break it up yourself. Clips can be sped up or slowed down provided that the duration of the clip doesn’t change. The bonus challenge was to take the exact same footage and put it over a different song to see how it changes.

This leads to timelines that look like this:



Each clip is exactly 6 seconds long, and I have 12 clips, for a total run time of 72 seconds. The green lines over the clips are speed ramps, using a Vegas feature called velocity threads. I used this challenge to teach myself how to use velocity threads, which create variable speeds within a single clip. The primary purpose of the velocity thread was to get some sweet, sweet internal sync, which is really important for an aesthetically pleasing video.

My initial reaction to this challenge was the following:

1. A slower song will look better with longer clips
2. If I use a movie I have less to scrub through for scenes
3. A song that hits 60 BPM will get natural beat sync
4. If my second song is 120 BPM they will feel different while still syncing to the same beats

This led me down a rabbit hole of trying to find song BPM, which is, quite frankly, impossible. Due to how songs speed up and slow down, sometimes three different websites might give you three different BPM for the exact same song. So I gave up my search and went with the first song to which my husband said “You should use this song.” That song was House of Cards by AViVA. I looked up the BPM, and by sheer dumb luck, it was clocked at 120 BPM. I listened to the lyrics and chose the movie Perfect Blue to pair it with. This was my second time working with Perfect Blue, so I was pretty familiar with the scenes. (Author’s note: Perfect Blue is a psychological thriller, and if you’re not familiar with it, it is violent, graphic, and has triggering content. I avoid those scenes in my edit, but I don’t want anyone to go and seek out the film without knowing what they are getting into). I hated almost every song I put over the footage for the bonus challenge, which was completely due to how heavily I relied on internal sync, especially in the photography section. I eventually picked a song that had a different tone than House of Cards to show how the same footage can hit different emotional notes. Fully Alive by Flyleaf is 149 BPM, and I think it shows through how the footage basically looks stapled on and doesn’t really pair at all. But I tried!

The end result was the following two videos. The opening bump is 6 seconds long to demonstrate how long 6 seconds actually is. It feels pretty long. (the middle bump is only 3 seconds)

Watch on YouTube

It was an interesting challenge, and I really enjoyed an excuse to teach myself a new technique. I foresee myself leveraging velocity threads more moving forward. See all the entries on the Bentovid YouTube Channel!

(And thank you to vivafringe for teaching me how to embed videos in dreamwidth)