violet_skies: Artist rendition of me in a purple and white dress (Default)
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:

A clip of a timeline in Vegas editing software

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)



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)
violet_skies: Artist rendition of me in a purple and white dress (Default)
 

I grew up helping my dad with his small business. He was a live sound engineer (now mostly retired), so from my pre-teen years well into college, I would spend the occasional evening or weekend setting up and tearing down sound equipment for shows and concerts. My dad encouraged my love of live music, taking me to see the Mighty Mighty Bosstones at age 10, buying me The Smashing Pumpkins tickets for Christmas at the age of 14, and getting us tickets to see The Black Watch bagpipes and marching band troupe at 17. Music is still important to me, with LoFi beats helping me be productive during the work day and personalized radio stations accompanying every car trip.


Song choice is critical to a compelling AMV, both for me to watch and for me to want to edit. Songs that have weird flow, are too repetitive, or just not my taste make editing with them really challenging. When I first started editing (just last summer, mind you), I only had two ideas. One was to the song “Count Those Freaks” by Whitey. I consider electroswing to be my favorite genre of music, and this song (which is about zombies) I wanted to pair with High School of the Dead. My spouse, Tyken, who I had spent the last few months pitching AMV ideas at, was completely disinterested. I got the song, the source, and went to work. Well, by the time I finally finished it, the video was OK I guess, but High School of the Dead, which I hadn’t seen in many years, was not quite what I had remembered. First of all, I remembered actually liking the show, and it did not hold up on rewatch. Second, I had some ideas to do neat text effects, but between my skills and Vegas’s text editor both being somewhat lacking, the text mostly fell flat. I will probably try to remake it some day when my skills have improved. Source selection is a whole different ball game.


Electroswing, however, doesn’t generally make good AMVs. They can be repetitive, have nonsensical lyrics, and generally have a very different “vibe”. I personally lean heavily on lyric sync, so if the words of the song don’t work for my source, I won’t use it. Lyric sync is also the primary motivator of the car game (well, maybe more thought experiment) that my husband and I play in the car. We listen to every song and try to name a source that would pair well with that song. The pairings aren’t always fantastic, and they aren’t typically videos that we want to make, but it helps our brains think through the process of finding source and song pairings. 


I drastically prefer to start song first when coming up with AMV ideas. I can only think of one instance where I started source first, and that was with my Bluey AMV (It's Good to Be Curious). I need to feel inspired by the song I’m using. Finally, I get to the title of the blog entry–where do I find my songs? This next part will sound like a commercial. I get most of my songs from Pandora Internet Radio. If you aren’t familiar with the platform, you make a personalized radio station with a band or even just a song that you like, and Pandora will find you similar-sounding material. You refine the station by giving songs you like a thumbs up and songs you don’t like thumbs down. The individual stations can also be adjusted on the fly to different levels of obscurity. There’s “Crowd Faves” which are the most popular song, “Discovery” is somewhat obscure, “Deep Cuts” are really obscure, and there’s also “Newly Released.” I don’t use Crowd Faves, but the other three are common choices for me. I like “Newly Released” for AMV songs because I have a weird personal bias against using popular songs for AMVs. If a good AMV has been made to a song before, I probably won’t want to edit with it. But I probably have enough preconceived notions about AMV editing that it could be its own blo


I also keep a list of AMV ideas in a note app on my phone. Usually I try to come up with pairings immediately, but sometimes I hear a really cool song and want to use it eventually. During Project Org Editor last year, three of my seven videos used songs that I had on my list without a source. After 9 months of video editing, my list is up to 30 ideas… And sometimes when I start an AMV idea immediately, they don’t go on the list–the one I’m working on right now isn’t from there.


I think my next blog entry might be about sync. And I feel like one blog post a week is probably a good pace. We'll see how this pans out long-term.

January 2025

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