Vidding - Tumblr Posts

Fanvidding used to be one of my things, last century and early in this one. I'd spend hours, days, with two VCRs or basic editing software, or with a mixer deck, especially if I wanted to extract a snippet of dialogue and mute the background music. "Labour of love" doesn't even begin to describe the process of getting a fanvid from concept to convention in the 1980s or 1990s.

I just had a couple of days trying out vidding on a high-powered Mac for the first time; a quarter-way-into-the-21st-century hardware and software setup, with nearly instant access to HD source video via the internet, and with by-the-hour rented cloud servers for uber processing power and AI automation when I need it.

It's like I've lived in 2 different worlds. Like, all that stuff I'd spend days doing by hand and ear and eye and brain to control the sound levels or trim a clip to the millisecond - there's software today that can do it at the click of a button in seconds. You want the soundtrack or ambient noise to vanish to isolate the dialogue? Done. Poof. Magic! Upscale that fuzzy old TV show to HD? Click! In an absolute pinch, my bloody phone can output a passable vid.

Vidding is still a labour of love, no question, if only because you need an awesomely detailed working knowledge/memory of the canon to cherrypick, but the whole production time scale has changed immeasurably within my adult lifetime. Amazing.

question for vidders: how do you get the clips for your fanvids? i’ve had an idea for a mandalorian fanvid bouncing around my head for a while but i’m not sure how to go about making it.