vidding_livejournal_ark2 | Newbie question: working with a lot of clips

I've been browsing the community memories for a while now and haven't been able to find an answer to this. It seems to me (please, correct me if I'm wrong) that all the how-tos and "vidding for newbies" and the like just give for granted that I know if I'm going to work with several clips, and how to do it.

The problem is my Adobe Premiere works alright as long as I'm using just one source vid. So far I've only vidded movies, so I just needed the whole movie file and everything went smooth. Now I want to make vids for TV series but I've been running into this problem again and again: how do you do it, clip-wise? There's no way I can use 20 episodes at the same time in Premiere without my computer exploding. Do you join all the clips you want to use in the same file? I've tried that with Movie Maker but it didn't work very well. Or do you cut each clip with Virtual Dub and still work with 20 different clips on Premiere, only they're small ones?

I'm really lost with this, so any help with your personal preferences and tips would be great.

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Yes, vidding a movie is much easier than vidding a series, but the very fact that a movie can be ripped in it's entirety to a drive has lured you into a dead end.

The following remarks come from an old-school vidder who began vidding with VCRs. The current software tools for computers can be fabulous, when you know what you're doing, but at the fundamental level of vidding, what you're trying to do is find a lot of very short clips from your source, clip them out, and rearrange them to your liking.

You really do have to scan through each episode and clip out the scenes you think you're going to use. Everybody has their own method of naming the clips you come up with; I don't trust Premiere as a library tool so we not only name each clip with keywords, but also write down - on paper! - each clip, its episode location, and a note about what's in the clip that we want to use.

You only have 20 episodes to scan: plenty of people vid series with a hundred episodes or more. The benefit of scanning the episodes before vidding is that you will inevitably see scenes you had forgotten that will be perfect for the vid. (Scan with the sound off - you see much better that way.)

And then, when you have your library of short clips and a rough idea - a storyboard if you will - of what the vid is going to look like, you can begin laying clips on the timeline, at which point you will discover that many of the clips you thought were going to work are all wrong, and you will have to go back to the episodes, scan them again, and clip new scenes into your library.

There really is no easy way around this. You could rip your entire series (only 20 episodes! you lucky person!) onto your hard drive, if you have the money to buy the drive space, but now you just have 800+ minutes of giant source instead of 130 to scan through to find
your clips. Ultimately, you still have to visually scan the whole thing. Much better, in my opinion, is to scan your source first, and do a kind of triage of possible vid clips.

So the short answer is yes, you do cut each clip with VirtualDub, or whatever means you have to get your source into your computer, and work with a number of small files in Premiere, going back to them time and time again, and clipping more as you need them.

Nobody said vidding was easy.

i know i have to scan the whole series to do the vid :) actually i'm planning to make a buffyverse fanvid, which between angel and btvs have far more than 20 episodes. the problem i have (and i'm sorry if it wasn't correctly worded!) is that once i do have those 20 clips i'd like to use in my video, i'd rather have it sort of glued together in one because i'm not really sure my computer will have the strength to work with a timeline made from different files, and since i have no experience at all with it just wanted to see how somebody else dealt with it.

i'm really sorry if this makes no sense, i can't seem to find a better way to explain it. never wanted to implied vidding was easy though, especially since it's obvious it isn't for me :)

Hmm, I see. I'm sorry if I sounded snippy. Without knowing what kind of setup you have there's no way to be sure, but I've made vids with Premiere on some seriously old and underpowered machines - slow processor, slow bus, slooow drives - and the number of clips in the project has never been a problem. *Rendering* could take forever, and there were times I had to wait and hum the Jeopardy theme while the video refreshed, but since Premiere uses pointers to the source files and not the files themselves, you might actually be making it easier for the machine by using several small files rather than one big one.

That said, I am a vidder from the age of the dinosaurs and working with multiple clip files is much more like working with tapes. Premiere is not the most forgiving program - finicky bitch is more like it - and if your source files have been ripped with different settings I can see how Premiere might choke on them.

But really, try multiple files. It's actually very efficient when you get used to it.

Newbie question: working with a lot of clips

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