I'm All In

Well it turns out I love video recording and editing. Having never seriously thought about trying it, I never knew. I love hearing about the artistry and super subtle nuances of editing video. I watch not only YouTube editing tips (My chosen medium) but actual movie editing insights and advice.

I've been circling between making music then making videos for the music then producing videos for my new watch nerd channel. The music videos are still patchworked clips of movies and other YouTube videos but they are a great learning arena.

I then apply what I learn there to my watch nerd videos. Although my videos are just vlog style, I want to find ways of telling stories or evoking emotions, thoughts, excitement simply by way of how I've edited my clips.

I need to improve my filming skills as well. I think part of that is equipment due to the dark setting I film in. My Pixel seems to take grainy footage in such scenarios.

I'm already feeling more comfortable in front of the camera, and getting more proficient in Blender's video editor.

We'll see how it goes.

Strobe Hack

I am definitely still a Blender video editing noob. I am working on another video clip collage for the latest Neutrient song I've made. To give the video energy and movement I wanted to add a strobe effect. In Blender's video editor the Transform blocks have a strobe option along with a setting to get it to fire every X frame. So I gave this option a try.

No matter what settings I used it appeared to have no affect at all. When I tried hitting the internet I didn't see any conversations on this feature. I decided to think of a hacky way I could pull it off using the tricks I've learned so far.

I do a lot of layering in my videos. Adding one clip on top of the other and setting the top one's alpha over to < 1. So I hopped on YouTube and found a video that was just black flashing to white and back. Just the strobe I needed.

I dropped that clip over some of my other clips and turned down its alpha. Perfect. I now have a cool strobe effect I can add wherever I want.

FPS Mismatch Pain

I am dipping my toes into video production. I began with some collage-style music videos now I am starting a YouTube channel about wrist watch nerdery. One pain has become immediately apparent is the trouble of frame rate. I made the mistake of adding audio as the first component to my video, so the frame rate wasn't set to my video's FPS. To my surprise the audio was out of sync with the video. I had never encountered this, my collage videos all used an audio track and video only clips.

I tried going into VLC and saving each clip's audio as a separate file, then importing it into Blender but I wasn't aware of exactly what was going on. It was still out of sync.

I next tried manually getting the FPS to match my video but then it refused to render (I later found some other settings I could have tried that may have helped).

My projects were still set to 30FPS so I had to keep all my clips short so that the mismatch was unnoticeable. I then learned how to set my phone camera to 60FPS and figured while I'm struggling with this, I may as well get a higher frame rate.

Bad Idea.

The only camera on my phone that is capable of 60FPS is the back camera. The front camera is still 30FPS. So I ended up with some clips at 60FPS and some at 30FPS. So I went through every 60FPS clip and converted it to 30FPS using FFMPEG.

Tonight I'll be starting a new video. I'm hoping it goes smoothly. By dragging my clip into the timeline first thing I believe the project will automatically set the the FPS.

After working on the video tonight, it did indeed set a custom FPS, however there is still a little bit of drift. This will be a problem when I get better and can create longer takes but for now it works well enough.