SH021 - indirect

video: Akira
music: In Flames - "Pinball Map"
link: depositfiles [42 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: November 2001

This was the first video that I used rough-drafting on, a process that would endure for the next 71 videos, bar one that I did in Virtual Dub alone, and demos 2 through 4 for which that would have been a fucking waste of time. What this involved was, when cutting up the capped MPEG2 source, making two clips, one at the normal, original resolution, and one in crappy MPEG1 with an otherwise-identical name ending in _d (if I recall correctly) for "draft". When making the video, I would use only the draft clips, for better live synch, and then once the video was drafted to satisfaction, go back and rebuild it out of the high-quality source, matching the mark points as noted on the sheet of paper that was serving as the project file.

I could get away with this, of course, because MovieStar was basically a linear editing environment. Fucking around with clips, limited only to shortening them anyway, was a deadly bad idea for stability reasons, and similarly, the only effects were transitions and the only transition that didn't look like garbage was the crossfade. This limits what you can do, but makes it a lot easier for a learning editor to get themselves established in this kind of process.

Paper project files and the drafting process had their limitations, though; on SH063 I left about seven cuts out of the paper notes when drafting, which made things harder in the final assembly process than they needed to be, and on SH090 I accidentally destroyed one of the HQ cuts while making the drafting version. Of course, this was the luckiest video for it to happen on, because the source was an upscaled 320x244 ASF so I wasn't really losing any detail, and the video wasn't ever going to be generally distributed anyway.