I think I accidentally started to make a vid last night. With a song choice inspired by watching wrestling this week *facepalm*. Oh, and it's a shipper vid *headdesk* [nothing against shipper vids, it's just that I'm a total failure as a shipper so it's not exactly a "vid what you know" scenario for me]. So I ended up staying awake until 5:30 am. I have zero clips to show for it so far, but I did manage to edit the song down to two minutes! Which is still probably 90 seconds more ambitious than my concept, but maybe I can just string together a 30-second sequence of clips and repeat it a few times, right? Especially since I've now got a track with 2 verses and what feels like 8 repeats of the chorus. But it's a great chorus!

See, I've been thinking about trying to vid for over a year now. By now, I've got at least seven or eight Works in Progress Solely Existing in My Head, because the software seems so daunting. And it is! I started off by trying Windows Movie Maker, figuring that it couldn't be that hard to pick up. And it looked pretty straightforward, until I imported an .avi of an episode and discovered that it only recognized the audio and not the video. I tried to figure out what was going on, via Google searches and looking through the tagged entries of the LJ vidding comm and making sure that I'd downloaded the right codec, and -- still nothing. I contemplated converting my avis to another format, but figured I'd see if I had better luck with another program.

So I, er, acquired Sony Vegas and couldn't get it to install. Next stop: Adobe Premiere. I got that to install easily enough, and it handled the avi files fine, but refused to import the mp3 of the song I wanted to use *sigh*. Which, okay, I could handle that, and I wanted to edit the song down anyways for a) length and b) wildly inappropriate lyrics. So I opened up Audacity for the first time, and it all went pretty smoothly (I hope? I cut a section out of the middle, and I think the resulting splice works but, hey, 5:30 am). Audacity let me export the edited song as a wav file that Premiere was now happy to import.

So I guess the next thing to do is watch the episodes and jot down scenes to clip? The Premiere interface is absurdly intimidating -- did I mention that I needed to choose an aspect ratio before it would even let me start a new project? -- and certainly overkill for my immediate needs, but so far it works. Maybe I'll play around with it a bit or go to a bookstore and find a Premiere for Dummies-type book. I still have no idea how I'm going to do stuff like match beats -- the waveform for my song basically looks like a solid wall, due to the heavy guitars.

Well, there goes my weekend. I'm posting this to keep me motivated -- it would be all too easy for me to give up, especially with the absence of instant gratification. Also my cat was really upset that I was ignoring him last night (or maybe he was just sick of hearing the same song over and over while I was fiddling around in Audacity). I'll have to come up with ways to reward myself for incremental progress and reward my cat for his patience and understanding.