How To Vid Like Me: A Tutorial

Because quite some people asked me shizz and I had to delete my old tutorial vid. So this is a new tutorial, based on my current style.



What kind of software you need:

-Sony Vegas (to make the colouring work, other than that, I DUNNO)
-NewBlueFx for Vegas (don’t ask where to get it, forgot it, gooogle)
-Dvdshrink (to rip your dvds)
-or get the movies/tv shows via torrents.

other handy stuff:
-hypercam (to record shizz you can’t download off your screen)
-pond5 (where I get my overlays from, hypercam *hint hint*)
-1001freefonts (for great fonts like my favourite “Birth Of A Hero”)
-quotegarden (nice quotes on all sorts of topics)
-freesound (sound effects, registration required BUT it’s awesome)


tips and tricks:
-rips are always better because VOB files won’t make your Vegas crash as much as avi files (those thingies are too compressed which make vegas crash)
- whenever you’ve got time and get into a new fandom try to make a project file
and start cutting the episodes down. It’s a lot of work at first but you can vid much faster after that. go through the episodes and pick the scenes that look interesting/artistic/gorgeous and delete all the random crap you don’t need. Out of 40min episodes I get ca. 8min of vidable material.

example: my Walking Dead Project

Whenever I feel like vidding TWD, I just open the TWD project file and make the video in there. When I want to make a DW video I open the DW project file. So I’ve only got 4 vegas projects to make loads of videos. Organization: you’re doing it right.

Making of the Video “Derezzed”

Let’s see how I made the Walking Dead part of this video here

1. The basics
Listen to the song. Multiple times. You should have certain scenes in your head already. If you know some , put them in first. When you import the song it will look like this:

To make the video work try to concentrate on one thing. Either matching the
beats or the vocals or the piano, pick one part as main concept for your video.
Don’t let scenes play out for more than 5 seconds when you’ve got an upbeat
song (slow instrumental stuff is different of course) I love to match the songs
almost 1:1 which is why I do cuts with almost every drumbeat. The audio is the
spine of your video, you base everything on those wavy lines here.

the tracks
I work with 4-5 video tracks and 2-4 audio tracks most of the time.

video track 1 (on top of secondary) : main track, most video scenes
video track 2 (bottom): secondary track for additional scenes & fade in/out
[video track 3 optional if I need some clips set to alpha)
video track 4: text
video track 5 (maybe 6) : overlays (scribbles, shades, whatevs.)
audio track 1 (below text & overlays, on top of maintrack) - music
audio track 1-3: voice overs (might need more to adjust different effects for dif. voiceovers)

all my video tracks except for the text track are set to screen.
Here’s a screencap what the project file looks like with the tracks:

I don’t use any of the fade ins/outs you get with Sony. You can see I use the simple ones you can adjust on the clips. You can change the curve by right-clicking on the top of the blue curve (it will make your cursor look like a hand then), a window will appear where you can choose your fade out/in.

Once you’ve chosen your scenes and placed them right, matching to the song
etc you will get a raw version of your video. In my case it would look like this

Nice! It goes with the music, it looks interesting and yet it’s still a bit boring.
I just goes along with the drumbeat and to make it look more interesting with the
higher notes once. But still. We can do more about this and make it look more wohey-y. So what else could we do about it?

what I did apart from the basic cuts & scenes:

- internal movement
look for scenes that underline a certain wooosh of the song (see last scene with the camera work, zooming out, goes well with the last deep note of the song)
instead of doing cuts with every beat use something like a beat in your scenes.
like the arrow hitting the zombies head right at the beat at 0:06. Looks cool, makes it more baaaam.

velocity change
you can change the velocity of your clips by placing your mouse on the end of your clip (your cursor will change to two arrows pointing the opposite direction) hold ctrl and the left mouse button and pull it to the right to slow the clip down and to the left to speed it up. One need thing to do is speed the clip up a couple of milliseconds before the beat, and slow the rest of the clip down to slow mo right from the beginning of the beat.  (did this with the door scenes in the video)

freezeframes
Are always cool to look at but only if the moment is really interesting and only right on the beat. ( see Rick Grimes at 0:05)
You can do freezeframes by placing the timer right on the frame you want to freeze and press the little button above your preview window:


Save the snapshot somewhere and then place it on your track where you want the freezeframe. Example: Rick Grimes freezeframe

Bonus knowledge:
Since I wanted this video to look a bit sincity-y comic-y I made the freezeframe look even more different by using masking and cutting Rick out. I made it extra rough on purpose to make it look like a cutout. Masking is brilliant. You can find it by clicking “pan&crop” on the clip.

Part 2: The Effect Bizz

This is the part you can leave out or you leave it in because it makes the video look different. The video could be perfectly fine without the random stuff thrown in here, but I wanted to to effectbonkers so here’s the deal.

text
It’s become something like my signature now. Writing stuff on my videos which fits the mood and what my crazy mind comes up with at the very moment. It underlines the message, what you are trying to say with the video.
I love to use fonts like batang, Birth Of A Hero, times new roman, inkborrow.
But you can search 1001freefonts for cool stuff. Don’t make it too big, I use 16p-22p only, depending on the font. Makes it look more serious somehow.

Bonus: the crazy cut out text
1. choose text with background colour.
2. write your text and pic the colours, place it on top of your video.
3. the text file will cover you video with the colour completely, but this is fine.
4. click pan&crop on the text file and go to masking
5. cut the text out roughly (just like I did with the Rick Grimes freezeframe)
6. Et voila, your own blackmailing text. HA

example:


The text represents the high notes of the song in my video. I tried to match them.
Makes the video look even faster and match-the-beat, although I didn’t change a thing about the scenes.
See the video with text and what it does to it.

overlays
1.I got them from sites like pond5.
2. place them on the very top of your video.
3. set the track to screen
4. adjust the overlays by using brigthness&contrast, levels and b&w
 (mostly to get rid of logos etc)
5. use random scribbles that match the song somehow, or some nice addon stuff
to highlight things in your video like me - the blood whenever someone’s been shot.
6. you can see how I used them in the track screencap I posted.

The video is almost done, looks even more freaky with my overlays now.
Le lookee.

If I were to describe the ingredients of my videos by using former drummer “knowledge”
the maintrack is the baseline, the snare and the bass drum.
the effects and the text are the cymbals, the highlights, the additions.

the final touch - the colouring

the colouring does make a difference. In my case it makes the transitions look even more flashy and highlights details even more.


So what does the video I just explained to you look like in the end:

Here’s the full thingy.

Any questions? No probs, just send me a message on tumblr or youtube =)