The Voyager Conspiracy - Video Making Guide

Video Making Guide

By Sazzy (sazzy@voyager-conspiracy.co.uk)

Original: September 2006
Updated: May 2008

I’ve had quite a few queries over the time I’ve been making vids on everything from what software to use to how to rips clips to what format to output them in. So with a little prompting I decided it was probably a good idea to finally write one single guide that I can refer people to.

This is intended to be a guide to the process of making videos from initial idea to final product. I’m concentrating more on high level concepts and processes, rather than loads of technical detail that will make your brain hurt. That said, obviously I have to include some specifics, but you’re free to email me and ask about anything that’s not clear! I also concentrate primarily on Voyager vidding, but the techniques discussed could be used to make videos for any sort of fandom.

One thing I should mention that though this guide might seem clinical at times, vidding is actually a very personal (and creative) thing. These are just meant as some handy hints and tips, but in the end you should just go with what you feel and what pleases you. Each video is the imaginings of your imagination and ultimately only you can tell what you want to do with it.

I’ve divided the guide up into some sections as follows:

Choosing a song
Planning your video
Video editing software
Getting video clips
Creating your video
Ouputting your video
Releasing your video

1. Choosing a song

Ok, so you’ve decided you want to make your own video, but where do you start? In 99 cases out of 100 I personally start with the song. Nearly always I will hear a song and something about it will cause me to link it to J/7 (or whatever subject you’re interested in). It’s very, very rare that I’ll think…”I want to do a video where Janeway gets jealous of Seven and then wins her over”…(or something similar) and then go looking for a song to suit.

However, don’t just pick the first song that tickles your fancy. Once you start really listening to lyrics and trying to associate them with your chosen subject, you’ll quickly realise you can turn pretty much any song into a video (just look at Fast Food!). You should pick something that really means something to you and inspires you for your first effort. It should also be a song that you’re not going to mind hearing over and over and over and over again (believe me, you may well never want to hear it again once you’re finished!).

One other thing to bear in mind is who your audience is. If you’re doing it purely for yourself then pick what you damn well please! However, if you’re hoping to get other people interested in watching it, you might want to consider how well known the song is. If you pick something by some really obscure artist that no one else will ever have heard of, you’re decreasing the chances that people will want to watch/sit through your video. There’s definitely something to be said for the sing/hum-along factor in keeping people hooked just as much as whatever visuals you choose. I know I’ve started watching other people’s videos in the past and had to really force myself to watch to the end because I didn’t know/like the song.

I tend to favour songs that have a bit of pace, or at least something dramatic/angsty about them, because this gives much more opportunities for interesting visuals to accompany the song. Slow love songs may be beautiful and heartfelt and scream J/7 to you, but as videos they can be pretty samey and a bit dull (the editing has to match the slow pace of the song, and you’re going to have to use the same scenes as a hundred and one other videos – they sit by the fire, Janeway kneels before Seven etc etc ).

Something else to consider is access to the song. For most video editing software you’re going to need to have it in mp3 (or some other common) format. The video editing software I use doesn’t allow encrypted things such as the m4ps you get from iTunes even though you’ve legally paid for them. However, this doesn’t mean iTunes (or similar pay services) are out of the question as a source – you can always burn the track to cd and then rip it back onto your PC as an mp3 to get round the problem. Of course the best source is your own collection of music on cd (if people still have them!) and another favourite of mine is WinMX. This is a file sharing program (in the form of Kazaa or old Napster just without the horrible spyware). WinMX has suffered a bit since I first wrote the guide, so the number of tracks available on it isn't as good as it used to be, but it can still be a useful source.

2. Planning your video

You’ve now chosen your song and already you probably have a few ideas flashing through your mind about what happens in the video you’re going to make - so you need to write these down!

Actually that’s not strictly true. Iin fact I don’t often write my ideas down these days, but in the beginning I nearly always used to, so it’s probably a good thing to do when starting out.

Notes are a good thing to make sure your video doesn’t just wander along aimlessly, or start fabulously before petering out into nothingness. One thing to consider is what the overall theme/story/mood of your video is meant to be right at the beginning. It’s not much good having something that veers between comedy and dark angst (unless that’s what you really intended!).

The story/theme/mood doesn’t have to be anything too deep and meaningful – “Janeway kicks ass” is a perfectly acceptable theme! Alternatively it can have its own mini plot, e.g. Roxanne where Seven flirts with various men, making Janeway increasingly jealous before Janeway snaps and hunts her down for a confrontation. Beware of making these plots too complicated, though. It may make perfect sense to you at the time, but remember the casual viewer won’t have been considering your video and song over and over for hours on end. I realised this with my Achilles Heel video when I watched it back. The multiple timelines were straight in my mind, but anyone else would have wondered what the hell was going on! (hence the addition of the helpful subtitles after the video was finished).

Another thing to think about is who’s meant to be singing it? I.e. is the singer Janeway, is it Seven, or is it just sung about them by an anonymous third party? You can switch between viewpoints during the video if you want to, but as with the above note on convoluted plots, this might get tricky for the viewer to understand. Your watchers shouldn’t need a reem of subsidiary notes to understand what’s happening in your video! The song and images should be self explanatory for the most part.

A few other considerations are what the timeline of the video is meant to be (is some of it told in flashback? Is it set over a certain season?) and whether there are recurring themes/lyrics where you want similar things to happen each time.

How you make your notes is up to you. My preferred method (which I don’t actually employ anymore!) was to get the lyrics to the song and then put them in a table with a spare column to the right where I could note down what happened in conjunction with those specific lyrics. Sometimes that was just something general, e.g. Janeway is watching Seven (which I would later need to find a matching scene for), sometimes that was a specific scene if I had one in mind already, e.g. Janeway kneels before Seven in Voyager Conspiracy (as you can imagine that one cropped up in a lot of notes!).

I personally found writing it out like this would make sure the whole video was consistent. If you just go straight to editing, chances are you’re going to lose track of where you’re going – it’s good to have a goal in mind. Planning also helps keep the excitement/tension up in your video. If you just start at the beginning and work through as you go, you might use all the best/exciting scenes up and have nothing to stick at the end of your video. Or even worse you might get fed up and finish it in a hurry with filler for the last couple of minutes.

An alternative to making notes is to edit as you go. I’ll mention this in a bit more detail in the section on making your video. Even if you’re going to do this it’s probably a good idea to at least know what the vague story/theme/mood and the viewpoint of your video is meant to be before you start.

3. Video editing software

This is the software you use to actually join your visuals together with your audio to make your video and create an output file. It’s what you’re going to need unless you intend using the power of your mind to broadcast your masterpiece to the world.

Here I have to admit to being no expert (that is in video editing software, not using the power of my mind to broadcast to the world, in which, of course, I have loads of experience). I’ve used only two different applications to make by videos - the stunningly basic (some might say crap) WinProducer and more recently the stunningly fabulous Sony Vegas .

The most commonly used application by other vidders is Windows Movie Maker, primarily because it’s free if you have Windows XP, rather than because it’s actually that good. I don’t have first hand experience of WMM, but I’ve heard it’s meant to be rather prone to crashing/seizing up randomly and making you want to put a fist through your screen as you realise you didn’t save that scene you were editing for the last 3 hours. That said, it’s probably your best bet if you’re new to vidding and don’t want to shell out for an application – just make sure you save your work regularly!

A couple of other alternatives that will cost you…*gasp*…money (unless you’re one of those naughty hacker types) are Adobe Premiere which comes in two forms – Elements (about $100) and Pro (seriously expensive) – and Pinnacle Studio (also about $100). Just google either of these if you want to splash the cash! The aforementioned Sony Vegas also costs money unless you have any nice friends *innocent whistle*

I’m sure there are a multitude of other applications too – just use your friendly neighbourhood google for more details.

4. Getting Clips

You’re not going to get very far without some source material to create your video. There are a few ways you can go about getting the necessary clips:

a. Download existing videos and chop them up
b. Rip whole episodes yourself
c. Rip specific scenes yourself

(N.b. “rip” means convert all or part of a dvd into a compatible file format to import into your video editing software, e.g mpeg, avi etc. You can rip video too, but since I have no experience of this I’m going to concentrate on dvd)

a. Download existing clips and chop them up - this may sound a bit naughty and cannibalistic, but actually it’s a good place to start, especially if you just want to have a play around. Most vidders won’t mind you doing this with their videos as long as you don’t take great lumps of their videos and just re-present them to different music. Be aware of taking their editing too, such as use of slow motion, greyscale, transitions or spliced scenes (two scenes put together to make a new one). Once you’ve downloaded their video and imported it, most video editing software will cut it up for you automatically into smaller scenes that you can refine.

b. Rip whole episodes yourself – if you do have the dvds then you can create your own source material. This can be time consuming, but at least you’ll know your video is 100% original. I don’t actually know the best software for ripping whole episodes since I actually use method c below. This is because my video editing application doesn’t do that handy thing I mentioned of cutting large scenes automatically up for you. The prospect of having to drag 40 minutes of video through the timeline every time I wanted to find something was not very appealing!

c. Rip specific scenes yourself – This is the method I use mainly for the reason given above. Also with smaller files, you know what each one is about and you get exactly what you want without lots of extra unwanted stuff (endless scenes of Chakky looking wooden, Tuvok looking stoic etc). The downside is that if you realise you need something else you’re going to have to go back to the episode and rip that specific bit.

Since I use c, that’s the one I’m going to talk about here. When I talk about ripping specific scenes, I mean ripping one or two minutes of footage from a particular episode, e.g. the Delta Flyer Scene from the end of Voyager Conspiracy (though actually that one’s about 5 minutes long, but you get the point!), and saving it as an avi (in my case, though you can save it as other formats).

Of course the first stage is deciding what you actually want to rip, and that’s down to your video and what you need. This is where your knowledge of Voyager is going to come into play unless you want to watch all 170 odd episodes in search of the perfect scene of Janeway smiling. Over time you’ll obviously build up a library of clips that you can re-use but when you start out, you’re just going to have to go by what you remember (or what you might have seen in other videos) and rip accordingly, e.g. you know you want the Delta Flyer scene from Voyager Conspiracy, them sitting by the fireside in Omega Directive etc.

An alternative to this is to painstakingly work your way through all the dvds and rip all the scenes you think might come in handy at some point. This is what I did once I got the dvds but it takes a long, long, long time! (I hate to think how long, but it was done sporadically over a period of months). So now I have a library of over 1000 clips (at which point the task becomes remembering what’s in each one!) that I can just use when I want to make a new video. Even then I sometimes have to go back and rip new scenes. If you’re going to take this approach I recommend making some formal notes of what the key things in each clip are in some document/spreadsheet/database that you can refer back to, e.g. Janeway smiles, Janeway drinks coffee, Janeway fires Betsy etc. I did this for some of mine but then got lazy and now I have to try and just remember which clip I need when I’m looking for something specific.

Naming your clips consistently is also going to help locate the right images. I gave mine a naming convention of a prefix for the episode, a prefix for who was in the scene and finally a descriptive name, e.g. imp_J7_Sickbay (from Imperfection and features a J/7 sickbay encounter) or kg_J7_NaziExplosion (from Killing Game, featuring J/7 running from the exploding building) or ng_J_QuartersMood (from Night, Janeway’s all moody in her quarters) or end_ship_InConduit (from Endgame, the ship flies down the borg conduit) etc.

So how do you create all these lovely files? Well, there’s lots and lots of ripping software out there, but the one I use is called 1 Click DVD Ripper. I’m not claiming this is the best by any means, but it works for me. There is a charge if you want the full version (about $30), or you can get the free version which rips 30% of what you want. You might think this sounds a bit crap – what good is 30% of what you want? – but you can fool the application if you’re only requiring small bits of an entire episode by telling it you want more than you really do (e.g. if you want the scene at 1:00 – 2:00, you just tell it you want 1:00 – 4:00 and you get what you originally wanted!). I just got fed up of having to make all these calculations since I was ripping so many clips and shelled out for the proper thing.

http://www.1clickdvdripper.com/

I’m going to give a brief guide to using 1 Click here, so you can skip this bit if you’ve got your own ripping app, or you’re just bored by what I have to say ;)

1. Put a dvd in your cd drive

2. Play the dvd in your dvd playing software for a couple of seconds (or force it to be played if this doesn't start automatically - you need to do this to initialise the decoder for some reason)

3. Stop the dvd being played and close the playing application.

4. Double-click on 1 click dvd ripper

5. You get a window with "1 click dvd riper" in the main bit and "wizard" "start" and "burn cd" buttons at the bottom

6. Click the "wizard" button

7. Select the "Open IFO or VOD" option, then click the three dots button to browse for the file you want

8. Navigate to your cd drive and pick the appropriate ".IFO" file. This is important - don't pick one of the ".VOB" files - you want the IFO!! E.g. if you are trying to rip from the first episode on the dvd, then select "VTS_01_0.IFO", if you want episode 2, then pick "VTS_02_0.IFO" etc The IFO file is like the index to the episode, whereas the .VOB files are the raw video.

9. Once you've picked your file you go back to the 1 click dvd ripper screen and click next.

10. Now you have the "step 2: Input Settings" screen. You don't need to anything on here apart from click "next"

11. Now you are on "step 3: segment select". Select the "choose a segment by time" and enter the time segment you want. Now click "next". Note that 1 Click isn’t spot on perfect – you’ll find that it’s often a few seconds out one way or the other. So be generous in specifying the time limits of the scene you want (add on a few seconds at either end).

12. You are now on "Step 4: Output Setting". By the "output file path" input box is another three dots browsing thing. You need to select this and enter a file name, otherwise it won't work properly. Once you've entered the file name click on "save" and you're back on the "step 4" page again with your file name now filled in. You MUST use the browse button to do this. It won't work if you just type in the file name.

13. Click "finish" and you should be taken back to the main window

14. Click "start" and off it goes!

For subsequent scenes from the same episode you don’t need to go through this whole process again – you can just select the segment (step 11) and the output file (step 12) without having to go through the whole wizard again by using the menus up top. Make sure you browse to change the output file name as described in step 12 above each time.

One more thing I’ve found is that you have the region 2 discs, then season 4 of Voyager doesn’t have all the required .IFO files on each disc. It only has one for the first episode on that disc, meaning there are about 20 episodes where it’s a lot of hassle to get a clip. You can do it using the .VOB files, but it’s very tiresome and not something I’m going to go into here. If you do have this missing .IFO problem then contact me for some help if you need it!

5. Creating your video

So finally you have some clips and an idea of what you want to do, so it’s time to get down to making your masterpiece!

As mentioned before there are a couple of ways you can go (especially if you don’t have a specific written plan for the video) when you get to the stage of actually putting the scenes to your chosen music:

start at the beginning and work your way through in order.
put in scenes in any order you want.

I personally prefer the latter of these for the main reason that I’ll often have key points in the song where I know exactly what I want to happen – they’re defining moments of the video. I like to get these right first and then build the rest of the video around them. Often one of these key moments will be the end. Having this in place near the start of the process also helps define where you’re going with the video and avoids a common problem with videos I’ve watched where they seem to lose course halfway through.

However, a lot of other people like the start at the beginning approach (maybe due to ease of use with their chosen video editing software). It’s entirely up to you how you do it! I do sometimes start at the beginning when I have a very defined plan for the video since I know I’ll get to my dramatic moments eventually.

How you actually edit your video is also entirely up to you and your song, I can’t tell you how to do that here! However, I will offer a few tips from experience of watching and creating videos:

Match the editing pace to the song – if it’s slow then you probably want long, slow scenes, if it’s fast then you probably want quick editing cuts.

Don’t let scenes drag on without any editing – most of us have seen the original episodes so we don’t need to see the whole thing presented again for great chunks at a time, just with some music in the background. It’s amazing what you can do to alter an existing scene just by some selective editing (changing the cuts, the speed of the clips and who is focussed on in what order etc). In general I wouldn’t let the same unedited version of a scene go on for more than a few seconds at a time, but then I do have an itchy editing finger!

Don’t put in too many cuts – I know, I know, I just said not to let things drag on, but equally if you’re chopping all over the place you’re soon going to make your viewer dizzy (and possibly violently ill). Quick cuts can be good for sections of a video, but give the viewer a breather from time to time!

Don’t leave editing slips in the final version – there’s nothing more disconcerting than being swept along by a video, only to be knocked off course by a quick flash of a scene that wasn’t meant to be in there. I know WMM is particularly bad for letting these blips creep in, but you are allowed to go back and fix them!

Don’t let your video overrun the end of your song – the song knows when to call it a day, your video should too! It just looks sloppy if the visuals carry on once the music’s finished unless there’s a specific reason for it (like you have some credits or something)

Try and keep continuity – if you’re doing a J/7 video and you start dropping in scenes where Janeway has the tight bun hairstyle (i.e. obviously from season one or two) it’s going to look a bit odd. That said, I do use pre season 4 clips in J/7 videos, though they tend to be ones where the Captain is relaxing in bed and that sort of thing.

Don’t get carried away by all the wonderful affects in your video editing software – so you can transition from one scene to another in 300 different ways – woo hoo! Should you use each and every one of these in your video – no way! Personally I find all those weird and wonderful transitions somewhat cheesy in a video – I’d recommend sticking to the good old fade (either to black or between clips) or a simple cut for pretty much all your clip transitions. Similarly use other effects sparingly, or it’s just going to look a mess!

Create new scenes from old – so you can’t find a scene where Seven brings Janeway flowers (because it never happened – booo!), never fear – you can make one up! You don’t have to be bound by what actually happened in the series as shown – there’s all sorts of lovely new scenes you can create by splicing other ones together. Obviously the closer the two clips are in terms of lighting and location the better – it’s not much good splicing together Janeway giving someone a flower while down on some sunlit planet with one of Seven in the dark cargo bay and expecting the viewer to realise Janeway is giving the flower to Seven. One of my favourite splices is Janeway smiling down at the biobed (which actually had Chakky on it – bleeeurgh) in Cathexis with the close-up of Seven gazing up from the biobed in Killing Game. This one works well because both clips are in sickbay and you can’t see who either of them are looking at (Plus Janeway has the mometarily appearing twist hair rather than the bun so it’s not quite so obvious her scene is from season one when there was no Seven around to smile at). With more powerful editing software, such as Sony Vegas, you can even go one step further and manipulating two scenes into one using the power of masking. I'm not going to go into detail on that here, there are tutorials on YouTube if you want to know.

Making your video fit the section of song – you have a lovely scene of Janeway coming round a corner, walking down the corridor and into a room that is just perfect for your instrumental break only the goddam thing is about a second too short for the length of the music – doh! But all is not lost, you can play around with the speed on just part of the video. What I do in these cases is cut the video into two bits that actually join together, e.g. a second or so in, and then slow down one of the bits so the scene is long enough for your music section, i.e. she’s walking at slow speed and then she speeds up to normal speed so her going into the room matches the end of your section. Alternatively you could just slow the whole thing down to fit and chop off the start – it’s up to you

6. Outputting your video

You’ve finally finished your first version of the video and you want to see what it looks like, which means you need to output it to a single movie file.

Obviously each video editing application has its own methods for doing this. In general you need to specify some output parameters of your video such as the file type, frame rate, kbps, size etc.

Typical settings for these that I use (though this is from Windows Media Encoder and not my editing app, but that’s a whole other story!):

File type: .wmv (this is the most commonly used, though some people use .rm)
Size: 320x240 (this is standard 4:3 size – your ripped clips might not be this size and you might want to adjust this slightly to stop everyone looking fat or thin!)
Frame rate: 25fps (this is the PAL frame rate, NTSC is 30 though I’m not sure how much this matters when you’re dealing with computers!)
Audio format: 64 Kbps, 44 Mhz
Video Bit Rate: 250 Kbps

p.s. don’t ask me any complicated questions about frame sizes and PAL and NTSC etc, because it’s all just as confusing to me! I just played around until it looked ok and worked!

I’m afraid you can’t output the video at the same lovely high quality you created your clips at (unless you’re doing it just for yourself), since most people aren’t going to bother sitting around while a 50Mb+ video downloads.

You should aim for something roughly 10mb in size as a maximum (depending on the length of the video). I find that a 3-4 minute song comes out somewhere around the 7-9 Mb mark with the settings I use.

You can play around with the settings on your particular application until you get the output size and quality you want.

7. Releasing Your Video

You’ve finally done it – you’ve got your video and it’s finished – now to release it on an unsuspecting world! But wait! Just hold on a minute…

I know you’ve been working at this thing for ages and now you just want to share it, but I speak from experience when I say hold onto it for now. If you keep it to yourself for a couple of days and then watch it again, I can guarantee you that you’ll spot at least 10 things you want to change. I personally keep mine back for weeks (sometimes months) re-watching them periodically and tweaking until I get them just right.

Of course you could keep doing this ad infinitum – there comes a point where you just have to let your baby go and be free!

Once you are satisfied that you’ve tweaked it enough then you need to find somewhere to let people get at it. You have a few options:

a. Create your own website
b. Get someone else to put it on their website
c. Put it on a video sharing site (i.e. YouTube)
d. Put it on a file download site

A bit more on each of these:

a. Create your own website – not as hard as maybe it sounds with all the tools now available, but if you just want a free site then there are often restrictions on both the size of files allowed, that might exclude your videos, and the bandwidth (which affects how many people will be able to download it). As an example my site is paid for and I have a limit of 80Gb bandwidth a month that I regularly exceed! (though I do have nearly 200 videos on there!). In general if you’re searching around you want something (either free of paid for) that offers as large a bandwidth limit for the price you’re willing to pay. If you have your own site you might want to zip up your files to prevent people watching them direct off the page (and killing your bandwidth), or use some other way to force them into downloading it to their own computer before watching (I don’t do this, which is probably the cause of my bandwidth nightmare!). Note that you could combine having your own site with c. (putting it on a video sharing site). In this case you create the basic pages, but the videos are hosted on the video sharing site and the links (and player) embedded in your pages. This is relatively easy as the video sharing site should give you a link which you can just cut and paste into your page to achieve the embedding. (p.s. thanks to annika for making me think of this last point!)

b. Get someone else to put it on their website – much easier than a. since it’s free (unless your friend is really tight!)

c. Put it on a video sharing site – Basically this means YouTube. If you've been living on the moon for the past couple of years then a very brief bit about it. It’s really easy to use – you just need to create an account (don’t worry it’s all free), and you can start uploading as many videos as you want. The only downside is that people will have to watch them off the YouTube site or from links embedded in other web pages. There are ways to download the video and take it away (if for example they want to transfer it to some portable device), but these aren't as immediately accessible as options a or b. Still this is the best place to start if you don't have your own site and I use it in conjunction with my site due to the large number of visitors.

d. Put it on a file download site – there are a few of these around too like PutFile and YouSendIt, where you just upload your file and then receive back a link that you can give to other people for downloading purposes. The main drawback here is that there’s usually either a number of downloads or time limit after which people won’t be able to access the file.

Whichever method you choose you’re going to want to advertise your new creation. If you’re talking Voyager or J/7 then some places you might want to plug it include:

www.voyager-conspiracy.co.uk/forum - general J/7 forum

http://j7faction.com/community - another general J/7 forum

http://www.groups.yahoo.com/ – groups to join include Janeway7, janeway7ers, VoyagerMusicHub, KissMeKate

http://www.trekbbs.com/

And there you have it – just wait for all that lovely feedback (or not!). Don’t be disappointed if you don’t get much beyond – “that was great” or “I loved that video”. Though you’ve probably watched it 101 times and know every nuance of editing and timing, most people will watch it once, enjoy it (or not) and not really think of it again. It’s rare you get detailed feedback on how profoundly moved someone was by the way you faded between Janeway and Seven at 1:43, or how they felt elated by how you matched the surge in music to a triumphant moment or how they really understood Janeway’s pain from the story you told. Still, you had a good time making it (right?) so who cares what anyone else thinks!