I mentioned in the previous post how long some of these take to put together, and decided to break it off into a separate post. So here’s the deal.
The first part is fairly easy now, which is the photos – I can generally have a dozen of them cropped, resized, and ready to go within ten minutes or so. Unless I decided to do an animated gif (pronounced, “GIM-ee-sum-LUV-en,”) in which case I have to overlay several frames together, crop and resize them while stacked, select the frame delay, run the test animations, all before finalizing it. This one was worse, in that I had accidentally had Auto White Balance set on the camera, leftover from some experiments, and the abundance of green in the frame caused the camera to muck up the color a bit, so each frame had to be corrected by the same degree, plus I’d shot them handheld at high magnification so my camera motion caused the frames to misalign a little, and thus they had to be re-aligned; it wasn’t perfect, but good enough to show what I needed.
And then the video: two clips of a minute each, no biggie, right? Except that the title images had to be done, and a little trimming, and then the voiceover, recorded as the prepped clips played to sync them. Twice, because I didn’t like the first. Then that cleaned up and edited, laid into the video clips, relative volumes adjusted, and a little more trimming and shifting so the syncing was consistent. I didn’t check times, but all that took well over an hour I believe. Look good? Then set it to render, which takes many times the actual length of the video to accomplish.
Nope, not done yet. Now that has to be uploaded to Vimeo, with various details added and settings tinkered with, including selecting a frame for a thumbnail. The easy part, really, is embedding that into the post, since it’s just a line of script that Vimeo produces.
The text of the post went pretty quickly all told, but there are always multiple drafts as I save frequently, monitor the flow and make sure that I’m not missing anything (not always perfectly,) clean up typos and smooth out the sentence structure a bit (not always, or perhaps ever, perfectly.) While doing this, though, I realized that one of the photos that I’d edited for the post I’d somehow never saved, and thus had to re-open GIMP and redo the photo. I also shamelessly sidetracked myself, twice, in trying to find a) a method to correct a silly issue (that a lot of people have been having) with Kdenlive, my video editing software, and b) a better ‘theme’ for GIMP that didn’t hide some key menu functions in low-contrast graphics; I was successful with the former, not yet with the latter. It might seem like a lack of discipline to get sidetracked, but I’ve found that if I set the issue aside until I’m done with some task, I probably won’t return, and the issue will still be affecting things when I get involved in the next project that I’m trying to get done – better to take care of it now.
So what I initially thought would be a quick illustrative post turned out to take hours, and while I understand why, I just don’t want it to take that long. So at the very least, go watch that video five or six more times and drive my stats up a bit…