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I put together my fourth minecraft video last night. It started out at 32 minutes long so I had to do some heavy editing to get it under 22 minutes. That's still over my target of 18 minutes, but less egregiously so. In total there are 25 splices and 6 transitions. (Transitions are things like wipes which indicate the passage of time between two scenes.) A couple of the splices are a bit rough but I think most of them are pretty seamless.
Where it's toughest to do a clean splice is when there's music playing in the game as a sudden break in the music is quite noticeable, even when it's just playing gently in the background. Fortunately that doesn't happen too often and when it does I can use a transition. In theory I could use transitions for all of the cuts but I think that 30-odd transitions in a 22 minute video would be a but, um, distracting, to say the least. A clean splice is preferable, if I can manage it.
I think I'm getting better at spotting potential splices. For example, there's a scene where I go into the water to gather up a lily pad. The water was deeper than I'd expected so I ended up sinking under the surface several times before I got myself stabilized enough to harvest the plant. My splashing around was not sufficiently comedic to be entertaining so I decided to cut it out. I found the frame from the first time going under the water's surface and the frame from the final time going under and cut out everything in-between. The transition from above to below water was already sufficiently abrupt that the removed material isn't even noticeable.
I finally figured out the problem I was having with the low audio volume. It would be fine in my original video but by the time it was uploaded to YouTube it would be so muted that I'd have to crank YouTube's volume up to its max to hear everything. It turned out that one of my editing tools was changing my system volume. So the YouTube video was fine, it was my system that had the volume turned down. D'oh!
Where it's toughest to do a clean splice is when there's music playing in the game as a sudden break in the music is quite noticeable, even when it's just playing gently in the background. Fortunately that doesn't happen too often and when it does I can use a transition. In theory I could use transitions for all of the cuts but I think that 30-odd transitions in a 22 minute video would be a but, um, distracting, to say the least. A clean splice is preferable, if I can manage it.
I think I'm getting better at spotting potential splices. For example, there's a scene where I go into the water to gather up a lily pad. The water was deeper than I'd expected so I ended up sinking under the surface several times before I got myself stabilized enough to harvest the plant. My splashing around was not sufficiently comedic to be entertaining so I decided to cut it out. I found the frame from the first time going under the water's surface and the frame from the final time going under and cut out everything in-between. The transition from above to below water was already sufficiently abrupt that the removed material isn't even noticeable.
I finally figured out the problem I was having with the low audio volume. It would be fine in my original video but by the time it was uploaded to YouTube it would be so muted that I'd have to crank YouTube's volume up to its max to hear everything. It turned out that one of my editing tools was changing my system volume. So the YouTube video was fine, it was my system that had the volume turned down. D'oh!
