In Which Kat Suffers for her Art

[katallison]

So, I had an entry half-written about my annoying week, and then I deleted it, thinking, "Dear god, bad enough I should have to live through my annoying week, why inflict it on my friends?" And instead I shall burble at length about my adventures as an utter newbie in vidding, which are probably even more tedious than the-week-in-retrospect, but may give the more expert vidders in the reading audience a nostalgic glow for their own early days, and convince the non-vidders that they are truly much better off sticking to writing.

So--since my own writing is still in the not-happening place, I decided to spend the weekend messing around with Premiere, which, let me just say at the outset, is the Thrice-Accursed Hose-Beast. I thought I'd start with a fairly simple idea to which I'm not deeply attached, namely a Victoria (of dS) vid to June Tabor's "Pavanne," which is a lovely sad song about a bad, bad woman. The plusses here are that this would allow me to use source from only two episodes, which makes finding clips easier; and the aforementioned lack of emotional attachment, which means if I totally flub, no biggie.

First step: import the audio into Premiere. I had the song downloaded from eMusic, and all I needed to do was convert it from MP3 to WAV, which is at least something I already knew how to do (the only step in this entire adventure of which I have mastery, I might say). So I converted, saved, opened Premiere, imported, hit Play, and -- nothing. I could see the little squiggly waveforms on the timeline indicating that there was indeed audio there, but no sound. I fiddled, I dithered, I clicked many buttons and studied many menus, I read through the Premiere manual, all to no avail.

(And may I just say that the Premiere manual is perhaps the worst freakin' piece of technical documentation I've ever encountered, at least when it comes to helping people whose way of learning new software is to jump right in and start dinking around. I don't really know who it is designed for, except maybe people who already know how to use Premiere. Grrrrr.)

I rendered. I changed settings. I trashed the entire thing and started over. Nothing, nada, rien. Finally I closed it and went to bed (this was yesterday), thinking (with the wan hope I often bring to computer fuck-ups) that if I just let it sit for a while and reflect on its sins, it'd come around and snap into shape.

Opened it again today, and again, no sound. Also, I discovered, no capturing of video from the DVD player, once I'd done all the plugging-in of cords. I started wondering about capturing directly from the computer's DVD player, recollecting that I'd seen a thread about this on the Vidder list not long ago, and went digging through the list archives, wherein I found a bunch of fearsomely intimidating technical posts about codecs and what-not, but also stumbled across a post by the lovely jackiekjono answering someone's query about why she couldn't get audio to play in Premiere. Go to Project Settings, quoth Jackie, and change the settings in this particular way, and you shall have audio. And I went and changed settings thusly, and lo! The audio played! And there was much rejoicing.

I phoned over to the House of Jackie and Carol, and got the lovely Carol (aka lapillus) on the phone, and burbled happily, and then, lofted on the updraft of mad optimism, said, "OK, so -- the next thing is, I need to cut a verse out of the middle of the song. Hah hah! That must be easy, right?" Carol assured me that this quite easy, all I needed to do was use the Razor tool. I said, "Razor tool! Right! I know where that is!" And I hung up and returned to Premiere.

And yes, I did know where the Razor tool was, and I clicked at the point where I wanted to start cutting, and I clicked at the point where I wanted to stop cutting, and then I sat and stared at the screen for a while. So -- uh, how do you get the stuff you want to excise out of the middle of the track? Back to the Premiere manual, whose brief section on the Razor tool is a masterpiece of unhelpful obfuscation. Back to the clicking around, and the studying of menus. And eventually, back to the phone, redial the House of Carol and Jackie, and this time I got Jackie on the phone, who said, "Oh, sure, all you need to do is select the part you want to delete, and then delete it!" And I went and did that, and lo, it worked! I felt a bit like Gandalf standing in front of the gates of Moria, having just realized Duh, dumbfuck, all you hadda do was say "Friend"!

Carol and Jackie had both warned me that getting the two remaining chunks of audio smoothly meshed at their join might require some tweaking and fiddling, BUT -- when I dragged the two together, and plunked them down, and hit "Play" -- by god, they flowed smooth as you please. I mean, it might not pass muster with an audio engineer, or with anyone listening for a join, but, y'know, good enough for government work.

That accomplished, I went back to the issue of capturing, and after much futzing, established that:

--if I keep the settings in "Project Settings-->General" where they need to be to hear audio, I can't capture;
--if I change them so that I can capture, I can't hear audio;
--in any event, I can only capture from the VCR and not from the DVD player, though in each case I have the same set of cords plugged into what looks like similar "Line Out" jacks.

These arcane mysteries remain to be plumbed. For now, I have shut down Premiere (Evil! Hose Beast!) and am refreshing myself with a fine malted beverage. I have not done the two things I really should have done this evening, namely a) visit my dad in the hospital, and b) go to the gym. But my dad seemed to be perfectly fine when I was there this morning (as distinct from last night, when we had a trip to the ER and a reprise of "I think he may be dying this time -- um, oops, guess not, he's going to be fine"). And the gym will always be there tomorrow.

Oh, and also? Carol and Jackie will, as my mother used to say, be wearing stars in their crowns in the Great Hereafter. I'm just saying.

Comments

[katallison.livejournal.com]

This is very reassuring -- I figured it was probably just that I'm dense or something.

I bought the SAMS "Teach Yourself Premiere in 24 Hours" book today, and am actually finding it very helpful. The author starts from the assumption that his readers have already leapt in and begun messing about, and he does a good job of walking one through how to do various things, without getting too complicated. Plus, the illustrations are very good.