When you’ve decided what program you’re going to use, you can start gathering your video clips and preparing your music files. This is a really important step as you need to avoid processing your clips too much so that you retain as much quality as possible in your final video.

The Golden Rule

… is not to use clips from other fanvids – vidders have spent time gathering their material and editing it, so to take this and pass it off as your own is disrespectful and lazy. You should make the effort to get your own source material either by downloading or ripping from your DVDs. I’ll post a separate help topic on how to rip DVDs, but there is a lot of information on the internet already.

Why go to the hassle? Well, you have a lot more freedom over the clips you choose, you’ll earn the respect of your fellow vidders and your audience, and your video will be much higher quality.

Music

Your song needs to be ripped to your computer ideally as a WAV file. WAV is much better quality than mp3 as it isn’t compressed. Unfortunately this means that the file size is bigger, say 50Mb for a song.

If you have an mp3 that you want to use, it will work, but it might make your video editing program slower to run. I always convert my mp3s to WAVs using a free program called Audacity.

Video

If you have the video on your computer already (for example something you’ve downloaded) your video editing program might work with it as it is. If it does, you’re pretty lucky!  A word of warning though, most downloaded episodes and other clips are compressed as MPEG2 files, which are generally accepted to be a nightmare. Although you might be able to open them in your software, it can cause a whole host of problems when you want to save your video later, as random frames will start appearing where they shouldn’t and so on – it’s impossible to fix it later and you might lose your whole vid.

Many video editors struggle (and crash) when you try to give them something they don’t like. Adobe Premiere, for example, only likes to work with uncompressed AVI files or a select few codecs (see my ‘tired-eye guide to encoding). This kills my hard drive space, but at least it works!! Quicktime (.mov) files are generally acceptable by all programs, so that’s what all the ‘freebies’ video samples are offered as on Tired Eye.

When I’m preparing my video for Adobe Premiere, I save it as an AVI file using the “Codecica” free codec which retains the quality and crispness of the original image while limiting the file size. You could also try the Logarith codec, which is also free to download. The bonus for using Codecica is that Premiere Pro can display the video without needing to pre-render it first, which makes the whole process much quicker.

So how do you change your video clips into something more palatable? I use VirtualDub, which will work with most types of video. With this, you can clip the parts of the video that you want to use, save them as an AVI file either uncompressed or with another codec. If my source footage has black bars on (many movies do), I chop these off. This is just personal preference, but I think it gives you more freedom over your effects… they might not look so good when you apply them to the black bars. So long as the aspect ratio of your final video is sorted properly, your video can do without the black bars and still look fine.

VirtualDub is a fantastic program – I’ll do a separate tutorial on this one day.

Another few options are SUPER and MPEG Streamclip, which are also free – both specialise in changing video (and audio) from one format to another – I prefer SUPER as it seems to recognise more file types.

Next, though, we’ll look at setting up the size, framerate and other settings in your video…