It’s been a while since I last edited something and well, this time around my project’s rather big. I’m part of a stream team on Twitch called “Mistakes” and someone in our team started creating these clip compilations on YouTube (so many links)… and since they’re well-received and since it’s a lot of work, I asked if I could help Porthos out, which is why I’m editing the compilation of August’s clips! So, I got back into DaVinci Resolve (after not creating any videos for quite a while now…) and started selecting clips, working out the order and if I could somehow link that one clip where someone murders her wife to the clip where someone else was carrying away a dead body and I think I did quite well overall… The last few things that need to get done are a bit more complicated, though!
For starters, I had to take a voice recording and split it into two clips (for the intro and the outro) and then I had to adjust the levels a bit to match every other clip’s tone before I realised that I had to do that for everyone… and I quickly scrapped the audio levels… for now at least… There’s probably some setting or some easier way that I can do that with. I’ll do that at the end! The other thing I needed to add was this animation that shows the stream name, game name and who clipped it. It’s cute and works quite well but the other two that are working on these compilations are using Vegas while I’m using DaVinci… and those two programs work differently. So, me being a newbie and all of that, I struggled quite a bit doing what they told me to do, which is why Dante and I sat together yesterday and he tried to recreate the thing from Vegas in DaVinci and he succeeded. So now I can do that! In the meantime, I was trying to fix the intro and outro while also discovering the power of simple animation and dynamic zooms (obviously with Dante’s help).
I had this clip of my own stream in there that shows me discovering the “Fortify Alchemy” enchantment after about 20+ hours in Skyrim in my newest playthrough and it’s a whole thing! I chopped it up into little pieces, zoomed in on my face in one of the pieces, zoomed in on the enchantment, and zoomed back… and I love it. It’s similar to something that Dante did when he edited the last compilation last month and I wanted to figure out how to do exactly that! DaVinci Resolve has this preview window where you can select the overlay at the bottom left corner. Change that to Dynamic Zoom and you can either zoom in gradually in a smooth motion or you just align the red and the green box in the overlay to match up and just have it zoomed in without a motion. Worked quite well, still quite tricky.
The hardest part was to deal with a text thingy that would fade in… but it wouldn’t fade out and Dante and I struggled so hard to figure out ways to make it fade out, including copying it, reversing it, and then deleting everything. It was a whole thing. I settled for a burning transition where it all burns out because… after all that struggling, I really wanted to burn it all to the ground… but that transition actually works quite well as the next streamer in the compilation was playing Bloodborne and uh,… idk, it made more sense when I was actually working on it.
Either way, Dante is a great guy. He’s a calm and entertaining streamer, parent and friend. He finished up the little animation/label thingy that I need to import today to finish up the compilation. I’ll then try to import some gasps and other SFX while I also work on other edits after today’s stream… in a few hours… wink wink… and I’m really quite excited about all the future editing I could now do. I mean, I love it… it just gets quite time-consuming and uh… tedious? Sometimes it just pains me when I try to do something and it doesn’t work as I thought it would… so then I try to figure out why it’s not working or how it’s working and looking up stuff online doesn’t yield any results either… I think the biggest issue for me with editing is that I often have something in mind but I don’t know how to find it in DaVinci Resolve or on the internet. I end up looking for something but I don’t know what it’s called, essentially. It’s like wanting to order something but the waiter doesn’t speak your language and you have no menu to point at. If you had the menu, you could point at it and the waiter would understand, but because you have neither the language skills nor the menu, you end up struggling…
And that’s certainly something. Still, I think most of it comes down to experience, practice and well, lots of failure. I mean, you learn from your mistakes to get better, right? If you don’t practice or if you don’t do it a whole lot, you won’t make mistakes and hence you won’t improve, so I just gotta keep at it! Either way, uh, check out the people on my team while you’re there. They’re great! And let me know if you had similar experiences with editing in general or with DaVinci Resolve.
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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