Okay, so having been finally exposed to the awesomness that is the Whoniverse, I find myself with all sorts of interesting ideas for fanvids-set-to-music, of the kind that one finds on Youtube. This is a good one.
The thing is, I have no idea how to make one of these. I mean, zero. I have never used video/audio editing software, ever, and don’t know where to get it, let alone how to use it.
Still, there are 635,000 fanvids out there, many of them made by youngsters, so it must not be too hard, right?
Can anyone point me at a tutorial? And software that can be had cheaply/free?
If you’re on Windows, Windows Movie Maker, while it sucks as general editing software, is probably more than good enough for purposes of a fan music video. It’s also rather self explanatory.
Really making a fan music video is about 1% technical prowess, 99% perseverance and creativity. And hard disk space. You’re going to have to find a way to get all the videos on your computer, then import them into Windows Movie Maker and cut them into clips (again, should be relatively self explanatory) and place them back to back. Couldn’t be simpler, but obviously it’s very time consuming – finding all the sections you want, cutting them up, knowing what order to put them in, scrapping pieces and replacing them as you don’t like them.
After that, WMM makes it pretty easy to just put a music track (in most common formats) under it.
You could take the dive and get some crazy advanced editing software, either the free or the pay, but for a fan music video WMM should suffice.
If you’re on a Mac – I’m not sure what the name of the standard editing software is off the top of my head, but I’m pretty sure it comes with the OS. I think it’s similarly self explanatory, and a bit better and more robust than WMM.
ETA: I’m pretty sure WMM also has really basic filters and transitions, like cross fades and sepia filters, so don’t worry about that too much. Just don’t try anything too complicated.
YMMV, but I found that fanvidding with WMM was something I wasn’t masochistic enough for - mostly that it would crash very often and take a while to restart.
I went and treated myself to one of the cheaper editions of ‘Sony Vegas’, which is a great product and easy to use, but I’m not sure if you’d call it cheap. (Runs approx $90)