OpenShotCutEditor

First draft of the video for the "Khajiit" piece done. It's not working for me.

Not just for technical issues, but for a lack of focus and flow. Also...a thing that is unique about this piece is that I performed all the parts on acoustic instruments. On period acoustic instruments, in some cases. So the video should show that off and the first draft doesn't.

I was going to get a little crazy with costumes and chromakey and shadow-filled lighting because I'm shy (and because it looks like it would be fun). But seeing as I've already stuck my mug on several YouTube videos on my efforts to learn violin and trumpet, maybe I'll just set up the camera in front of the nice wooden fence we have in the backyard and film that way.



So the first quest was footage. Used QuickTime Movie Player as a screen recorder, which caused the game to slow and stutter quite a bit. I created Yakima the Location Scout-Cat and sent him out into the wilds of Skyrim for footage, armed largely with a barrel full of console codes (as I didn't have the patience to build him up to where he could actually survive the war zones we wanted to photograph).

Skyrim, as far as I am aware, doesn't really have a Mechanima plug-in, so there was a lot of ducking in and out of camera options via console. Unfortunately there seems to be no easy way to trigger a performance animation or even a walk from the "free camera" -- which really restricts the available shot angles -- and of course there's no keyframe spline to guide a tracking shot.



Then edit. iMovie is of course nearly useless. Pity the Mac never had something as nice as Windows Movie Maker. I tried out ShotCut, which generally did the job but I wanted full keyframing. Filmora keeps pushing itself everywhere that purports to be a list of "best editors" but even without the $50 price tag it just seems...underpowered.

OpenShot was well worth a try. Full keyframing, infinite layers of video tracks. The most recent versions have moved from a friendly floating tabbed window for certain functions to a tiny docked panel in which the options are less clear and a lot harder to manipulate. Still, it technically did the job...except that it borked on anything bigger than a still frame. It would hang for minutes before displaying what was right under the timeline pointer.

Natron was very interesting and worth a second look. This is the only node-based compositor in this list. One of the warning signs of open-source software is when the Linux version is highlighted. This software is deep, complex, and largely undocumented. It took a few hours to get over the hump and figure out how to patch input file through processing and merge nodes to an output render. Unfortunately, it too didn't run smoothly enough on my Mac Powerbook to allow cutting video to a music track.

So back to ShotCut. The lack of keyframes means you can't animate changes in position and scale of your clips, but it does offer fade and cross-fade. Since filters are applied per clip, not per track, you can arbitrarily slice a single clip into sub-clips and apply different filters to each; essentially keyframes without any of the inbetweening that usually smooths it out.



So how to the next version? I think I need to pen-and-paper this; to actually make something like a storyboard, if not a full script and shot list. On the flip side, I only want to spend so much time on this project. I have other, better, music waiting. And the Sea Peoples, of course.