Or: A comedy of (frustrating) Errors

Getting into the digital realm is not too difficult; the age of social media almost demands it. As part of getting all my social ducks in a row, so to speak, I decided to make a video post on YouTube introducing myself. Dependent on how that goes, I’m planning on doing several more videos to start a vlog. All in addition to this blog, my two websites and the half-dozen other social media outlets I maintain. Um … what am I getting myself into?

First Comes Un-Love

The love is gone. Unfriend.

All went well at first; I already had a camera – a Canon Rebel Ti. I procured studio lighting, found a relatively clutter-free corner of my house as the location. There, I sat down, stared into the camera and went totally blank. Crap, I thought. This is a lot harder than it looks.

Sixteen-and-a-half torturous minutes later (most of which was spent with me laughing my ass off), I managed to record my first video. I was so excited to get to editing it!

In a previous life, I did video editing. Left over from that short-lived career was a video editor called Ulead VideoStudio. I knew this program inside and out. We were like best buds. Through editing the long and painfully awkward video I just filmed, I went to export the file only to come to a rage-inducing realization: my video editor was frickin’ hooped!

Then Comes Rage

Take that, Ulead! Now, we must Kung-Fu fight!

A series of unfortunate events thus rendered Ulead completely useless, and my four duel core processors could not save me this time. An upgrade to Window 10 and raw MOV files proved to be doom for both the program and my mental stability. Ulead crashed continuously; I couldn’t export more than five clips at a time. Video that survived past the five-clip mark was cursed with an off-sync audio track, thus turning my video into a badly dubbed foreign film. Panic! Horror! I may have even cried a little.

Then Comes Rissa in a Straight Jacket!

It’s like a secret code to decrypt my insanity!

Thoroughly chafed around the edges, I nursed my downtrodden-ness with half a box of Oatmeal Cream Pies and did some research. Little did I know, there were a slew of completely free video editors out there to soothe my wounded pride.

Enter Lightworks on its shining white steed, here to sweep me away from the cursed land of poorly constructed videos. Lightworks had a very steep learning curve as it’s a non-linear editor whereas Ulead was linear; half an hour of watching tutorials online, and I manage to piece together a test file. It took another few hours to figure out what the heck I was doing.

Then came the painful task of transferring all my marked video from Ulead to Lightworks… via paper. By hand! Nasty!

What took me 16 minutes to shoot, about 2 days to edit (because I’m slow), and another week to finally complete is now available, in all its awkward glory, on my YouTube Channel. It took 45 clips to make a mere 3 minute video, but ya know what? I’m freaking putting it up anyway because it took me nearly two weeks to edit!

Lightworks! My Hero!

Well, now I know what not to do, both in the filming and in the editing of future videos. The next vlog post should be smoother. Though, I think I will take a break from all that frustration for a little bit.

I think I need a drink.

• Rissa