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Finally had a chance to play with video editing

Back in March I talked a bit about video editing and said I wanted to play around with a great program called PowerDirector.It's been a while but I finally got a chance to play around with it. It's definitely given me an appreciation for how creative and time consuming playing with video can be.

The thing that stands out the most is how much our personal library of knowledge and memory comes in to play. When you are mixing various media together it really requires you to reference all the media you've ever seen in your life - it's the only way you'll be able to creatively match up media with each other such that it presents as a single, unified experience for the viewer. 

The video I created mixed together a variety of media. I mixed a track from Alan Watts, movie clips from Inception, Shawshank Redemption, ShowTime's The Borgais and HBO's  Boardwalk Empire and music from Nine Inch Nails.

I'm a huge fan of Alan Watts, he was a theologist / philosopher back in the 1950 - 1970s. If you think someone like Alan Watts is a nut then you probably won't enjoy the video I made.

One video on YouTube that I've always liked was a mix that someone did of Alan Watts with various art pieces. I saw it years ago and yet I still play it now and then simply because I'm really impressed with the artistry of it. 



I think it's great that people can create little artful pieces. When you think about it, 20 years ago (heck even 10 years ago) it was beyond the 'common' man's ability to create something like the above video, much less make it available for public consumption.

Having said that, most of the 'mixes' people create, aren't that enjoyable to watch. It's not their fault per se, it's simpy difficult to create something that is actually interesting to watch (I'm not sure I accomplished it, but hey, it's my first kick at the can).

Anyway, you can view my video here

I wish I could embed it in this blog for you, but apparently if you use a movie clip YouTube disables the embedding due to copyright concerns. I thought about not posting it, but you can't really make heads or tails of what the copyright rules are. Strictly speaking anything that doesn't belong to you can't be posted. Yet, posting a song seems to never have any issues. Additionally, 'clips' of movies don't seem to get taken down either. All that seems to happen is that the embedding function is disabled.

I think the copyright law is designed to stop people from posting full-length movies and tv shows on YouTube. Yet, for any of you who know lawyers, they always use langauge that gives them the widest range of options. In this case, if they wanted, any video with a 'clip' from a tv show or movie could be requested to be removed.

So we'll see what happens, who knows maybe they'll remove my video. Although I don't think they will given there are lots of 'clips' from various movies on YouTube that have been up for years.

To make the whole copyright issue even more confusing, some clips you can embed. Which implies that some content creators don't impose restriction. From what I can tell clips from shows on HBO you can embed. Clips from Warner Brothers prevent embedding.

Like I say, it's impossible to make heads or tails of it, so we'll see what happens.

So there you have it, my first video, hopefully you enjoy it. I think for future videos I'll move away from video content and play around with pictures for the content just so I don't have to worry about whether my video gets taken down from YouTube at some point.

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