Chp 333. Mizoram trip - in motion

I’ve been extremely engrossed in this new passion of mine the past one week – editing videos! This week, I’ve been going home every day after 2am because of this extra-curricular activity as I have to balance my workload too.

I always find editing movie files to be extremely fun and engaging. And by editing, I of course don’t mean the high-end professional editing with 3D graphics and Maya FX etc. I’m talking about the amateur time-pass editing

Some of you may know about the Zahminga Fanai “Angel” music video I remade around 5 years ago . Shot, directed, edited and produced by yours truly (I even starred in it, lolz). Unfortunately, the owner of the song (the guy who composed the song for Zahminga) didn’t allow the file to be uploaded on YouTube when Zahminga and I asked him for permission. So that was the end of it…

I was using a Sony Cybershot digicam then to record the music video, and Sony Vegas Pro 6.0 to edit it.

Right now I have a pretty damn good phone that records video in HD, and I got the latest Sony Vegas Movie HD Platinum 10.0 recently. So my passion has definitely been rekindled.

But it’s not an easy task. Platinum 10.0 is wayyyyy different from the Vegas Pro 6.0 I used to know. I mean, it’s like a complete new software. No similar tool, function, layer etc. I remember how long I took to learn some of the basic stuff on Vegas Pro 6.0, so I was a bit hesitant about venturing into this new version. And the people in my agency who do this kinda stuff all work on post-production tools like Combustion and Smoke. Nobody has worked on this tool before.

But then, thanks to the internet, I was able to find relevant tutorials on YouTube whenever I was stuck.

Hence I am uploading two videos I’ve been editing the past 2 days. They’re nothing great, no special effects jhing jhang bursting out from here or there or fancy flashing thingie falling from the sky etc. Just a normal video. But it has allowed me to do exactly what I wanted to do – label with names during the movie, and blur some faces as they don’t want to reveal their identity.

--------------------------------------------

Christmas Feast.

In Mizoram, everybody comes together at their respective Church in their locality during Christmas for this giant HUMONGOUS feast [Ruaitheh]. The feast is prepared by the people themselves. Groups of volunteers [hnatlang] gather on the morning of the feast and are divided into different task-groups (usually based on age and sex).

Some construct the feast area, others fetch vegetables and livestock, others chop the vegetables or cook the meat etc etc. And by 4pm, the feast starts. We all sit together and eat together as one. Such bonhomie you will not find anywhere else. This is a short video of the Christmas feast held at my locality – Chaltlang South Presbyterian Church.



--------------------------------------------

Meeting online friends.

Apart from spending time with my family and friends, I also got to meet my online friends during the holidays. These are the people I met online and it was really good to see who they really are in real life. We all knew each other pretty well from all our interactions online, so none of us felt like strangers.

Here is a video of some of my online friends.




So that is it for now. Back to the video editing software for me, and hope you have a wonderful weekend ahead.




--------------------------------------------


UPDATE: Ok looks like YouTube might remove the audio of my second video upload due to some copyright violation bull$hit. Anyway I googled and found ways to bypass this – I can also avoid this by changing the frequency and tempo of the audio file so that their tool does not detect/recognize it… I’ll do this from my next upload onwards. As for this video, don’t be surprised if the audio is suddenly muted by YouTube.