Star Wars Flashfic Meme

justmarriedexchange nominations close tomorrow (the 10th).

I will almost certainly be signing up for this one, I'm just saying. And you do need three distinct fandoms for this exchange.

*my existing assignments side-eye me*

I like Ken Follett's books, and I like airplanes, and I like historical books, but this one was just kind of lackluster for me, unfortunately. It kept me reading, and parts of it were very engaging, but I ended up feeling kind of "That was it?" at the end. I mean, to be fair, this book is set early in WW2 and there's a lot of war still to go, but it feels like we didn't quite get the full plot or the amount of airplane that was promised by the title. The airplane-promising title manages to be a big spoiler while not actually delivering on its promise. (Although, to be fair, I guess it did get me to read the book.)

( Spoilers in general )

It is really interesting how my interest in visual media has spun up again over the last six months or so. It's not that I physically couldn't watch for a while, it's just that over the last couple of years, say since 2022 or so, I wasn't really interested. I would have said it was just because I was happy with the stories in my head and didn't need more stories, but I was also completely uninterested in watching vids and similar, and now suddenly that switch has flipped the other way and I'm back to finding them fun and fascinating to watch, even for source canons I barely know.

(For me and vids, I'd say song choice is *the* big driver of whether I'll watch a vid or not - I'll nope out in seconds if I don't like the song, but I'll watch one even for a source canon I've never seen if it's a song I like.)

Anyway, in a shocking twist, last night I finally got around to subscribing the things I need to subscribe to in order to get vidding source for Babylon 5.

I capture vid source like no one else I've ever met (though maybe people who do this just don't talk about it) - I screencapture from the video window playing on my computer screen. I can do it other ways, and in fact have done it a number of other ways (from ripping DVDs to ripping DRM'd MP4s - I did all my Agent Carter vids that way; it does look very crisp and beautiful - to simply using the *cough ahem* broadcast downloads back on the 2000s; a lot of people did that for vidding back in the SGA/White Collar era, although it meant dealing with watermarks on the video). But I keep coming back to capturing video from screen because it's just so easy. I can get exactly the clip I want and only the clip I want without any extra trimming work, it's easy to skip around, and it means not having to rip and store a kabillionty episodes for a long source canon.

This stopped working for a while because of software measures to prevent it, but I figured out a relatively easy workaround for vidding MASH (disabling graphics acceleration in Chrome) and now I'm doing that for B5 as well - I just need a relatively clean streaming source without commercials. I was genuinely really amazed at how crisp MASH turned out for the vids I made for Festivids. The obvious downside to screencapturing video is that the quality can suffer, and there's also the possibility of the playback stuttering - I used to have this happen occasionally when I tried to capture too much video at once on older computers (circa 2006 or so), where it would drop frames when I'd save it if it was too much for the memory buffer to handle. These days, modern computers can handle quite a lot of video at a time (I do it in Quicktime, I think it's saving directly to the hard drive as I go, whereas before it was definitely doing some kind of intermediate working-memory storage) ... buuuut capturing from streaming is limited by the streaming source, and those often stutter or glitch. It has been hard to get good video quality in B5, not really helped by the source itself being kind of potato-quality to begin with.

And as if that wasn't enough, Final Cut really struggles with the concept of 4:3 video that's not absolutely tiny. All of its large video presets are widescreen, but even forcing it to 4:3, it'll still make it widescreen in export - blah. The biggest that I can get it to make a 4:3 vid isn't very big. So it doesn't really matter that my source video isn't that high quality because it's potatoing it on export anyway! Final Cut, why are you like this.

THAT being said, the main reason I don't call myself a serious vidder is because I just sort of ... don't care? I'm not overly fussed about image quality and frame rate and codecs. I am DELIGHTED that it's no longer necessary to fuss around with codecs for the most part, now that everything seems to have standardized on MP4s and uploading to streaming sites. A ton of the vids I've downloaded and rewatch over and over are snagged from Youtube or are ancient WMVs from the era of making vids as small as possible for download, or are someone's first vidding efforts - and I *love* them. I appreciate crisp clean large video as much as the next person, but I mostly just want a fun viewing experience, and when I'm making vids, I simply like making them for myself and I'm happy if other people like them too. I'll work harder to get it looking nice if it's an actual gift for someone, but for the ones I make for myself ... eh. It's a lot like my approach to fanfic as a creator - I do care about craft to an extent, but mostly, I don't care if it's great, I just want to feel things.

(So the long and the short of it is that I'm making Babylon 5 vids now. Yay!)