2009 – A Slice Of Big Pauly

Every now and then, I get the video editing bug – but I don’t do the most obvious things when I get such a bug.

Nearly ten years ago to the day, and before such “animation” could be done on a video editor – I created a ten-minute clock on a green screen for use on YouTube. Many people commented something like: why on Earth would I want to do a thing like that? I didn’t know what they meant by that, really – that I took the time to make the clock, or why I put it on a green background.

For one, I thought it would help other video editors out putting it on a green background – because that background could be edited out by using an effect called chroma-key. When your local weatherman is showing you the conditions and the various maps, they are usually standing in front of a green screen. The stations chroma-key in the various maps and graphics, and that’s how you get local weather – a concept television has used for decades.

It also used to annoy me back in the space shuttle era that unless they were showing the old, massive countdown clock at the Kennedy Space Center, or unless the launch commentator briefly mentioned it – you had no idea how much time remained at various points before the launch. For one launch video in 2009, I did just that – superimposed the “green screen” clock so you knew at all times how much time remained before liftoff, up until there were just 10 seconds remaining.

I’ve always said I’d do another video someday for a 15-minute clock, and thanks to modern video editors available for free like ShotCut, it’s a lot more easier to do now. DaVinci Resolve looks like another nice free editor, but I only have 4GB of RAM on the machine I use everyday – which is more compatible for Shotcut’s purposes.

I guess if you wait long enough, everything you want to do you can do for free – is that the moral of the story?