Ask the Vidder: astartexx

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Ask the Vidder: astartexx
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	astartexx
Date(s):	August 26, 2008
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	vidding, fandom, Supernatural
External Links:	Ask The Vidder, Archived version
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astartexx was interviewed in 2008 for Supernatural Roundtable.

Some Excerpts

To get the basic background information out of the way: I discovered vidding around 1999, about week after I went first online, thanks to a fellow XF-fan pointing me in the right direction. I was too intimidated to even try my hands on it right away. There was so much to learn, so many programs needed and my dreadful English really made the tutorials confusing. Thank god for PWPs, at least those fanfics I could figure out. Who would have thought fandom would be good for my education, it didn’t fail where teachers before despaired. I consumed every fic and vid instead and when I changed fandoms to Angel the Series my English improved enough to understand what people were talking about in technical tutorials. So I started vidding in 2002...

I stayed for the next two years firmly in the AtS/BtVS vid pool, it was comfortable, creative and crazy. I started to stalk and then actually speak to people and get to know vidders I admired from afar. Hi charmax! *waves* Anyway, the party came to an end, once AtS was cancelled, and I took a leap into the sparkly movie puddle. Since then I conquered the shallow depths of Alias, Lost, Veronica Mars, Haunted, Deadwood, The X Files and finally Supernatural. My master list with all vids can be found here and for streaming pleasure you find me over at imeem.

Supernatural broke my one year vidding block/hiatus in 2006 with a birthday vid for charmax. It feels like I own the show my comeback as vidder altogether, it really inspired me. I did eight vids since then in the SPN fandom with a preference for Dean PoVs and a wide range of themes.

I’m probably one of the slowest vidders ever, also one of the clingiest to their original program. I still vid with good old Adobe Premiere 6.5. Yepp, this is the program I started out all these years ago and to quote various vidder friends: Why fix something that isn’t broken (once again, xandra_ptv is laughing at me). Of course the machine I vid on has changed over the years, currently I’m vidding on a laptop with several external hard drives hosting my footage. As vidder you can never have enough space, this is something I learned. Also that you never stop learning, even when you are using the same program for over six years. I think the moment when I can’t compose a shot I want in Premiere 6.5 is when I finally upgrade and learn After Effects. Photoshop CS is also a tool I rely on more frequently. Another thing that made a huge difference for me in the last two years was learning Avisynth - first to prepare the footage and then later to tweak things around for the final encode. There is a reason why vids suddenly looks so nice at a small 30 MB output, Avisynth has everything to do with it. Trust me. As a vidder I try to avoid clichés, so every song I vid really speaks for something I want to say about a character. I love unusual takes to approach a theme and layers to cover up my shallow fangirl - otherwise I would feel naked. I adore playing around with colours, so that became part of my style. I’m also fond of audio voiceovers, sometimes they just add an oomph even when the song remains the voice of the character. The technical aspect of vidding is fun, same goes for figuring stuff out. I will always have the itch to remaster a vid and sadly that feeling starts two weeks after the release when the new-vid-glow dims.