Relative Something

My progress as a novice movie maker is currently mixed between successfully finishing a video of my song, but stymied with the task of trying to turn it into a DVD that will play on any variety of players. Details, details. There are a lot of details to post-production work. As it is, I got ahead of myself and imported as many images to my iMovie program as I could find, yet neglected to improve any of them with enhancements to brightness, contrast, or saturation. But with my focus at the time explicitly aimed at getting images to match lyrics, I hastily advanced that cause at the expense of tending to adequate preparations. By the time I realized the situation, I decided it wasn’t worth losing the progress accomplished to go back and start over.

If you have been following along, this matches the experience I was writing about after I got back from recording my song. I will allow what I see as flaws to remain in this project. It gives me renewed respect for artists who do this work for a living.

What exposes me as a novice, a true novice, is that I don’t have experience with the software I am using. I peruse the menus, searching for a selection that appears as though it would lead to results I envision, and then bump into a variety of failures until I either change direction and try a different menu or alter my vision of what kind of outcome I will accept. Ok, every once in a while, I get lucky and things happen just like I hope they will. It happens just often enough that I don’t get scared away from trying again to use the software to do things that I don’t actually know how to do. I get some results, but the process isn’t pretty.

I think if I actually used this software more than once a year, I might retain some of what I learn from each experience and develop a basic proficiency, but as it is, I am starting at the beginning each time I get inspired to try. One of the problems is that I have just enough success the first times I use it, that I think my expectations rise, and then when I try again a year later, I find myself increasingly frustrated by the combination of higher expectations from previous success matched against the lack of memory of how I achieved it.

See why I amaze myself when I ever do accomplish these kinds of tasks? Over time, I have come to understand that I can enjoy an acceptable level of personal satisfaction over progress that comes in small steps.