Die in a Bonfire: An Experiment in WoW Video Editing
by Lume ~ July 10th, 2008. Filed under: Videos.Technical limitations aside, I now understand why a lot of people don’t create videos for their blogs. The process is extremely time consuming.
I spent pretty much an entire day performing and frapsing the material to include in the video. It then took several hours to learn how to use Premiere Elements and nearly two days to piece it together, add music and try different editing theories. And I needed half a day just to figure out how to encode it properly and upload it to Vimeo. All between work, raids and real life!
The video itself is reflective of the learning process. It starts off with longer pieces edited together randomly, followed by me trying to time scene transitions and actions to match beats in the music. Later on, I do some experimentation with time stretching. The result is a video that starts off slow but ends well.
If you have a short attention span, you can probably skip to about 9:40 or so.
I don’t think I’ll be doing a lot of entertainment-focused movies in the future, particularly if the quality hinges on timing and hundreds of clips. However, I might do some instructional videos, because I can’t see them taking nearly as long to complete. Otherwise, the process is simply too time consuming.
Songs in the Video
- Crazy - Gnarls Barkley
- I’ve Got a Plane to Catch - LOST Soundtrack
- Time Is Running Out - Muse
- Last Battle - Ocarina of Time Soundtrack
- Fanfare - FFVII Soundtrack
- Ring of Fire - Johnny Cash



July 10th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Just how many times did you die? :)
July 10th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I lost track somewhere in Arathi.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Awesome! :)
July 10th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
What a clever idea for a first video! Thanks for sharing!!
July 11th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Very Good video lol
July 12th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Brilliant video! Bless them plucky gnomes with their “Can Do” attitude! :D
July 12th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
I rolled it a gnome explicitly so it would die hundreds of times.
July 14th, 2008 at 7:38 am
It took me twelve hours to compress, encode, and edit my first WoW movie.
It took me less than four to do my second.
Learning curve is pretty steep. I enjoyed it. :P