Holdfast Bullshittery - Pre-production week (Patreon)

Good afternoon everybody. And a sincere welcome to the new patrons. Thank you for being here. And thank you everybody for being so complimentary about the last video-essay. I'm glad people have been enjoying it.

Right now though, I'm eager to climb back into the driving seat and get started with the next project - this time a bullshittery. At least something easier to take the edge off that last edit.

It's been a while since Holdfast received some love. So over the weekend I moved the Holdfast Nations at War Master over to my main editing PC to have a look at it.

For those who are unfamiliar with my process - all my livestreams/recordings are saved onto a slow speed, high capacity storage device called a NAS that sits on my desk. It looks like this:

Basically it's multiple hard-drives pretending their ones really big drive. Like six dwarfs in a trench coat trying to sneak into a cinema. All of the livestreams are saved on there, sorted by game, and then by their recording date:

Additionally they each come with a small text file where I've typed up any relevant notes. Such as moments from the livestreams that could be prove interesting. Along with exact timestamps recorded using a small plugin called "infowriter", activated on a keystroke, assigned to my stream deck. Very handy!

With these two elements, the first step of any bullshittery is a pre-production stage. In which I create a "master" Premiere Project file containing all of the footage. And do something Premiere calls "nesting" - creating individual timelines of useful clips under their own names.

These titles I can use to rapidly identify a clip and determine how useful it is on a glance. It's not highly refined. More just a rough sorting guide. Here's an example of a nested sequence title:

The important part of this process is to be picky. For any editor can arrange clips on a timeline. Heck, even bots can do it. But what matters is the comedy. Trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. Stacking the master premiere file with highlights worth assembling. Because there's functionally no point spending ages editing visual effects on comedy that's not going to make people laugh. 

This whole pre-production step precedes the frequently talked about 11122322111 process. In which I try to distribute highlights onto the timeline in that familiar pattern. Which I'll talk about (for the new Patrons) much later.

What I'd like to do for the next week is go through that pre-production process. For Holdfast has about 50 livestreams nested from the previous bullshittery. But it has accrued a whopping 170 additional livestreams. Making pre-production nesting a very desirable proposition. I'm extremely confident there's multiple excellent bullshitteries in there.

So if you'll bear with me, I'd like to have a dig through the footage for Holdfast. See what gems I can unearth.

I'll let you know how it went at the end of the week. Followed by the next part of the plan. Hope you're all lovely :)