swizzlespoon

Still alive, just not reading or posting much online most of the time.

I'm finally watching vids that premiered at Vividcon in August and many of them rock-- so rock on, you people who make excellent fanvids! Go you guys!

I enjoy vids and fanfic so much I really should do more to give back than leave kudos and the occasional comment and to that end (and simply because there seems to be a need), I've been working on a lengthy guide to how to use the FanFicFare plug-in with Calibre to organize one's fanfic collection and have your fic readily available in whatever format you like, wherever you like.

And then when that project was ongoing while I was looking at vids and making a clean start on my Plex media server set up, it led to me starting yet another fanvid organization project.

But! Stroke of genius? Crazy idea? I made a separate Calibre database just for fanvids since so many vidders are now putting info re their fanvids up on AO3. So I'm using FanFicFare and custom columns to download all that useful fanvid metadata for vids by vidders I like who have such things available on AO3.

Meanwhile I've also been making movie.nfo files for vids (and fanart and poster art when ready-made isn't available or needs tweaking to work well as Calibre cover art and/or poster and fanart on a media server like Plex or Kodi).

I've been pondering a script or plug-in that could generate nfo files for fanvids using data from AO3/FanFicFare. My husband's a programmer, he could help . . .

There still isn't a definitive useful fanvid database like The TVDB for TV or IMDB and Movie DB for movies, is there? Would be a tricky resource to maintain. And yet. A gal can dream (and I did look into creating such a thing once upon a time).

Honestly if vidders would simply maintain consistency in how they name files, that would be a help. Or use a standard format for listing useful data when posting about vids on AO3, Tumblr, DW/LJ, YouTube, wherever? It's likely already a pain to post things in as many places as some do.

But if everyone agreed on filenames of FANDOM - VID TITLE - VIDDER or something that would be a boon to nerds like me.

I've also decided I wish all vidders would create some sort of cover art for their vids or at least pick a still from the vid they think best represents it? People can do that when posting vids to YouTube and I'm now so very grateful for people who actually put art up with their YouTube vids or select a good frame of the vid where it's possible to do so.

At first I was viewing source on YouTube vid pages to find the imagine file for that, but lately I've been using this Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey script to make it easy to download that image for vids on YouTube. (Basically it puts the image on the YouTube page as a small thumbnail beneath the vid next to the subscribe button IIRC so it's easy to simply "open image in new tab" and/or right-click-save it.)

On AO3 when you post a fic or vid or other fanwork, you should be able to designate an image as cover art and when people do that makes it dead easy to autogenerate a book cover (or vid movie poster as the case may be) using FanFicFare and Generate Cover plug-ins with Calibre. It still seems rare that anyone does this on AO3 so I'm not sure if that's hidden or new or people don't realize how helpful it is to do that?

I occasionally consider putting together a simple guide for how to do these things as well as a proposal for formatting or something but I figure if I posted that in a vidding community somewhere people would just wonder who the heck I was and what my deal is and think me presumptuous and annoying.

But perhaps if I put together a useful resource and built templates and guides, people would appreciate that? Mostly I want to give back and simplify the lives of vidders and fans of vidders, not make more work or complicate things. It's tricky, you know? And maybe some clever soul that's more involved in vidding fandom has already tried this or done this sort of thing. I surely don't want to step on toes.