How Free Is Free?
The following covers how to use the free video editing software DaVinci, by the company Blackmagicdesign. (Specifically, for how to make a #corecore video for tiktok or any sort of video editing.) It’s a fairly popular software, used by a good amount of freelancers and professionals in the film industry. If you’re a filmmaker worth their salt you’ve most likely used and heard about DaVinci. I am stale. I have only ever used brain software for editing writing so I had to figure this all out for a very specific video I had in mind that I’ll show you later. First, I need to tell you why I downloaded DaVinci, what my specs are, how I used it, and how it ended up.
The Mona Lisa Would’ve Loved Tiktok
No doubt you’ve heard of or used Tiktok. I jumped on the wave pretty early on and have mostly been lurking with a few little scenic videos here and there. Now, the important thing to know about Tiktok is that it uses a very specific algorthim that’s different from instagram. Here’s a literal case study of how Tiktok’s algorithm is better at reaching the right audiences. The idea here is that Tiktok places you onto these conveyer belts with the same sort of tags, content, etc. and then just indexes you to whichever conveyer belt you spend the most time on. It makes sense and it ultimately lets you be in control of what you’re viewing without any sort of meddling.
The reason I like this is that it means each video that’s uplaoded is going straight to someone who really wants to see stuff like that whereas other apps tailor popular, or sometimes payed posts, to be viewed first, which is annoying because it feels unauthentic.
So, with this specific algorithm I have found myself in a very specific niche of Tiktok. Invariably, everyone will. But this one is special and it’s called #corecore.
What’s #corecore?
You’re familiar with meta, not the company but the concept? To be self-referential, referring to itself. Well, on tiktok #corecore sorta means that but in this exisential dread sorta way. You know what, the best way to educate is to show so take a look below and let your imagination wander. Remember, this is not supposed to be some sort of narrative, it shouldn’t “make sense.” It is not in any way a linear media.
So you’re probably thinking to yourself, “well that was sorta sad and despondent.” You’re right, good diction. It’s supposed to be a collage of videos, quotes, scenes, but mostly moods, that come together to fill in this sad black hole of a heart. Hey with a demographic of 16-20 year olds what’d you think was going to be on here? But it isn’t always just sad stuff, I personally like the ones that get philosophical and ask big questions. Here’s an example:
So what you can see is that it interpolates videos that all have this underlying theme of despondency and acquiesence yet bewilderment and maybe like a small pinge of hope because there’s hope there. Which leads me to my video! But it’ll take just a few more little headers beecuase I gotta show you how I made it work.
DaVinci DaVinci DaVinci’s on fiya
Free stuff these days sucks. Samples from costco are as big as my pinky, the free air at the gas station keeps stopping, it goes on. But DaVinci is pretty great. After finding a few helpful tips on formating and exporting from this guy. I have a desktop with some pretty old software, like 2014 old. AMD A10 8GB of RAM. It’s suggested that you have 16, but hey we make do. So I went over to the site, downloaded, installed, did some homework and I was on my way.
So I sourced all the videos from youtube, converted them and wrote out a little shot list of where everything was going to go. I wanted to do the interpolation because it looked cool and I felt i thad a bigger impact on the theme when done well. I knew I wanted some hope at the end so I made sure to keep some crux of tension at the beginning. *writing
The tricky thing about editing software is figuring out all the shortcuts and how to keep everything still while messing with other things but since I’ve had a pretty good education of Adobe I felt comfortable to just click a bunch of shit and it turned out pretty well! First edited video ever and I’m a fan.
Caveat
The one issue is laptops. My god it took so long. So when I was editing on my desktop, remember how I said there’s a suggested RAM limit? Well, that suggestion was valid because it was taking so long to do anything, literally just moving a video element a couple seconds would take me probably 5 minutes because of how much it would lag. So I went to my laptop, a Dell XPS 15 from 2014, and downloaded the same DaVinci Resolve 18. I had my shot list ready, this time for a friends new album.
THEN IT CRASHED. AND KEPT CRASHING. THEN IT WOULDN’T EVEN OPEN.
I learned that it was a driver issue after parsing through like 4chan chats and shit it was a lot man. but anyway I figured out that because laptops sometimes have two graphics cards DaVinci gets confused and just stops altogether; super smart. So anyway, I took to my drivers, updated them all, even went into my graphics settings and changed the preference of DaVinci to use one driver over the other. I even turned off the Intel driver entirely and it STILL DIDN’T WORK.
So idk about you guys but I’m not a VERY tech savvy person. Like I know how the stuff works, I get what’s going on, and why it’s wrong but sometimes I’m just like hey if it works don’t worry ’bout it. So I gave up, left and went to sleep. Today I woke up and was determined to figure it out so I went to the scariest place of all; developers chats. This is where people speak in heirogliphics. Specifically, I went here, and it actually helped.
Old Is Gold
So what I had to do was revert my NVIDIA Geforce 960M to an older driver, specifically the driver that is compatiable with CUDA (no clue) but it’s listed in the, fuck it here it is.
So that’s what I’m talking about. It wasn’t working because DaVinci has settings that were made for a specific driver year and has trouble converting for newer stuff. Now it’s working beautifully and I’m on my way to making Tuwke X an earthshatteringly incredible music video, keep on the lookout! But until then, check out the #corecore tiktok I made!