Video editing has been difficult for me.
I come from a background in still photography. I have usually had the ability to select the one mostly perfect shot from a variety of possibilities, and then perform light editing to individual perfection.
With video, it has seemed much more like a set of tradeoffs. With video, it’s necessary to not only have beauty, but beauty in relation to other camera angles and cameras.
The storytelling needs to be more explicit. With connections between shots needing at least token smoothness.
One thing that has been frustrating to me is that I seem to get zero feedback at all. Nope - none at all. Inside my head I assume that some set of viewers are perfectly satisfied, have edged through the scene and come to a glorious orgasm in perfect synchronicity with the climax of the video. And some other set of viewers are so disappointed that they immediately stop watching and unfollow me on Twitter. Both yielding silence from my perspective.
What follows is a cry for help in the form of a request for constructive feedback.
I’m going to talk about the editorial decisions of full videos, but mostly talk about cutting full videos down to previews.
The first video edit I made was for the BDSM sleepsack CBT scene.
It’s way too long. The full video is about 3 times too long.
Most of the edits to the full video were removing dialog. In a private scene I will talk a bunch. Sometimes reassuring, sometimes intentionally aggressive. But in a public scene this will be replaced with a wide variety of stern glances.
I tried digital zoom for a repeat of the cumshot with limited success. I am used to still photography with a variety of high end mirrorless cameras with high quality lenses. With my still photography equipment, I have gotten quite good 11”x17” prints from a 1° field of view. It is unreasonable to expect this absurd quality from a $200 GoPro camera, designed to go through a rainstorm at 80mph, mounted atop a motorcycle helmet. While it passes the squint test, the quality is unsatisfying after a full render.
I thought I did a good job. Muscle_dog was polite, and basically let me learn the lessons on my own. I realized later how unpolished this video looked.
Very early in our courtship, @HungArabDad gave permission for me to take video of our sex. Most of these videos only got watched once or twice before being filed away. These raw videos were a really great resource starting to learn video editing.
For my first fuck video edit, I first created an edit of the video without cuts, then added cuts to make a smoother narrative. It was okay. I had two different views of a good fuck. These different views combined to form a stronger narrative.
When it came time to edit this down to a preview, I made a couple of mistakes that I now recognize. The first mistake is that the preview was a summary of the scene rather than a teaser. The two will differ in which moment of focused on; a teaser will focus on rising action, the summary will focus on the climax. A teaser makes you want to see the full movie. A summary makes you almost feel that have already seen the full movie.
I also got the pacing of the preview wrong.
I started work on a newly shot video of an outdoor blowjob. This had new challenges and therefore new lessons. The blowjob video was poorly framed. The action seemed to wander onscreen in distracting ways. Manually stabilizing and reframing the raw video made it much more watchable.
I tried the same techniques on a single camera fuck video. My attempt at stabilization was taken too far, and became confusing. But the feeling I got was under-damped noise, telling me that the attempt to stabilize had been taken too far. Reducing the camera pans and zooms made the world better.
I did a bunch better with the preview. And produced something that I was happy with. @HungArabDad insisted that the preview needed to be still shorter. So I went back and tightened it further. That did make things better. For ease of editing, I had cut the preview together from similar length sections, and this created a beat that was compelling and made everything feel intentional. The regular beats followed by the longer hold at the end of the preview reminds me of an orgasm after stroking a cock.
The next single camera fuck video was easier. Pans didn’t work as well as I had expected. I went back and made all of the pan/zooms gentler and slower. But using any zoom at all, in particular for after the cumshots, revealed underlying deficiencies in the original video quality.
A flip fuck from during IBC 2024 had two cameras, an iPhone15Pro, and a GoPro11. These cameras were set up quickly. - stand lamp was pretty central in the view of the iPhone. This created lens flares that simply had to be tolerated. Lots of action happened outside the frame of the iPhone. The very wide angle view of the GoPro gave the opposite problem that action was almost always in a very small portion of the frame, needing digital zoom to be useful, despite the quality problems that created.
But the flip fuck from IBC was the first time I got the multi-camera editing working within Adobe Premiere. In contrast to all of the online tutorials, automatic synchronization of multiple cameras using the audio track has never worked for me. I have been left manually synchronizing and then copying timecode offset information into new sequences.
I watched all of the sequences, making notes of which cameras I thought had fun or useful footage. I then created a sequence from the multicam selecting the camera based on a smoothed version of my notes. This gave a 23 minute video, that selected camera, but had no missing time. (I didn't post the uncut video to my JFF page, but did post it to my JFF store.)
I then worked to cut the 23 minute long video down to a good duration. A fiend JesseColtSoCal gave useful advice that 15 minutes was a good maximum length for a JFF update. I struggled mightily to cut down to 15 minutes.
Sex by its nature is repetitive within a scene; Fucking more so. I had a number of ideas of where to cut. I thought about removing transitions between sexual positions. I thought about removing repetition in strokes, head bobs, and thrusts. I thought about removing entire positions and acts. I ended up using a combination of all of these strategies. Maybe not as coherently as I had hoped.
Then I started looking at porn video from my GoPro 360° VR camera. I had forgotten about some of this footage, and rediscovering it felt like Valentine’s Day, birthday, and Christmas all swirled together.
I am still trying to figure out how to make the underlying VR footage available in a useful manner on JFF. But in the meantime I can create flat views for use in videos. (After stitching the 360 video together into a giant 360, converting this to a cubic projection, then selecting direction and zoom for rectilinear projection in Premiere. Yeah, that is a lot of steps.)
This VR footage was included in another fuck with a two usable camera angles. One pointed at faces during the scene, the other made to point straight down. Instead of spending my time editing down the video, I decided to leave it as an uncut split screen of the front and top views.
I spent my time instead on transcribing the video. I may have taken this a little too far, trying to align every grunt and verbalization. The transcript definitely has value, but not enough value for the amount of time that it took. I should have concentrated more on stage direction (closed captions vs subtitles), but there doesn’t seem to be good support for these in Premiere.
A friend, JesseColtSoCal, gave constructive criticism. He said I needed to clean up the background of shots more. He suggested that split screen should be reserved for important events like cumshot. I absolutely agree with the first. I think he’s probably right on the 2nd.
But his feedback didn’t arrive until minutes after I had publicly posted to JFF and Twitter, so I couldn’t incorporate his feedback. But the criticism had real value to me, both in what was said and what wasn’t.
He hadn’t noticed a section of the video where I had addressed a siren from a fire engine by completely replacing the audio with a collage of audio from other parts of the video. (From 2:18 until 2:53)
I did a better job with the Twitter preview of this video. I kept the cuts to the beat. I identified the sex acts that didn’t further the narrative and one rimming shot was pulled out of order from the fucking in order to make the narrative flow better. I understood that for a preview, a snippet of the audio from the cumshot was better than including video.
I later discovered mistakes. One painful mistake was the difference between “scale to fit” and “set to fit” in Adobe Premiere. The first turns out to resample the image, the second one carries the full resolution. This showed up as blurry video when digital zooming during editing. Somebody wrote to say that we should shift to better camera equipment. After discovering my mistake, I fixed it in all of my videos going back. But I can’t fix some of the videos without changing the order in the feed, or breaking links from Twitter.
My editing work is very clearly improving. But it’s still a work in progress.
