How long does it take you to make a 5 min vid?

[x_rex30]

Time spent creating an amv is meaningless. Sometimes I spend over a week without touching a project, other times I work for hours a day. This is probably pretty general, as I doubt most amvs would take the time the creator claims if they works at it daily. Planing also saves a load of time and stress.

Yes it is meaningless. I dont care if you spent a year creating a vid, if it sucks, it sucks. I look at AMV creating sorta like drawing. Some people could do a better drawing than I ever could in 5 minutes, or it'll take me maybe 3 hours to do a really nice painting, and then someone out there will creat one in 30 minutes that is a lot better. I'm getting sick of people mixing effort with quality. Many creators go "Me spent over hundred hours, me put in lots of effort". Then everyone goes "ewww ahhh!!!!". Pfft!! :/

So far every time I've mentioned this, shit hits the fan and my average review score drops(damn biased bit**es).... Any way I made a 4:17 long video in 4 hours and it got a 4.0 star rating average from 16+ reviewers, and I had that review standing for like 3 weeks, then I brag about me taking only 4 hours on it, and then BAM!!!... in like 2 days I had around 8 more downloads to my video and it droped to 3 average. If your wondering what video it is look in my profile descriptions. Also my first video took me around 8 hours to complete, and it's pretty good ranked star ranking rise, made it about 5 years ago... Also this may be pushing it, especially for me, but my latest video entry took me an hour(another vid I made about 5 years ago). I already knew where everything was going to go in the video since I made the video in my head as I listened to the song, and then I just used my program Premiere on my dads crapn'toss, and it couldn't even save my progress/project, and had a lot of problems exporting. I made it and in my mind it was mind blowing, then I exported it and my system crashed and it got deleted, then I spent an other hour trying to make what I just did, then my comp crashed once again. By this time I was really frustrated and ended up remaking it an aditional 8 times.... and each time took about an hour and the video got worse and worse each time. So actually the time spent on the video is actually about 10 hours... heh, the original name of the video was VEGETA10 because of that, to remind me about how macs suck, and how much effort I put in trying to make the final product of the video turn out like the original one made that got deleted.

On a side note this video is my highest ranked video on a site, and averages out at about a 3.5.... If you want to check it out, GREAT, just don't be biased because you know how long I took on it. Sometimes I download videos without reading the discrip. of it, and the video has a low score, then after watching I think damn that was pretty awesome, and wonder why its score is low... then I look at creator comments and it says something like... "I spent three hours making this". :/ My whole point is people, quite judging a video based on how much time it took to make it. Thats pathetic, just realize some people are better artists than you are.

[BishounenStalker]

The shortest I've spent on any video was one week, and still had it turn out well. But that's because at the time, I did assloads of planning before editing (I only had vacation windows of 1-3 weeks to edit, since my POS laptop couldn't do it properly). The longest I've ever taken was two months (about 150 hours of work).

[godix]

Time took is meaningless. As someone gets used to their program they'll get quicker. I've spent four months on a video teaching myself effects in Premiere but because of that I could now do a video with effects in one or two days if I wanted. Besides, time does not equal quality. The best example of this is when AD posted that Storytelling took just a few hours.

[Noverca1is]

the general purpose of this reason was to just get a feel of an avg time people just spent working on a vid.

not the effort and/or quality of it or rating.
just a generalization point of view im looking at.

[Undertow]

Well, my videos are pretty simple, not much effects or non at all. I do however try to sync them to the best of my abilities, so that can take some time. The thing that costs the most time is coverting the dvds to Avi (yeah, i'm quite lazy when it comes to that).
But the total time i have spent on a video can run up to two months, or maybe even more. But just pure editing, i can finish something in a couple of days.

[Kai Stromler]

Time of construction is meaningless because there are factors involved beyond one's attention to detail involved, principally in the capabilities of your system and what you decide to count as production time.

Some people don't keep close stats on their process, some do. One person might say "this video took two weeks", meaning "I worked on this video off and on over a period of 14 calendar days until it was finished", but would have only devoted 18 hours to the actual work on the video. There's nothing that makes this more or less effort-input that someone who claims to have made an equivalent video in 18 hours, omitting that what is being described is 18 actual editor-hours of work spread over an arbitrary calendar span.

People's processes vary, and so does what they choose to count as work. Does ripping DVDs count as production time? How about timing the song and storyboarding? There's no standard to this; some people count only time spent in their editor as production time, some people extend over the whole process.

Then there's hardware/software. I did a 2-minute video in Virtual Dub on a 500MHz machine with 128 MB RAM, and it took 20 hours. I'm currently closing in on the end of a much, much, more complex six-minute video in Magix on a 3-GHz-equivalent (Athlon XP 3000+) with 1 GB RAM -- and it will also run about 20 hours. If your processor is slower, or if you have less RAM and your editor keeps paging out, you're going to require more time. If your editor doesn't support real-time playback of effects (or even edits in the case of that VDub vid), you are going to have to spend more time prerendering stuff. If your source is VHS or LD rather than DVD, you're going to have to capture it in real time instead of just ripping.

Basically, asking other people how much time they take is a wasted exercise unless they are working on very similar hardware, using the same software, and counting the same things as production time that you are. In the numbers above, everything is counted from the time the idea is finalized to the time the master version of the video finishes rendering: collection of video source (including reworking to editable formats if necessary), audio ripping, cleanup, and editing, clipping to select candidate scenes, song timing/storyboarding, any drafting, any effects pre-processing, editing, any partial renders contributing to the final build, and final rendering time. Post-processing for distribution is not counted. All time is in actual editor-hours.

Keeping close stats on your process, if you find them useful, can be a good thing; I do so and have accumulated nearly 100 data points over several hardware/software/source format combinations that give a fairly good predictive factor of what I'll be able to accomplish if, say, I have to leave the country in a week and won't be at my editing station for 10 to 14 days. If your real life doesn't impose these kinds of demands on you or you don't follow stats in other areas, keeping them may be a waste.

--K

[ProphetDK]

Hmm, looks like its been said and its true, the amount of time that you spend on a video is only how much time you put into it, not how good a video is.

If you are looking for an average its probrably not going to help, as people have said, some people just tent to take 50-100 hours to some people taking 5-20 hours depending on the project planning, familiarity of software/hardware, Software and hardware specs, ect..

Also footage takes its toll too.. if you have a 2 hour movie compaired to a 50+episode series.

I have had timelines I fly through and timelines i take a bit of time with. All depends on motivation and what inspiration i get when I decide on a project.

[MomochiZabuza]

Ironically, I'm going to start my newest project tomorrow (The song I'm using it is exactly 5 minutes long) so I guess I will time myself to see exactly how long it does take me (houres and amount of days) to finish it.

[tuathaanwarrior]

On the video im doin now, ive gotten aroudn 1mins 20 secs in 2 weeks, so five mins would prolly take a little less than 2 months. But then again, this is the first time im usin premeire so im still a noob.

[Illia Sadri]

A 5 min vid or 3 min vid or 12 min vid takes as long as it takes for you to declare it complete.

There simply are no set guidlines or even estimates.