Right, the YouTube links are blocked in a number of regions. It's the song triggering that.
Yeah, a pretty good amount of time went into it. Typically in bursts of a few hours once or twice a week for a couple months. A lot of it is experimentation. Move stuff around. Hope to get lucky with something lining up in ways you didn't anticipate, etc. Actually, it's the ones that randomly fit the music perfectly in some random spot you didn't plan for that are some of my favorites. In particular, moments like when CLU's light jet assembles around him in the earlier part of the video. I wasn't sure where to put that, but where it ended up was the first random spot I tried it. I love how all his body movements track with the music through the assembly sequence. It's those little details that are hard to find or anticipate. Then there are other spots where you just have trouble getting anything to magically work, and you just have to do a "good enough" spot filler bit. The rapid fire middle section was a different kind of fun. I kept rearranging those (particularly since that is easy, with them all basically being the same length). Some of the bits ended up in that sequence because I couldn't get a longer piece of them to fit quite right anywhere else. "Well, I could just take a second of it and stick it in the rapid fire stretch."
Some of it is specifically planned out before I even assemble the materials. I'd been considering doing the video for a while before actually starting work on it. When I first heard that music track, I thought it would be a cool one to edit a video to. For me, the hardest part of edits like this are the beginning and end. It's hard to get it started. Assemble the source materials. Do a couple edit/render tests to make sure the whole workflow doesn't have any glitches. Get the first dozen or so clips that you specifically had in mind where you want them. Then, stare at the empty timeline and start moving puzzle pieces around. A lot. In the middle, as you start seeing a full video emerge, it gets more fun to move the pieces around and see what you get. But by the end, it gets hard to see the forest for the trees. I eventually had just just keep watching the whole video over and over and over to see what spots still annoyed me enough to want to change them. Finally, I got it down to a last few like that and got them fixed. I could honestly keep tinkering with projects like this indefinitely, but have to just finally say, "good enough." As the movie-making saying goes, "movies aren't finished, they're abandoned." I prefer the less fatalistic variation, "movies aren't finished, they escape."
I've watched the video a handful of times since posting the finished version, and I'm still quite happy with it. Now I sit here with this Vegas Video project file, the source video files and wonder, "since I've still got the materials all marked up and sitting on the drive, should I churn out one more video to a different music track?" It is easier to do a second one, to be honest, once you've spent all the time pouring through the various clips and what-not. I did do that on my previous music video (the first one I'd done in HD - and had to use a FAR more cumbersome technological workflow for) involving Firefly/Serenity. In that one's case, it was nearly a full 2TB drive full of materials, with clips all labeled and cut down, etc. I decided I had to do one more video with the materials. And in that case, it turns out that over time I've grown to like the second video I hadn't planned for better than the first that had a good amount of pre-thought put into it (over time, more and more about that one makes me wish I'd worked on it longer).
For any fellow Browncoats who wanna see those videos (they were done back in 2009):
Knights Of Serenity (The first one that I had planned on):
http://goo.gl/Y4Qzm
Firefly Aeternae (The one I did as a follow up):
http://goo.gl/6hMKX
Those were also both done in full high-def. I also have 2.35 aspect ratios of those vids, just not in a shared online spot at the moment. It's kinda funny that both my Firefly vids and this Tron vid both had alternating aspect ratios to deal with (the Firefly vids do because the show was 16x9, but the Serenity feature film was 2.35).
Firefly Aeternae is up on YouTube, since they didn't flag music problems on that one. Knights Of Serenity was blocked completely (since it has music as mainstream as MUSE, no surprise there). Here is the YouTube copy of Firefly Aeternae:
16x9 Version:
http://youtu.be/r2QWn_1iEo8
And hey, I do have the 2.35 aspect version of this vid on YouTube:
2.35 Version:
http://youtu.be/7cEch4ijM6U
Also, for anyone curious enough, here are a few earlier versions of the Tron video (which have the alternating aspect ratios between clips):
Alpha (March 2):
http://goo.gl/xHr81
Beta (March 16):
http://goo.gl/7ex46
Release Candidate (March 28. Only a few differences from the final - I kicked it out so I could watch it a bunch of times as a final QC check):
http://goo.gl/Q9AH5
At any rate, that's enough rambling for now. Perhaps inspiration will strike and I'll hear another song that I think will work for a second Tron Legacy music video...
Oh, and as promised, I'll have downloadable copies of the full quality high def master renders online soon. Most likely by Sunday. I also put together an AVCHD disc build with both versions and a simple menu, and might post a downloadable ISO for that (which can be burned to a DVD-R and played in most Blu-Ray players). Each video file is approximately 750mb, and the disc ISO with both would be about 1.5gb. I just have to figure out how best to share them, since most of the file locker services have run away in fear.