Kicking some home video ass
I have about 35 hours of DV video that I’m moving into my hard drive. I just bought a 250GB drive for this purpose. However, 35 tapes @ 12GB per tape totals 420GB of storage. Some of the tapes have blank sections and some of the footage sucks (some people would argue most of the footage sucks, but they better be careful since any shot of my kids is awesome!) so, once I hack and slash the sucky parts, I hope to get all of my valuable clips on my drive for easy access.
While “producing” or “authoring” a home video project, I’ve found that monotonous clips of birthday parties, lasting 30 minutes a clip, are very boring to watch. Most of the footage is usually shaky, and the rest is composed of whole sections where people are talking about nonsense or walking through the house.
I’ve found that “themed” montages are much more interesting. I create these from many short outtakes, mixed in with music and stills, usually having a common theme. Having all of my clips on a drive, categorized by date and subject matter will make the creation of montages much easier… and better.
I don’t claim to be an expert, but I do have a few tips for you amateurs out there… wait, that’s me!
- Don’t follow your kids around. You’ll be amazed at how much footage you have of the back of your kids.
- Don’t always take video standing. Your kids are small and some shots at their level are more entertaining.
- Use a tripod for God’s sake, or at least use the image stabilization feature of your DV camera. I get a headache watching a lot of my own stuff before I started paying attention.
- Save your original DV tapes and don’t re-use them. Writing your video’s to DVD loses a lot of the video information that’s on the original recording. This is even mre true or Video CD or Super Video CD formats, MPEG1, and MPEG2 as well. 10 years from now, when authoring software is far better than it is now, you’ll appreciate the extra image data as the image-enhancing software available for professionals today will be avaialable for you tomorrow. Without that extra image data, there is not much that good software can do.
- Let your kids taks some video. They love it and they tend to take some interesting footage. If they break the camera, you have an excuse to get a new one, which will probably be better than the one you have.
- When creating slideshows, avoid creating it from simple slides that flip from one to the next. Crossfades are nice, but still not nearly enough. You can do better! You need to utilize slow zooms, music, and narration. Luckily all of this is easy using Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition, which comes with Microsoft Photo Story. I definitely recommend you drop the $20 and get a hold of it. If your authoring software doesn’t like the WMV files it produces, generate 800×600 WMV with the software (available via their “more profiles” page), import the clip into Windows Movie Maker 2.0, and generate a DV file (best quality output) that should import fine into your authoring software. If you want more explicit directions, write me and I’ll make a more advanced post.
happy shooting…
Posted by Nick Codignotto at February 18, 2004 04:33 PM
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