B: ADVICE FOR BEGINNERS ON TRAVEL AND FAMILY VIDEO

Good editing requires patience.

Beginners should keep to the minimum requirements that will provide the movie they want. I include all the popular rules but I have also added a few advanced features that I use - these are easily handled by the average amateur movie maker.

If you have travel and family video shots: trim and adjust them with a simple edit operation, make DVD copies for easy viewing and archive them for safe storage. At a later date, if you wish, you can then edit them down to a series of short movies.

If the old stuff is really bad - maybe you can convert it into a series of stills.

If there are short clips that are not too bad you may be able to make the scene watchable like this: convert the first frame into a 3 second still, then let the video run for a few seconds and finally convert the last frame into a 3 second still. Examples of how to do this are shown in Clip 1 Problem Video and Archiving play / download.

These notes will help a beginner to get started, they describe in detail the system I use. After you have edited a few movies, you can then move onto your own preferred system.

1. Load the video shots to your computer.
2. Trim the material to remove the accidental shots of the ground and the sky.
3. Trim the start and end of each shot to remove dead time and shaky bits.
4. Insert title cards throughout the video so as to identify the various locations and the people in the video shots. Do not superimpose the information on the video - this makes those shots unusable in future edits.
5. Archive the video clips to MiniDV tape or a spare external hard drive. I put them on both so that I have a backup. Refer to Part 19 "Archiving".
6. If you want to, you can later edit it down into short movies so as to provide an easy-to-view reminder of the various events.
7. You should add a black leader and a black tail at the end of the movie. These bits of video should be about 5 seconds long so as to make it easy to make copies on a DVD recorder.
   
   I have two friends that have a lot of trouble with black leader. Sometimes a DVD recorder or a computer will not recognise that there is a video signal there and will not start loading. If that happens to you - roll the tape forward to the first couple of video frames with pictures, and then see if it will load from there.
   [A practical work-around is to make your own "black" by shooting a black card with one tiny white spot on it near one edge of the image, or creating a still image in a paint program, import that and stretch it for as many seconds as you need.  Some systems also require soundtrack before they recognise the existence of the video. Copy any old soundtrack under the black leader but make sure the volume level on it is set to almost zero.]

When editing such short movies, the editor has to hope that the camera operator got in close and also took some cutaways and reaction shots. Use the rules as set out for dramas, where appropriate.

Refer to Clip 1 Problem Video and Archiving (play / download.) (5 ½ minutes) which shows:

Problem video - Oberammergau, an Austrian town in Bavaria

1. Raw video which has already been trimmed as suggested in steps 2 and 3 above.
2. First system fix - edit a "Series of stills" - where the video is really bad.
3. Second system fix - edit a "3 Seconds still + moving video + a 3 seconds still" - where the video is not too bad. Separate the clips with a bit of black as shown in the example.

Archiving - The Lake District, UK - Grasmere and Ambleside

1. An extract from travel videos in Britain with a title card describing the locations.

Exercises

If you don't have any raw video, now is the time to start practising the video shots and do some editing - refer to Part 1 and Parts 4  / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 - just reading about it is not good enough - you will forget some of the information and suggestions.

Editing Short Movies

That is if you have a lot of video that you want to reduce down to something that will be watchable. The length of the edited clips should normally be as shown below, but when on the site take longer shots - remember to look around for close-ups and cutaways:

1. Average clip 3 seconds to 4½ seconds, or 3½ to 5 seconds with 1 second cross fades.
2. Long clip 9 seconds, take care - keep it shorter rather than longer.
   There will be special situations where you will want to take longer shots of family situations, parades, school concerts and other events.
3. Reaction shots and cutaways - length to be a minimum of 1¾ seconds ie., one second and 17 frames. If you want to edit your travel and family videos to a more advanced state - browse through the "Further Advice For The Making Of Dramas" - then select the features you want to use.

< Part 16 | Part 17A | Part 17C | Part 18 >

© copyright Arthur Bullock, 2008