Shoot for the Edit
In the How to Shoot Better Video section of this site I have posted what I hope is a reasonably good introduction to the subject of shooting more effectively.
It is by no means a complete or comprehensive discussion of the subject but for the novice I think it at least gets you going in the right direction.
One of the main points I cover within that series of posts is the concept of shooting for the edit.
Too often the new videographer goes to an event or attends some kind of gathering with his or her heart filled with excitement and good intentions.
In an effort to make sure they have more than enough footage of whatever is going on they of course madly move about shooting just about everything in sight until they run out of storage space.
Then later, back at their editing workstation, they excitedly upload their footage and begin only then to discover that the footage they have seems to have been taken by someone running about madly videoing everything that moves… or doesn’t!
It is at that point that they realize this editing malarky is a bit harder than they imagined as they tediously try to piece together something that seems to make some kind of sense.
It is of course at that point they they are actually trying to piece together a story.
One of the most powerful ways to cut all of this time and effort down and make the entire experience a whole lot easier is to have the story worked out before you even begin shooting.
Now I know that many of us are often in a position where we do not have the luxury of working the story out first then going out to shoot it.
But what we can do is when presented with a situation where we are taking video, to have the idea in our minds that we are later going to put it all together into a story of some kind.
If you keep this idea of, “What’s the story I am going to tell on video and how am I going to do that?” in mind as you are shooting, your shots and your shot selection can be far more focused and efficient.
Of course if you are going to video something and have knowledge of the event prior to doing it one of the best tools you can use is the story board.
Some More on Color Correction and Grading
In keeping with a few of my recent posts on the subject of color grading and color correction I found this excellent resource the other day posted over on the Fenchel and Janish website.
It’s a pretty good collection if instructional videos gathered into one place with some commentary on each subject and well worth taking a look at.
- Film Look & Movie Atmosphere
And here’s another video I found on color correction as well:
Other Stuff
And in other news this week Telestream have just announced that their screen recording and editing software ScreenFlow will be updated soon to version 5 and will be available new or as an upgrade in early November.
If you are looking for a great video editor to use on a Mac but don’t want to be burdened by the complexity of a professional suite then you can’t go past ScreenFlow.
You can see my review of it here: ScreenFlow Review.
YouTube Settings
These days most video editing packages have a good range of up to date preset settings for rendering out projects that will be uploaded to YouTube.
In fact most of them have both the rendering and uploading pretty well automated.
If you have ever wondered what the correct settings should be or fell that perhaps the quality you are getting on YouTube is not what it should be then it’s well worth the time to learn a little about what the ideal settings are.
Keep in mind that no matter what you upload to YouTube it is always going to be re-rendered by them to conform with their own optimal parameters.
The trick here is to get your video rendered to as close as possible to the exact formats and parameters that YouTube will convert the video to in the end.
The reason for this is simple.
Re-rendering any video file from one set of parameters to another will always result in some kind of quality drop.
What you are trying to do is get as close as you can to their final output settings so that an absolute minimum of re-rendering (conversion) occurs and thus maintaining the full quality.
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