Pretty slim pickings this week for interesting news… or just about anything for that matter!
OK, so Suarez bit someone in the World Cup but let’s face it, hardly any surprise there!
However there was one really good blog post I came across that reminded me of a subject that I think a lot of people could benefit from.
Shooting Better Video
Over on the Wistia site this week they posted a great article with video examples of the some of the more common shots you can use to make your videos more interesting to look at.
Here at DIYVideoEditor.com there is a basic set of intructions for shooting videos which you can see here: Shooting Better Videos.
One of the main problems many newbies have is that they tend to shoot a bunch of video of a particular event or whatever then try to cut out the bad bits, slap on some music and viola… cinematic genius! Or maybe not.
Apart from the technical reasons this doesn’t ever really work is that when you are creating a video you are not actually documenting an event.
What you are doing is creating a video representation of that event.
If you were actually documenting the event then a four hour children’s party would simply be a four hour video of kids in various states of sugar insanity!
The trick is to get enough footage to represent what happened then go into the editing process to recreate the event in well under four hours!
To that end video editing is not a matter of cutting out bad stuff and adding music.
It is a matter of building the story with the available footage and arranging it so that the viewer gets a good sense of the event or story.
In my series on this site I cover a couple of scenarios to give examples of using long, medium and closeup shots edited to together to build the story.
Of course my humble offerings in no way cover the full range of ways that you can use various types of shots to build and maintain interest.
If you were wondering why some of your videos seems just OK or even flat or lifeless then take the time to take a look at the series on this site as well as the Wistia post which gives some great advice.
YouTube Crystal Ball
Over on the YouTube blog they have just posted a pretty comprehensive list of features they will be adding in the coming months.
If you use YouTube in any way it’s always a good idea top stay ahead of the game.
One way that I have found myself getting into trouble with YouTube is that I failed sometimes to keep ahead of where they were going.
By “trouble” I don’t meant getting banned or anything. I mean spending hours tweaking all my uploads in a particular way or adding some feature or optimisation trick only to find that if I had just kept abreast of the news, I would have found that YouTube was now offering some automated feature that made all my efforts a waste of time.
Explosions!
And finally this week a video tutorial from the guys at Film Riot on how to create explosion effects.
Now let me warn you. Although technically these guys know what they are doing and do a good job of showing you how to do it they can be pretty annoying!
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