Canon 7d
I got a Canon 7d this evening to use at work and am really excited to use it. The good news is there are a lot of graduation parties that must be attended this weekend, so there are ample opportunities to try it out. I’m planning on using the video option on it a lot. I’ve seen some amazing footage that it’s shot and am excited to try it out for myself. I’ll be posting photos and video clips that I shoot with the camera this weekend in a couple of days.
I’m also going to work on coming up with a video project to produce using this camera to try it in a real project.
Anyone got any ideas?
The Five Before Logo Build
“The Five Before” is an idea from another church, except they call it “The Ten Before”. The Five Before is a pre-service countdown video that has a host that gives the announcements the five minutes before the service starts. At New Covenant Bible Church, we’re going to use this with the youth group on Wednesday nights. I needed a way to open the video up, and made this Logo Build to put at the beginning of the video (I did get the building idea from another site though). So I created the logo in Photoshop and brought the layers into After Effects and built it up. Here it is, and let me know what you think.
The Five Before Logo Build from Andrew Male on Vimeo.
After Effects Countdown Expression
Recently I’ve been experimenting with an idea for a countdown video. The first step was to figure out how to make a countdown. Well many guys go in to the timeline, and make text layers that change every second to make it appear to countdown. When you’re talking about a ten minute countdown that can get really tedious, and there was no way I was going to do that. So I came up with an expression to do this. All you have to do is copy and paste it into the “Source Text” expression area and there you go. If you want to change how long the countdown is, go into the expression and change where it says “dur = 10″ near the beginning of the expression, to “dur = (however many minutes you would like it to be)”. Hope this helps!
offset = 0;
i = inPoint + offset; //the in point of the layer
dur = 10; //the duration of the countdown in minutes
dur *= 60; //the duration of the countdown in seconds
seconds = Math.max(dur - Math.max((time - i), 0),0); //the countdown time in total seconds
minutes = Math.floor(seconds / 60); //the countdown time in minutes
seconds = Math.floor(seconds - (minutes * 60)); //the countdown time in seconds (minus minutes)
if(seconds < 10) seconds = '0' + seconds; //add an additional '0' in front of single digit seconds
if(minutes < 10) minutes = '0' + minutes; //add an additional '0' in front of single digit seconds
minutes + ':' + seconds
Testimony Videos – Part 4 – Editing
Well it’s been a long couple of weeks working on the video Jennifer’s Story (Click HERE to see final product). The editing process went pretty smoothly.
Once all of the footage was captured (around 3 hours of footage from 2 cameras at 80GB), I lined up the clips from the two cameras on the timeline so that they would match up. The first step in the editing process for me is to go through all of the footage and take out anything that is unusable. This would be things like my voice asking questions, or mistakes that the interviewee makes, and things that could just never make it to the final project. Once I have that done I go through the audio, and get the story laid out. Take out things that aren’t relevant to the story that the final product will share (you need to find this out in your pre-production planning), and get the first rough cut done. Once that is done, I do it again, and once that is done, I do it again. I do this as many times as it takes to get the video down to a shorter version that still tells the story that needs to be conveyed. Once it’s down to around 10 minutes (usually after about 3 rough cuts for me) I bring the person I’m doing the project for in to view it. I make sure that this is the direction that they envisioned the project going, and if it is than I know I’m on target. The client usually has good ideas for things that they don’t think is important to share, so that helps me cut it down even more. Sometimes the client doesn’t like the video. I had this happen with Jennifer’s Story. I got the video down to about 10 minutes and had a viewing for a couple of pastors at New Covenant Bible Church, and they liked the first half of it, but didn’t like that second half at all, and wanted other things from Jennifer’s story in it. They had some good points that I took very seriously, and walked back into my office, put my headphones on (because when my headphones are on, I don’t get distracted with other noises in the office) and I started editing again.
One thing I do when I edit videos is duplicate my timelines after every rough cut. This is wonderful when you have to go back and redo a portion of a project or redo an entire project. It saves a whole lot of time when you need to go back and grab clips that you’ve omitted. So when I went back after the review, I duplicated my timeline and started working on the new one (DRAFT 4) (btw I always type my sequences in all caps so that I can quickly tell the difference between a clip, effect or timeline in my bins). Once my final rough cut is done, and I think the video tells the story needed, I get the audio transitions perfected. The audio in a video is the absolute most important part of the video and if it doesn’t work, then your video probably won’t work either. Sometimes I even turn off the video part and just work with getting the audio sounding good. Once that is done, I render out a timecode burn for the client to view (sometimes they come over to the edit suite for viewing as well). Once they approve the video I can work on making the video look nice.
I use cutting back and forth between a couple of cameras and b-roll to cover up my edits. On Jennifer’s Story, I pulled some of the clips into Adobe After Effects and did some effects on them. I used a couple of masks and adjustments layers to create blurs on the back of her head on camera 2, and some color correction. I’m really happy with the way those clips turned out, and during the process learned that you can really simulate a big focal distance using this technique, and I’ll definitely be doing that again.
Today was really about the edit process on testimony videos and not technique during editing in general. I’ll say one thing about editing in general and leave the rest for another post, and that is that the most important part of editing is organization. You MUST have your clips and bins organized or you could spend a whole lot of time searching for clips that otherwise you’d just be able to grab quickly. I’ll post more about this later.
Jennifer’s Story
The Testimony video I’ve been writing about, was shown at New Covenant Bible Church today! I’m so happy to have planned and worked through this project all the way through and kept the original plan in mind while going through the process. I would love to know what you think about it, so check it out…
Jennifer’s Story from New Covenant Bible Church on Vimeo.
Other Posts about this:
Testimony Video Part 1 – Audio
Testimony Video Part 2 – Directing
Testimony Video Part 3 – Shooting