any advice on home movies?

dogwalker wrote on 5/11/2009, 10:46 AM

[this is also posted in Vegas Pro forum, sorry, but I want to target as many creative people as possible, and you may not read all three forums]

I searched for "home movies" but perhaps I should have widened my criteria. If this has already been addressed multiple times, I apologize.

Basically, I have a lot of old family movies from the past twenty years, and I want to create dvds from them. I've done a few, and people have enjoyed them. I think my push to make them even more interesting is mainly for me.

Up to now, I've done a few things like slow motion for a few frames when the kids were jumping on the trampoline, editing a lot of redundant footage to make the movies shorter, doing a few PiPs where appropriate.

Well, someone in this forum recommended looking at Digital Juice products, so I've bought some stuff there recently (Halloween and Fire swipe sets, and the Wedding Ring editor toolkit). Since I have footage of various halloween parties, I hope to make use of it, and the Fire ones are just for fun.

I'd like to use the Wedding toolkit to take my wedding video and make it look nice, and perhaps my in-laws wedding video as well.

Here's the thing. I'm learning the technical aspects of masking, mattes, PiP, etc, but I'd like to find some training, examples, etc on the creative side. Things like how/when to use Lower Thirds, moving backgrounds, etc. And when do I use these in the video versus using them in DVDA while building the DVD?

Thanks in advance!

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 5/12/2009, 6:21 AM

DVD Architect is really more of a DVD authoring tool. It's probably not the best tool for doing production work or for creating special effects.

You more likely want to do that kind of work on Vegas or a similar video editing program.

As for technique itself -- it all depends on the story you're trying to tell.

You can do your home movies as a simple music montage. You play a song and put random video clips together over it.

Or you can try to tell the story of each member of the family, following him or her from their infancy through adulthood. Narration or an interview with a family member telling the story will help build the structure for each story.

I've included some ideas for how to tell a story with video in my Steve's Tips article on storytelling, a free download from Muvipix.com at
http://muvipix.com/products.php?subcat_id=41

dogwalker wrote on 5/12/2009, 7:51 PM

Thanks, Steve!

Sonata wrote on 5/14/2009, 8:13 AM

This would be better for the Vegas forums, but while I am here...

I have made 25 home movie DVDs in recent years.

I try to vary things a bit, also just for my own benefit, and I have done things like:

--simple, straight forward video
--I always have a credit reel
--I will sometimes cut out video for an "interview" chapter or "outtakes" chapter
--I will tell the movies like a story, with story text between scenes
--If another event is mention during a home movie, I will find a photo of said event and impose it or interject it into the movie.
--I try not to get into messing with the actual movie too much; I tried the newprint effect and it wasn't as cool as I thought.
--I have done some slow motion and reply stuff.

Funny, though, because for the next few videos, I am going to simply just put movie onto a disc.

I do spend a lot of time on the DVD menus, though. I sometimes use video footage with effects as animated backgrounds, and I often spend more time creating DVD menus than actually editing the movies!