Editing Tips Requested -- How can I make a good [vacation, wedding, etc] movie?

jmk396 wrote on 4/1/2005, 4:36 AM
Over the past two years I've made several slideshows for my fiancé as well as other family members. The slideshows were pretty generic (only using zooms/pans) but I spent a lot of time scanning in the photographs and cleaning them up in photoshop. I haven't done any other video editing so really I'm still at a very, very basic level of experience...

Now I'd like to learn more about video editing, so I've borrowed my mom's camcorder and captured an hour's worth of DV footage from her last vacation (a cruise to the Carribean).

Unlike the slideshows I've made previously, editing video footage seems EXTREMELY difficult. (not difficult to make cuts, etc, but difficult to make it look good)

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 4/1/2005, 4:58 AM
Editing can be difficult if you didn't shoot with editing in mind, or have enough footage to edit.
Start by building a basic story in your mind, based on what you know about the contents. You might even want to make a bin or at least a series of regions that contain footage where the dialog is in sync with a mouth, and mark those as the main segments of the story. Any footage not synced to a mouth can become B roll, or secondary media used to fill in slots between dialog or to cut away too during dialog. Maybe Mom is talking about how fun it is to be at the beach, and so after starting with a shot of her talking about the beach, you cut to a beach scene while she continues to talk about it. Or, start a scene with the beach shot, and she's talking under the beach shot, and you cut to her talking. Either way, it becomes interesting at that point.
Try to cut dialog only on consonant sounds, not vowels. Consider learning how J and L cuts work if you need to change shots out where dialog needs to continue but the footage isn't prime. Consider using stills of the vacation intermixed with the motion footage if you find yourself running out of shots. Don't be afraid to go to a website and look for pix of the same areas you visited, to use them in your family video. This can help in the absence of a good shot.
There are lots of book and web tutorials available on the art of the edit, and it is an art. Practice and play a little, think about how you want to arrange the story. Does it start before the vacation? Does it start after the vacation and is presented as a memory? Does it start ON the vacation and then refers back to pre-vacation or post-vacation? Think of it like a song with a verse, chorus, and bridge, and this sort of helps. If you need to "repeat" a verse, no problem, just do something interesting with the footage so the viewer doesn't feel they're seeing the same thing twice.
jmk396 wrote on 4/1/2005, 5:09 AM
What are your thoughts on music behind the vocals?

At first I was thinking of cutting out all of the vocals from the footage and using a music track as a background (Buster Poindexter's - Hot Hot Hot). The first 30 seconds are really nice (the music is synced with dancing footage), but after that I'm at a complete loss on where to go because there is only about 30 seconds of dancing footage -total- (and that song is very upbeat so it doesnt match the other 95% of the footage).

The vocals from the footage are about 80% from my mom speaking while taking the video (so you can't see the mouth moving like you mentioned above).

Thanks for the tips and please keep the advice coming!

Spot|DSE wrote on 4/1/2005, 5:19 AM
So, start with the footage you have, then do an audible transition such as a "whoosh" or a page turn, and cut to a different kind of music, laid low under the vocals. You can also just do a standard crossfade transition with no additional audio, and use dissolves on the vid to make it work.
If it's a narrative, it becomes much easier to work with, because you can cut to shots of what your mom is talking about, and cut in stills (if you have them) of the vacation location or find some on the web that are related. Once I had a friend who went to Paris for a vacation, his video was terrible because it rained the whole time. So, I downloaded several dozen stills of areas of Paris, combined it with some of my own footage of Paris, and he had a nice vacation vid. He was there, so it still tied in with his memories of the occasion whether he shot the footage or not.
DavidMcKnight wrote on 4/1/2005, 6:31 AM
a vacation video of Disney World was my first foray in editing and reminds me of what you did. We didn't have the camcorder on all the rides, so I taped one of those Travel Channel specials on WDW and included some of that footage in our video. I also found the concept of using stills to illustrate things you saw but didn't record to be beneficial.