Make Your Own Video

While browsing for free stuff recently, I found this list. I know of many of the things mentioned, but plenty more are new to me.
111 Free Filmmaking Tools

I’m currently trying to get to grips with the latest version of After Effects. It’s been years since I last upgraded (version 4.1!) and so much has changed that I’m treating the exercise much like learning a new system from scratch. Here are some of the useful-looking tutorials I have found so far:

• Adobe Beginner Classes
• Video CoPilot
• AE tutsplus
• www.stevengotz.com After Effects Links
• Ultimate Round-Up of Adobe After Effects Tutorials
• Forging Fire Flourish
• Happy Aftereffecting
• Expressions in After Effects
• 50 Excellent Adobe After Effects Tutorials
• 50+ Most Amazing Adobe After Effects Tutorials

Any other good suggestions?

Click the image to play the video: (WMV 01:25 10.5MB)

The Yahoo Videoblogging Group’s “30 videos by 30 Vloggers in 30 Day” Challenge is that each person draws inspiration from the video created the day before. I was intrigued by all the chopping and changing in recent videos from Mike Moon and David Lee King, but I wanted to pick that up and show that change is a vital part of survival.

And I wanted to celebrate Darwin, today at least.

The music is from Instrumental Works by SaReGaMa, released under a (cc) by-nc-sa licence.

A few months ago I finally gave in and bought myself a Macbook. There are many things I like about it, and also a bunch of irritations and disappointments.

One of the disappointments was the video editing facilities. I know a lot of happy Mac-using video editors, and so had assumed that the Mac ecosystem would contain a wide range of video editing choices, just as the Windows world does. Unfortunately not. For video editing on a Mac you actually have very few options. Each new Mac comes with a very basic editor in the form of iMovie, effectively the equivalent of Windows Movie Maker. Anything more than that costs big money either for Apple’s “own” Final Cut, or the crazy world of Avid. There are a very small number of open source video tools but none of them is really a general purpose video editor.

On my Windows PC I have a handful of different video editing systems ranging in price from the nearly-free (less than £5), through a few at £40/£50 to the top end of my budget (around £100 for the likes of Sony Vegas or Adobe’s introductory version of Premiere). My favourite at the moment is Serif MoviePlus although from time to time I take another try at using the generally highly-regarded Vegas.

My initial attempt at using iMovie on my new Mac left me pretty much baffled. It seems to have no time-line and common tasks such as splitting and trimming clips, inserting cutaways and boosting/cutting spot sounds make me scratch my head. I know I need to spend more time with the tool to get used to it, but Apple’s video tutorials and on-line help don’t seem to answer my questions and frustration gets the better of me.

I have recently found Ken Stone’s obe-page iMovie 09. I hope this is more help…

Click the image to play the video: (WMV 02:12 13.7MB)

On Wednesday evening I joined a group from the IET and took a special tour of the East Anglian Film Archive. This is a fascinating place, filled with hundreds of thousands of films and tapes covering over 100 years of moving image recording. Here’s a short taster of the visit.

I left inspired by their enthusiastic dedication, despite continuing paucity of funding, and the possibilities for collection of today’s video alongside the images of long ago.

Special thanks to Louise Lawrence and Pete White for taking us round and explaining everything so helpfully.

Click the image to play the video: (WMV 01:29 9.7MB)

At the start of VloMo ‘08 I honestly did not think I would make it. Now I am really “chuffed” to have got to the end having posted a new video every day for a whole month.

I have definitely learned a lot – my editing is much faster and smoother and I even got to try a few new techniques during the month. If you participated in VloMo ‘08, I hope it has been a similarly uplifting experience for you. Now to catch up on watching the ones I have not seen yet …

[update: enclosure was pointing at the wrong file, so this video did not initially appear properly in the feed. Fixed now, sorry ]

Click the image to play the video: (WMV 01:19 9.7MB)

After leaving Vancouver we picked up our RV (camper van) and headed north into the mountains. At home we barely even have hills, so this was an exciting (if rattle-clattery) adventure all of its own. By the time we returned the RV I had driven around 1500 km of these kinds of roads.

Click the image to play the video: (WMV 01:41 9.8MB)

While I did not manage to fit in any time to record and edit yesterday’s post the evening before (as I have often done this month), I did decide what I would do for today’s video, and even started it going.

I have been slowly working my way through the collection of videos for the Semanal Project. Inspired in part by Mike Moon’s “Time Lapsed Saturday” posted for Semanal Week 34, I decided to record my own time-lapse movie.

I dragged out a USB cable until it allowed my low-spec webcam to point out through a slightly dirty window and set it to record an image every minute. To capture the images I used the free “Webcam Timershot” Windows XP powertoy from Microsoft. I set it up following the instructions in Time lapse photography using digital camera or webcam at Mike Temple’s Open Resource Center.

Naturally it has no sound. Interestingly, it fulfils most of the criteria for a Lumiere (with the exception of the duration, I guess), but whether a time-lapse video is in the spirit of the Lumiere rules I’m not so sure. In some ways early film-makers would probably have found it more natural to take a separated series of still pictures to form a moving image.

Opinions?

Click the image to play the video: (WMV 00:53 5.2MB)

I didn’t manage to work on video stuff last night, so here is a quick piece from this morning.

Click the image to play the video: (WMV 02:12 16MB)

Margaret and I got married in August 1995. Our recent trip to Canada was a kind of second honeymoon, and brought back memories of what it had been like thirteen years before. For this video I delved right back to the first tape I recorded with my first camcorder, a Canon UC8Hi which I bought specially.

As you can imagine, I was kind of busy on the day of the wedding, so I just handed the camcorder around to guests and friends and asked them to film anything they liked. Here are a few little clips to give a flavour of the day. Apparently I never stopped grinning the whole day!