DJ Promotional video
The story behind the video...
A lot of advancement has been made in the general filming and production aspect of this video as compared to the first. Since the first video, I have familiarized myself with my camera (cannon 70D) which improved the overall quality of the footage I attained. For this new video, I was much more comfortable filming in Sycamore Deli — I knew all the right places to get unique camera angles. This is demonstrated by how much more varied my camera shots were.
These types of videos always come down to the details and I put a lot of time working on timing milliseconds of footage just right. If you are particularly observant, or just watch the video closely you’ll see all the little flourishes I incorporated into this video. I have to admit, those are my favorite parts, even if they aren’t the most obvious part of the video.
The short duration of the video in no way parallels the time spent editing. A lot of people ask why it takes so long to edit a video like this and my answer to that is that there are a lot of aspects to video editing that are hard to see in the final product. Unless someone is a video editor themselves, they often have no idea the amount of time that goes into production. For this video, I had over 2 hours of footage. Now before I can even began editing, I have to shift through the footage and pick out the usable bits and bobs. That means I watch ALL my footage over again- there’s two hours right there and I haven’t even edited anything yet.
Once I have all my clips lined up, I then have to visualize where I want each clip to be placed. Often I have to play the music through and think about the beat and how I want to build the momentum of my footage to match the music. After I arrange my clips in the general positions I want, I have to match the cuts between clips to the beat of the music. This is quite tedious in that if I change anything after I made all the edits, I have to go back and adjust every clip (this nuance could be avoided if I had better editing software to lock footage into place).
I always find timing the footage to the beat of the music to be the most difficult part of my job. This always come with complications such as duration of a shot varying or different types of shots — you never want two front crowd shots back to back that would be repetitive and mundane. Finally, after all that, I do all color editing and tighten the whole video (make sure there isn’t clips that are unnecessarily long). That gives a little insight onto the production aspect of editing.
In the end, the time was worth it because I am proud of how the video turned out! I hope you enjoyed (and hopefully understood) my rant about editing!