Digital Video: Lessons Learned
[by Judy Herrmann]
A couple of weeks ago, my partner, Mike Starke, and I finished our very first digital video project. We made our deadline with about 15 minutes to spare and only pulled one all-nighter; two facts I take inordinate pride in. In the process we discovered a lot that we’ll do differently the next time. Here’s what we learned:
1) Shooting – get tight, get loose, get high, get low, go wide, go long – just mix it up! Once we were editing the footage, we noticed that even if each segment is showing different people or activities, too many shots from the same distance with the same lens or from the same camera height get boring fast.
2) Editing – I haven’t yet figured out the organizational system that we’ll use in the future but I know we need a better one! I can’t tell you how much time we lost searching for a particular clip that we had tagged but couldn’t remember which bin it was in. About halfway through the project, we wound up creating an Expressions Media catalog for our clips. There’s probably a better way but this let us use a tool we already knew really well to visually scan key stills from each clip instead of trying to remember what we’d named it and where we’d stashed it.
3) Set up – Video editing applications are monitor hogs. You don’t just need two monitors – you need two big monitors. We got by with a 21″ and a 23″ display hooked to our tower but would have happily used more space.
4) Time away – After watching our footage over and over and over (and over) it got really hard to figure out how long someone who’d never seen the shots before would need to see a clip before moving onto the next thing. Every few hours, we really needed to get away from the project for a few hours so we could refine our edits with fresh eyes. As we work out the deadlines for future projects, we’ll take this into account.
5) Rejuvenation rocks! One really great side effect of doing this project was experiencing the excitement (and fear) of doing something we’d never done before. We’re not just learning new software, we’re learning a new way of seeing and a new way of thinking as visual communicators. I’m feeling more excited, more creative and well, frankly, more hopeful than I have for awhile. It’s been a good reminder of how important it is to keep pushing myself creatively. As Miles Davis once said “If anybody wants to keep creating, they have to be about change.” After 21 years as a still photographer, I’m ready.
5 Responses to 'Digital Video: Lessons Learned'
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You guys constantly try to push us still photographers into doing video. As if it is some sort of guaranteed future. I do not believe we need to learn video or motion.
None of us know the future of photography. The medium that is suffering is print media however still photos are a strong part of online magazines and websites.
Go ahead and be videographers -I will stick to what I am good at: stills.
Jason Wallis
Great points that are very helpful! Love the Miles quote, he sure lived it.
Thanks.
great advise thank you!
[...] there’s a great post by Judy Hermann on the lessons learned during a digital video project. My favorite from her list of tips is number 4: “Time away – After watching our footage [...]
I find it amazing to see ASMP offering so much advice from so-called “experts” in their field, but then we discover upon reading said advice that these experts really have relatively no experience at all.
Here we have an ASMP expert giving advice on Digital Video: Lessons Learned, only to discover that this is her FIRST video project.
An “expert” should really have more than just one instance of trying to do something before he or she is presented as an expert to the industry. Are the rest of the ASMP experts providing advice on this forum also this experienced?