Day 282 - Video Diaries

snippets

The problem with taking lots of video when on holiday, is that you then have to do something with them when you get home...

In Font, we took over 70GB of stills and videos, but of course they mostly contain about 30 seconds of interest surrounded by a couple of minutes of nothing much...and they're all helpfully named 20140919-123745.mp4, or similar.

It seems to me that the only way of getting these hours of media into a form that is even remotely interesting to anyone else, you need to edit (and edit some more), and cut (and cut and cut even more), in order to reduce it to something palatable and digestible...preferably, there needs to be some sort of story...and humour...and action of course...ideally some sort of drama...and appropriate music. 

If this all sounds complicated...well, it is - it takes a great deal of time and fiddly effort to produce even a short video!

The first problem, when faced with masses of media like this, is to find an engaging story...to do this requires a solid familiarity with, and understanding of, the source material.

So I like to start the whole process by taking my raw video files and cutting them up into snippets with actual content, and naming them appropriately.

The folder in the screenshot above shows a series of such snippets, each representing a single little story...in most instances here, each video is a single climb of a single boulder, but there are some contextual shots too.

We obviously didn't take many contextual shots on this particular day, which is a shame - nobody wants to see climb after climb after climb, so shots of the forest, or local flora and fauna, are very helpful for adding variety and interest.

Fortunately I have at least one story to tell of our holiday in Fontainebleau, so that will keep me busy for a couple of days - and you for about 15 minutes, if you can stomach it.

Anyway, watch this space...

;-)