I always wanted to do one of those talking dog videos…
I always wanted to do one of those talking dog videos…
Hello.
I know. It’s been a while.
You’re looking at where I live when I’m not in England, home of the annual Chalabre en Sérénade music festival, now in its second year.
The founder, Vinx , lives two doors down, and we both live in the centre of the town where much of this takes place on our doorstep.
You may have seen videos I did of last year’s festival, mainly for promotional purposes to help increase sponsorship for this year’s festival and those to come.
This video tells the story of the festival in Vinx’s own words. It’s an interesting story because this festival has features not seen in any other festival in the world.
It’s my longest ever project (850 GB original material), 5 days to edit, 20 minutes final length.
I gave my Sony NX30 to a retired British local. I shot on my X70 and a bit on the Mavic Pro II drone.
And there were the usual run and gun challenges to overcome.
I’m not going to get into them all, but I do want to cover one of them: The lighting and shooting of Vinx’s interview. (that was a 45 minute interview)
I hadn’t planned to do that in the beginning. Actually, I didn’t have much of a plan at all–except to wait and see what I got and see what the footage might ‘tell me’ to do with it.
What you will see is what it told me to do.
Trouble was, I didn’t have any of my lighting kit with me, nor a tripod. That stuff was in England.
So I propped the camera up on a window sill and tilted it with a matchbook wedge.
I turned off his overhead lights to get light off the back wall and used a 50 watt halogen gooseneck reading lamp from my house to create a key on his face in the room that was otherwise lit by daylight from a small window behind me. That was enough to separate his face from the background both by light and by colour (mixing daylight and tungsten can be a good thing). Afterwards, in post, I used one of my favourite tools, the Slice X Vignette Shape Mask, to subtly vignette the background in a shape that wouldn’t be obvious. And voilà! I must say I was pleased with the result.
The other main challenge was, of course, music audio recording.
I pretty much knew at the outset that we wouldn’t be doing a ‘concert video’. For one, there were over 40 artists in multiple venues all around town. For two, I had no interest in even trying to do that.
I decided I’d do it the way I did last year: Establish one good track to tie together each of the single events into a montage.
That required at least getting some good recordings to which end I took a feed off the board at the main concert, and otherwise used the camera mic to record an act that sounded potentially good. When I was doing that, I kept still and let the other camera guy move around getting additional B roll. Ironically, the feed off the mix board I mentioned was faulty, and much of that sound had crackle and hiss on it. But I got by with the skin of my teeth despite even that.
I also didn’t hang around long at most events. Sometimes I regretted that–such as at the church sequence at the end, but I took my chances knowing I’d have to edit with the best of what I had even if I missed some really good stuff. Of course, if it was a paid gig, I’d dutifully stick around for everything, but charity shouldn’t have to kill me.
Sorry about any ads that might show up. Someone’s got a copyright claim on it and I’m trying to find out who it is so I can get permission on behalf of the festival, since we’re not trying to monetise it.
Finally, I think you might find that this 20 minutes goes by pretty quickly.
If it doesn’t, then for you, I have failed.
I’ve been traveling a lot between England and France lately. Thus I’ve had to change my equipment packing routine–which I know is a dangerous thing to do.
I’ve forgotten to bring my keyboard (so now have one in both places, plus a spare), drives that I needed (now I taken them all back and forth in a small case), my LED lights (well, can’t forget those again because they’re too expensive to just buy a spare set), battery charger cords, drive cords, etc.
All that’s pretty sorted out now, but still, traveling on Ryan Air with a couple small bags with all the equipment I need violates my run and gun principle of ‘always carry everything you might need in two small cases’.
But ‘Ryan Air small’ is a different kind of small.
So it was with great deliberation that I decided this time to leave my Sony RX10 in France.
That was the first thing that went wrong.
A couple weeks ago I went to Wales to cover the unveiling of one of my wife’s statues. I shot a lot of it on the RX10. Naturally I thought I had done what I always do after a shoot: immediately download.
So when I arrived back in England with some time before my next shoot I thought I’d sit down and put together a promo video for Laury on that last statue commission.
But it turns out half my footage and all the high quality stills were still in France. Either that or the footage evaporated off my drives in transit.
The other things that went wrong happened earlier in Wales though.
The morning we left I had a few short minutes to interview the main guy who was going to provide my narrative for the video. We met at the statue.
Suddenly my radio mic wasn’t working. It stared at me with an ominous digital error message.
I didn’t have my rifle mics either.
That left me with no choice but to use the on-board Sony PXW X70 mic. In the wind. Next to a busy road.
When you only have one choice, you have to take it.
So I worked with what I had.
Then Laury gets an email that she’s been shortlisted for another statue in Wales.
Suddenly my new video was urgent. I knew it would potentially close the deal as it was a freshly unveiled statue in Wales with some very good selling points spoken off-the-cuff by a respected Welsh solicitor (lawyer).
Footage-wise I managed with what I got on the X70.
I had to steal a still photo off the internet shot by the event photographer who was next to me as I shot the same shot on video. Hope he doesn’t mind.
For the audio I used Izotope RX6 Advanced audio repair. (really, it’s a life-saver)
And I came up with this:
I promised to put together a short video piece for a friend who was doing a photo exhibition in our town of Chalabre, France and then totally forgot about it until the day before.
I had been (and still am) accumulating footage of what happens in the local area for an eventual narrative-driven promo and intended to use some of that for a short piece.
As I was leaving the next day for an event in England, I had about 6 hours to get the job done.
Since it was just going to be an edit to music, and knowing I had plenty of footage, the first step was to find a piece of music that was quintessential France.
I almost exclusively use Audio Jungle for a few reasons. Other sites may have these qualities, but once I found Audio Jungle years ago, I had no reason to look further.
As with any site, you can narrow down your music search by genre and even further by instrumentation, vocals, etc.
Unlike most sites, you can also narrow it down by putting in length parameters (time). Also BPM (beats per minute).
But what I like most is that the music is graphed so that at a glance you can see if there are shifts and changes in the music. (A lot of music for corporate and such uses is rather monotonous with great use of looping and you can see it instantly on the graph). That at least helps me narrow down the options of what I’ll bother to sample because I prefer a piece with variations.
And, once I’ve found something I think will be suitable, Audio Jungle allows you to down load a preview (with audio water marks) so you can test it out in the edit.
In this case, I spent perhaps 5 minutes to find a suitable piece.
The edit was simply an assembly edit to the music.
No fancy transitions or titles. They wouldn’t have made it any better or made anyone more interested in perhaps visiting this area of France.
Watch it and tell me if this might make you want to come. Or if fancy effects would make any difference in your wanting to come.
If you do…we have Air BnB space for you to stay right in the heart of all this. Indeed our house is right on the village square where several of these scenes were filmed.
Some of you may have seen a few of the videos I’ve been doing for the Duchess of Rutland. She got the video bug all of a sudden about 6 months months ago after realising that shoot video I did for them was bringing in big spending foreigners to the Belvoir shoot.
She also got a 20-something Marketing Director in who got her all jazzed up on social media, particularly Instagram and they have a successful account going there.
So now I’m having to make 60 second versions, and sometimes exclusively a 60 second video for their Instagram account.
For their website, however, I produce longer, more informative videos on their main subjects or services (weddings, corporate events, Gardens and one on Capability Brown–England’s most famous landscape architect) whose last design happened to be for Belvoir Castle, a fact only discovered in the Belvoir Castle archives a few years ago.
Anyway, I was busy doing the usual corporate style videos for the website (Gardens and Corporate), and was asked by the Marketing Director to do an Instagram version.
In two cases I just chose some appropriate music and condensed the B roll into a 60 second edit because there was no way to edit down the narrative to 60 seconds.
In one case, I was able to make a sensible narrative in the 60 second time limit, so now I’ve done both.
I then wrote the Managing Director of another marketing company that uses me exclusively for videos and showed him what I’m about to show you–suggesting that for future contracts, we add in the offering of a 60 second version for any company that also has an Instagram account. And charge them for it, of course.
He thought it was a good idea and I’m passing it on to you, hoping that I’m not teaching my grandmother to suck eggs in the process.
So here’s the usual corporate video:
And the Instagram version:
And by the way, if anyone is reading this far:
Shot on the Sony PXW X70
All hand-held, except for sit-down interview, of course. Stabilised as necessary with FCPX.
Edited and Graded in FCPX (following Denver Riddle’s excellent video on using FCPX’s new color tools)
And, something new! I bought Izotope’s RX6 Advanced when there was a recent offer, paying only a few hundred for an upgrade from RX6 Standard (hey, I’m not rich and the price for Advanced is usually over $1000).
My oh my! I used it on the Duchess interview to handle room echo and clothes rustle. The former was not my fault, the latter was.
One click and less than a minute of processing for the entire interview and you’re listening to the otherwise UNMIXED result. (I normally–even with RX6 Standard) spend a lot of time mixing to get the sound good. The RX6 Advanced result was so good I just left it as it was. Presence, warmth, clarity.
RX6 Advanced is lightyears better than anything else and even worth the $1000 price tag to have it in your FCPX toolbox. For anyone interested, my last blog was all about that with reference to the same video above (but you can hear the before and after there.)
I stumbled on Izotope’s RX Audio repair tools a few years ago.
I bought and used RX5, and later upgraded to RX6 Standard. Things that used to be impossible to handle (such as wind noise, clothes rustle, echo or even police sirens) now could be.
I’m not an audio geek. But I do know that the best answer to all these audio problems is not to record them in the first place.
In other words, correct microphones correctly placed and a good audio environment are far more important than many people realise. And no matter the quality of the image, poor quality sound is unavoidably a direct index to one’s level of amateurism.
Even so, things don’t always go right. And that’s where RX6 Advanced is an essential editor’s tool. It’s pricey, but worth its weight in gold.
Now listen to me. RX 6 Standard is pretty good, but compared with RX6 Advanced it’s like the difference between a 2011 MacBook and a 2018 iMac Pro. Or, shall we say, a Ford F150 and a Ford F350 King Cab dually.
And the difference is a module called ‘Dialogue Isolate’.
Take a look at the modules that come with RX (click to enlarge).
Anyway, like I said, I’m not an audio geek.
I recorded the Duchess of Rutland in the Guardroom, which I already knew was an echoey space. I used a rifle and a lapel.
The rifle mic turned out to not do the job. And the lapel had clothes rustle on it. And, of course, there was echo.
Being the new and proud owner of RX6 Advanced I fully expected to use at least ‘Dialogue Isolate’, ‘De-Rustle’ and ‘De-Reverb’ to clean up the sound.
Turns out the default position of Dialogue Isolate did the whole job. It was a two click process. Sure, there were LOTS of parameters I could have adjusted, but just to show you what it can do in default mode using only the dialogue isolate module with no further adjustments, listen to this short excerpt. It starts with the untreated raw footage and intercuts with the RX6 Audio repair and graded footage.
Here’s the whole video.
I was doing a little maintenance on the Video Whisperer website and found an article I had written that somehow didn’t make it into the Run and Gun Videography book. The basic idea was written into the book in other ways, but in seeing this I felt it was quite well written and informative and worth sharing on the blog. Here it is:
Most of the business/corporate videos on this site were done with local talent–specifically, the actual people who work at the business, including owners, directors and regular staff.
Heavyweight Air Express was a medium-sized, but global company venturing into the video realm. They immediately thought to hire a professional actor to do their video. I advised against it, and whilst my opinion, when I told them why, they decided to go with their own talent.
In the case of Heavyweight Air Express, it wasn’t that they couldn’t afford to hire a pro for the job. In the case of smaller businesses, the additional cost may indeed be an important factor, and could even be the reason for not even considering having a video done due to perceived high cost.
The good news is that a high quality impactful business video is quite affordable, notwithstanding the fact that it should rapidly pay for itself.
As to pro actor versus local talent, here is my opinion and essentially what I told Heavyweight.
Firstly, think about those big companies who use professional talent on TV commercials. We know they’re actors and we know they’re paid and we know they’re reading script. The only reason that doesn’t bother us is that we ALREADY KNOW the company, its products and services, precisely because they’re already big.
Now let’s consider we were watching a commercial for a company we never heard of and that a professional actor was presenting. Well, we can tell at once that he or she is a professional actor, and we know that they’re being paid and reading script. Suddenly those factors that didn’t bother us with the company we already know come into play in a different way with the company we never heard of. To a certain degree we suspect that is it just “hype”. Afterall, it’s a professional actor reading a script with perfect hair and all the right hand gestures.
Now let’s take that same company and use it’s actual president, CEO or owner. First off, we can tell it’s not a polished pro. We can tell this is the real guy and that he’s putting his reputation on the line. So what he has to say–if it’s a subject we’re interested in–has a little more credibility. And we tend to give him a chance. We listen. We don’t just toss him off as a bit of marketing hype.
Secondly, people who work for the company and believe in it and its products and services are emotionally attached. They know what they’re talking about. They’ve dealt with the products, services and the customers who use them. And we can tell that too.
So the question becomes, how does one get a “regular guy” to come off well in front of the camera.
That’s pretty simple and is something a director is trained to do. But in terms of content (how we get them to say what we want them to say), here is where the Video Whisperer differs from most other video production companies. We don’t try to script it. “Remembering script” or “remembering what to say” is the downfall of any attempt to produce a marketing piece for a business, because people who are not trained actors have trouble with that sort of thing–and you can tell.
Instead we do it on an interview basis. We have an informal chat–interview if you like– with the camera rolling. Sure there are plenty of bobbles and mis-starts and all else that is part of normal human conversation. But as soon as we start talking about a subject that they KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT or have a particular EMOTIONAL CONTACT with, they suddenly start sounding quite natural and start coming off quite professionally–having completely forgotten about the camera.
Such interviews may last 20-40 minutes or more. And from that, the job of the editor is to distill from all the footage the essence of what we want to impart to the potential customer or client. That means there are a lot of “cuts” and that means often things are put together in a sequence differing from how it actually came off in the interview. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that, in the end, they provided the material necessary to being able to put together a marketing piece for the company just as if it had been scripted to begin with. And the best part is: Some of the things that come up in an interview one would never have thought to script!
(originally posted on my Run and Gun Video Blog , but seems not too many people follow that one, so sharing it here)
I noticed my book cover on Amazon along with some of the related ones being promoted (and their covers) which reminded me at the same time of the many postings I’ve seen of people’s equipment. Some nice stuff and some Frankenstein monsters, but the underlying message (despite what was being said) was usually, ‘look at me’.
You know, the guy posts a shot of a whole load of expensive stuff with the caption: ‘off to do a blah-blah shoot’. Since surely nobody cares that he’s off to do a shoot, the obvious intended message is ‘look at all my cool stuff and be envious’.
Now look at the cover above.
That was very deliberately posed. Of course there was a humorous analogy with and throughout the book of the camera being a gun (so the Marlboro man hat and coat forwarded that), but note that the relatively small and unfancy camera is just dangling from the hand as if it were a 6 shooter and he’s off to shoot some vermin on the ranch that are stealing his chickens–or off to the OK Corral to dispatch Billy the Kid for that matter.
The gun, the camera are tools, they are not the man.
They come out when it’s time to do the job and the pro doesn’t care what you think about them.
They’re taken care of, oiled and cleaned as any professional would treat his equipment, but except for a few of the narcissistic crazies, they don’t sleep with them, pose with them in the mirror or caress them fondly when no one is looking.
They’re just tools.
And look here: The gun that killed Billy the Kid didn’t even have a laser scope on it.