Learning By Doing: HP ProCurve event

This video isn't my best ever, but the shoot went very smoothly. The sound guy gave me a cable into the board so I didn't have to drag out my own and put it away. Everything sounded great. After the presentations I just did some brief interviews and shot b-roll. No big pans or tilts this time. They're overrated. And then as I was about to leave I started chatting with this guy who really hit the nail on the head. Knowing I had the footage put me at ease, so I got set up quickly. My Manfrotto tripod feels heavier all the time, but it totally rocks. Or more to the point, it doesn't.

Learning By Doing: Transitions with two tracks

The "two-camera" part of my two-camera project is over. I've been editing video of Pastor Dawn Roginski's ordination and installation at my church. (The short version is a few entries down, "Something I've been working on.") The ceremonies were shot with two cameras, and the bulk of my work has been switching from camera to camera.

The Ordination's already finished. On the Installation, I just reached the end of the synchronized two-camera part of the footage. Now I just have to splice together a few pieces of footage to make a graceful conclusion, and add on the credits and the credits music. There'll be some surprises breaking up the credits, too.

Something I Learned: It turns out it's really hard to do a cross-dissolve between clips on two different tracks. It may actually be impossible. I ran into this on the short and at first I did a fade-in-fade-out transition (picture fades to black and the fades back in) that looked super cool but was insanely complicated. Then I realized I could just put the adjoining clips on the same track. You can only ever see one track at a time anyway, so I just cut out the clip below and pulled down the clip I was using to the lower track. Then I just put the playhead between the clips and chose the standard cross-fade.

There may be better ways of handling that, but hey, I made it work. By the way, I can't show you that transition, because I ended up changing it later anyway.