Happy New Year! I hope you captured some wonderful footage of your little one(s) over the holidays with family and friends. If you've been keeping up with my posts thus far, you should have an abundance of videos of photos of your little one. Unless your little one has yet to arrive, then you probably have a very long list of photos and videos you will want to create. Nevertheless, at a certain point you're going to have to do something with those videos, because you're phone can only hold so much data. As much as it kills me to delete photos and videos of my little guy off of my phone, I know that I have to from time to time in order to make room for MORE photos and videos of my little guy. Make sure you back everything up before deleting anything. I would recommend on-site and off-site back-up. Considering our house caught on fire when I was in the hospital giving birth (thankfully there was mainly just smoke damage), you would think I would take my own advice on that, but I digress.
Editing is actually when the storytelling happens in unscripted material. Just watch the credits at the end of your favorite reality show, there are actually "writers." They don't necessarily tell the "actors" what to say, but they go through all of the footage and create a story out of the hours and hours of chatter. This may seem like a daunting task for your home videos, and that's when you can hire someone else to step in and create the story for you and your family, but it actually can be pretty fun once you get started.
The first thing you will probably need to do will be to find a program to edit your footage in. There are a number of online editing programs that are rather user-friendly as well as simple editing software options for Macs and PCs. There are tons of online tutorials that can make you a sufficient editor without too much time and hassle. Make sure that you know at least how to pick in and out points of the clips you want to use, how to add in simple transitions and titles, and how to export a final file that you can either display online or use to create a DVD.
Once you have chosen the program, you may have to convert your footage into a recognizable file format for your editing software. If you don't know what format your footage is already in, do a quick Google search of the camera (or phone) you're filming with and the word "codec" and you'll be able to find out. Then you can put that codec into Google and the name of the software you'll be editing with to see if they are compatible. If not, again you can search for online tutorials on how to convert the footage into a useable format. In my case, I had to run all of my iPhone videos and my husband's Galaxy videos through Compressor before I could bring them into Final Cut Pro.
Okay, so now you've got footage ready to edit and a program to edit it in, congratulations, now the real fun begins. Watch all of the footage...a few times. You'll start to see that some clips are more useful than others when it comes to telling the story. Really ask yourself if that clip shows a new milestone, is just too cute not to include, or shows the same thing in a different outfit. Or perhaps the video may include your little one interacting someone else that isn't around very often or may not be around for very long, then you'll want to include it to show to your child in the future.
Now that you've figured out which clips are the most important to include to tell your story, now it's time to really pick out those important moments in each clip. Each clip should be at least ten seconds, but really not longer than twenty when creating a montage for others to enjoy. If you find a clip that you definitely want to use more than twenty seconds of, see if you can divide it into two or more different clips and cut out some footage in between and then connect them with transitions. This way you'll really keep the story moving and your viewers interested.
Depending upon the software you're using to edit, you may be able to add in titles and drop in photos to fill in the gaps in the story when you weren't able to capture video footage, as well as add in a music track. Definitely put in dates and age in months when the footage or photo depict a milestone, especially if you are not keeping a traditional baby book as well. Transitions, such as cross dissolves and fade out/fade in are a nice touch to move from clip to clip. Try to stay away from some of the "cheesier" transitions that will cheapen your story. Remember, the video you are making is about the subjects in the video, not your editing. A rule of thumb to remember, if the editing calls attention to itself, then you're doing something wrong. Cuts should feel motivated and have a nice flow to them.
If you want more specific tips on cutting clips, I will include those in a future blog post. In the meantime, feel free to see some of my storytelling in the video baby book samples on my website.
Friday, January 3, 2014
Monday, December 23, 2013
The Importance of Keeping a Baby Book
...or "Why I Do What I Do"
There are a lot of great reasons to keep a baby book for your little one(s). Keeping track of milestones is not only great for reminiscing in later years, knowing that your little one is hitting their milestones is important to track for progress, even years down the road. The sooner a developmental delay can be identified, the sooner intervention can take place and quite possibly avoid problems later on down the road. Your pediatrician will want to know at each of your well-baby visits that your child has not only reached specific milestones, but when they happened.
Another reason to keep a baby book is none other than avoiding the dreaded "mommy guilt." Believe it or not, not writing down when those milestone occurred can create a great deal of negative feelings and then the overwhelming feeling that occurs when it's time to finally play catch up may keep the catch up from ever even happening. More simply put: the more you have to write down, the less likely you'll write down any of it. This tends to be the case, more often than not, for successive children. Then the "mommy guilt" is even worse when the kids get older and compare the lack of documentation of their lives to their older siblings. Luckily, my mom had four years between me and my older sister, so for being a third child, my baby book is pretty well filled out. Of course there are gaps here and there, but the fact that I can ask my mom when I did such and such and she can say "I don't know, check your baby book" is usually good enough for me. I have yet to compare my book to my older siblings, but what I've got is good enough for when it was made.
This brings me to my next reason for keeping a baby book, FOR YOUR CHILDREN. Inevitably kids will ask where they come from at some point, being able to pull out a book (or it's equivalent) makes answering that question a lot easier. Of course I'm not recommending putting all of the conception details into a baby book, but typically looking through the book (or again, it's equivalent) will squash the birds and the bees question, for a while anyway. Looking even further into the future, when your kids have their own kids, it will be important for them to compare when they did something with when their child is doing those things. For example, my son is just now, at fifteen months, getting his first tooth. When the one year milestone passed and no pearly whites were in sight, I of course got concerned. But since I myself did not have too many teeth early on (thanks to being able to find out in my own baby book), a lot of my concerns were put at bay (and searching on Google was helpful as well).
Looking even further down the road, as much as we don't want to think about our own mortality, we will not always be around and giving our children the chance to read about our thoughts and feelings towards them and gain deeper insight into those early years and the relationships we developed during that time, can really make all the difference. In the case of Video Baby Books, seeing how we look at our babies, the way we respond to them, how we talk about them, how we look at them, is a priceless treasure that will mean more to them than we will ever know.
If a typical baby book is not for you, you are not alone. Feel free to check out my previous blog post on the typical baby book and alternatives that exist. If you're an expectant or new parent and already feeling overwhelmed, you can always delegate the responsibility to me and have me create a Video Baby Book for you. Check out my website, like me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter. On my website you can sign up for my mailing list to receive the "Top Ten Home Movie Failures To Avoid."
There are a lot of great reasons to keep a baby book for your little one(s). Keeping track of milestones is not only great for reminiscing in later years, knowing that your little one is hitting their milestones is important to track for progress, even years down the road. The sooner a developmental delay can be identified, the sooner intervention can take place and quite possibly avoid problems later on down the road. Your pediatrician will want to know at each of your well-baby visits that your child has not only reached specific milestones, but when they happened.
Another reason to keep a baby book is none other than avoiding the dreaded "mommy guilt." Believe it or not, not writing down when those milestone occurred can create a great deal of negative feelings and then the overwhelming feeling that occurs when it's time to finally play catch up may keep the catch up from ever even happening. More simply put: the more you have to write down, the less likely you'll write down any of it. This tends to be the case, more often than not, for successive children. Then the "mommy guilt" is even worse when the kids get older and compare the lack of documentation of their lives to their older siblings. Luckily, my mom had four years between me and my older sister, so for being a third child, my baby book is pretty well filled out. Of course there are gaps here and there, but the fact that I can ask my mom when I did such and such and she can say "I don't know, check your baby book" is usually good enough for me. I have yet to compare my book to my older siblings, but what I've got is good enough for when it was made.
This brings me to my next reason for keeping a baby book, FOR YOUR CHILDREN. Inevitably kids will ask where they come from at some point, being able to pull out a book (or it's equivalent) makes answering that question a lot easier. Of course I'm not recommending putting all of the conception details into a baby book, but typically looking through the book (or again, it's equivalent) will squash the birds and the bees question, for a while anyway. Looking even further into the future, when your kids have their own kids, it will be important for them to compare when they did something with when their child is doing those things. For example, my son is just now, at fifteen months, getting his first tooth. When the one year milestone passed and no pearly whites were in sight, I of course got concerned. But since I myself did not have too many teeth early on (thanks to being able to find out in my own baby book), a lot of my concerns were put at bay (and searching on Google was helpful as well).
Looking even further down the road, as much as we don't want to think about our own mortality, we will not always be around and giving our children the chance to read about our thoughts and feelings towards them and gain deeper insight into those early years and the relationships we developed during that time, can really make all the difference. In the case of Video Baby Books, seeing how we look at our babies, the way we respond to them, how we talk about them, how we look at them, is a priceless treasure that will mean more to them than we will ever know.
If a typical baby book is not for you, you are not alone. Feel free to check out my previous blog post on the typical baby book and alternatives that exist. If you're an expectant or new parent and already feeling overwhelmed, you can always delegate the responsibility to me and have me create a Video Baby Book for you. Check out my website, like me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter. On my website you can sign up for my mailing list to receive the "Top Ten Home Movie Failures To Avoid."
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
So You've Got a Ton of Photos of Baby, What Now?
Long gone are the days when you would think about each snap of the shutter and eagerly take a roll of exposed film to the drug store and wait two days for your prints. We have become a society of instant gratification, cooing over each and every photo as they are taken, sometimes at the expense of missing an even better shot unfortunately. If you're like me, your phone is slowly becoming a mobile photo album, constantly going back over old shots, reminiscing about when baby was small(er).
So what do you do with all of these wonderful photos? Of course you can still print them, cell phone cameras are pretty high quality these days and the auto focus usually grabs the right point in the frame, but then what? Buy an actual "Photo Album" to put them in and then find a place on a shelf for the album and bring it out to coo over every once in a while? Not too practical for this modern age of digital consumption. You could pick a few of your best shots, store them on a memory card and put that card into one of those picture frames that creates slide show. The problem with both of these ideas is that then the picture is just a picture, it doesn't tell the whole story.
We don't want to think about the one day when we will no longer be around to fill in the gaps about the story surrounding each picture. As much as we love to take pictures, look at them, and share them with friends and family, the photos we take are sometimes more for our little ones than ourselves. Have you ever taken the time to go through your parents old photo albums and scan through the faded orange images, trying to make out when and where each photo was taken and the circumstances surrounding those photos? I know that I have. Sometimes I actually remember those events, or rather remember being told of the events and have now incorporated those stories into my own memory banks as actual memories. Regardless, it's the stories surrounding the photos that make the memories valuable, not that Kodak paper those pictures are printed on.
So how does one record those memories and stories to go with the pictures for years and possibly generations to come? One option is to create a digital scrapbook of sorts, using any of the wonderful online options. Shutterfly will often send out discount codes for a free 20 page album, usually enough for incorporating a good amount of memories. Remember to incorporate text with your pictures, it doesn't have to be lengthy, just enough to fill in the blanks where the "thousand words" of the picture leaves off. If you have been taking notes somewhere of milestones, those can be added in with dates around the period of time the pictures were taken. Be sure to incorporate a number of pictures per page to really get the best bang for your buck, and make the album as much of a joy to look at as it was to make.
The other option you have is to take those digital photos and create a video out of them. There are a lot of free programs that computers come with to create digital slide shows. Just make sure you have the capability to incorporate text as well (see paragraph above about using text with photos). You can also put a few recorded soundbites in as well. Most cell phones have the capability to record audio notes. Use this as an opportunity for your little one to hear your voice. If you can easily incorporate some mini videos as well, that will make the entire piece a lot more interesting to watch. After all, if a video is created with love and energy but no one every gets to enjoy it, it never really exists.
Video editing tips will be in a future blog post. Be sure to sign of for my mailing list to receive all of my tips and tricks!
So what do you do with all of these wonderful photos? Of course you can still print them, cell phone cameras are pretty high quality these days and the auto focus usually grabs the right point in the frame, but then what? Buy an actual "Photo Album" to put them in and then find a place on a shelf for the album and bring it out to coo over every once in a while? Not too practical for this modern age of digital consumption. You could pick a few of your best shots, store them on a memory card and put that card into one of those picture frames that creates slide show. The problem with both of these ideas is that then the picture is just a picture, it doesn't tell the whole story.
We don't want to think about the one day when we will no longer be around to fill in the gaps about the story surrounding each picture. As much as we love to take pictures, look at them, and share them with friends and family, the photos we take are sometimes more for our little ones than ourselves. Have you ever taken the time to go through your parents old photo albums and scan through the faded orange images, trying to make out when and where each photo was taken and the circumstances surrounding those photos? I know that I have. Sometimes I actually remember those events, or rather remember being told of the events and have now incorporated those stories into my own memory banks as actual memories. Regardless, it's the stories surrounding the photos that make the memories valuable, not that Kodak paper those pictures are printed on.
So how does one record those memories and stories to go with the pictures for years and possibly generations to come? One option is to create a digital scrapbook of sorts, using any of the wonderful online options. Shutterfly will often send out discount codes for a free 20 page album, usually enough for incorporating a good amount of memories. Remember to incorporate text with your pictures, it doesn't have to be lengthy, just enough to fill in the blanks where the "thousand words" of the picture leaves off. If you have been taking notes somewhere of milestones, those can be added in with dates around the period of time the pictures were taken. Be sure to incorporate a number of pictures per page to really get the best bang for your buck, and make the album as much of a joy to look at as it was to make.
The other option you have is to take those digital photos and create a video out of them. There are a lot of free programs that computers come with to create digital slide shows. Just make sure you have the capability to incorporate text as well (see paragraph above about using text with photos). You can also put a few recorded soundbites in as well. Most cell phones have the capability to record audio notes. Use this as an opportunity for your little one to hear your voice. If you can easily incorporate some mini videos as well, that will make the entire piece a lot more interesting to watch. After all, if a video is created with love and energy but no one every gets to enjoy it, it never really exists.
Video editing tips will be in a future blog post. Be sure to sign of for my mailing list to receive all of my tips and tricks!
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Why Create a Video Montage of Baby's First Year?
Even though my son turned one two months ago, it is still settling in that I have a one year old! I am so glad that I took the time to create a one year montage for his first birthday party. Although a great deal of my footage is shot from an iPhone or other cellular device, it was so crazy to watch his progression during the first year edited together into a thirty minute video with fun music and titles. I stressed myself out to have the cut ready for his birthday party to play on loop on a television, but the truth is that it really was a video for my family and eventually for my son to watch himself grow during the biggest developmental year of his life.
When Xander was first born, each day seemed to take forever. I was just trying to fill our days with something until nighttime when I could actually get a little bit of sleep. I wanted to engage him and expose him to developmentally appropriate things, but every day was somewhat of a challenge to do so. I was in love with my little guy, don't get me wrong, but adjusting to life with a newborn for the first time was very daunting. Even though filming his twitches during sleep or playing on his activity mat did not seem like such a big deal at the time because I was watching him do these things every day, at the end of the first year you do start to forget those little details and I am so glad I captured them on video. With the video footage edited into a montage, I'm able to not only see them over and over again in the context of his development during the year, but I don't have to scroll through copious videos on my phone to find them among everything else I have shot. In addition, editing only the best part of each video makes the whole thirty minutes very interesting and engaging to watch.
Some of the friends and family who attended his first birthday had only experienced bits and pieces of his first year, some had never even met him. Allowing all of them to get a unique inside look at the ridiculous amount of changes he has already been through in such a short period of time made his birthday party even more about celebrating that whole first year not only for Xander, but for us as parents as well. Overall, a video montage covering such an important year was key for me and I hope to be able to help other parents create lasting memories with their own home movies as well.
When Xander was first born, each day seemed to take forever. I was just trying to fill our days with something until nighttime when I could actually get a little bit of sleep. I wanted to engage him and expose him to developmentally appropriate things, but every day was somewhat of a challenge to do so. I was in love with my little guy, don't get me wrong, but adjusting to life with a newborn for the first time was very daunting. Even though filming his twitches during sleep or playing on his activity mat did not seem like such a big deal at the time because I was watching him do these things every day, at the end of the first year you do start to forget those little details and I am so glad I captured them on video. With the video footage edited into a montage, I'm able to not only see them over and over again in the context of his development during the year, but I don't have to scroll through copious videos on my phone to find them among everything else I have shot. In addition, editing only the best part of each video makes the whole thirty minutes very interesting and engaging to watch.
Some of the friends and family who attended his first birthday had only experienced bits and pieces of his first year, some had never even met him. Allowing all of them to get a unique inside look at the ridiculous amount of changes he has already been through in such a short period of time made his birthday party even more about celebrating that whole first year not only for Xander, but for us as parents as well. Overall, a video montage covering such an important year was key for me and I hope to be able to help other parents create lasting memories with their own home movies as well.
Monday, November 11, 2013
Home Videos of Baby Filming Tips
Cell phones make great video cameras on-the-go!
But knowing how to use them properly can will make all the difference.
But knowing how to use them properly can will make all the difference.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Everyone loves FREE! So I've created a Raffle for a FREE Video Baby Book
Just use the link below, Like Video Baby Books on Facebook for a free entry, follow @Videobabybooks on twitter for another one!
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/9bdac10/
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/9bdac10/
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
A Traditional Baby Book...To Buy or Not to Buy?
Just because it's on most people's registries, does that mean it's a necessity?
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