A High Tech Heritage Tour, Part II

What did I learn? Don’t be foolish enough to start with seven hours of family videotape the way we did! My second best piece of advice? Find a good amateur videographer to work with you. My daughter’s fiancé is an aspiring young filmmaker and he recruited a friend of his to tag along on our family heritage bus tour. That meant we had two cameras shooting action all the time, and with a bus full of talking relatives and a historian that became critical when we began to edit.

Here’s how we created our Tour de Bronx:

Moving the Video From the Camera to the PC: To move video from the camera to the PC where you can edit it, you need FireWire—the only connection most camcorders use. It’s a much faster connection than USB provides. If your computer does not have a FireWire port you can add it. We had to buy a $30 FireWire board and install it into our computer.  Even with FireWire, transferring a tape (we used DV-mini) took about an hour. We had seven tapes to transfer.

Back up Your Originals: Since there was no way that we were going to relive our event, we needed to be sure we had backups. It took 20 DVDs, but we did create a backup of all of the video.

Editing: We chose Adobe Premiere Elements, which is to video what Adobe Photoshop is to images—a highly competent program with a masterful list of features—though not as full-featured as the professional version, Premiere Pro.

Premiere uses a filmstrip metaphor. You snip, cut, add, transition, create titles, and add effects at various points along your filmstrip line, and all the tools are digital.

The most reasonable way to tackle a large video is to map out the scenes you want and divide the big huge video into discrete scenes. By using two cameras we were able to do some cool things like “voiceovers” while one camera looked out the window of our bus, or shots of the kids’ reactions to the stories the adults were telling. This involved a lot of cutting and pasting.

A Few Tips: A few other tricks we learned to make a better movie:

• Stretch out the video to match the audio. You can literally yank on the video and it will adjust accordingly to match the length of the audio.
• Shoot some still frames that you can add in. We added in old photos and maps and it made a nice contrast to the video.
• Use music: Adding a little music livens up any family. We got ours for free on a site.
• Create a scene menu: Premiere and others like it give you tools to create a front menu for your DVD so you can jump to particular scenes. Use it.