Bob Chambers' latest 'The Multimedia Guy Video Blog' post is reprinted here.
How To Make Good Video
Today my wife had the television on and the program was one of those old classic black and white movies. What a treat to watch a master film editor work. The scenes built on the story and didn’t have a bunch of graphic pictures that you see in today’s movies.
That got me to thinking. Today many of the “video experts” tell you that the way to make good looking video is to watch what everyone is doing today on TV.
But that’s wrong. Just because someone has a video editing suite in their computer doesn’t make them video editors. In fact, all it does is make everyone think that it takes no brains to become an editor. Just take your raw video, cut out some scenes, add fancy transitions, paste in some credits, and you’re done.
But watch an older movie and see how the edit builds on the story. No fancy transitions between scenes. The transitions are just fades and cuts.
I was privileged to spend a month with an expert, my friend Leonard S. Smith, Jr., an Emmy winning member of the Directors Guild of America. We spent one full month editing thirteen hours of video into a 40-minute video. It was truly magic to see how he worked. And often we only got one or two minutes of finished video in a day!
Today you can get hundreds of transitions because some software programmer figured out how to write the code. But having those transition doesn’t make them work.
I know, you see them all the time on TV.
About those geometric transitions you see on TV, are they there because of good editing or because the “editor” had so many that he/she just had to use them?
What to be producing good looking videos?
Then start watching the classic movies on TV. Don’t fall into following the story line. Watch how the edit is done. And maybe you’ll discover what professional editors have known all along. Good editing is a work of art.
Bob Chambers, The Multimedia Guy
Bob Chambers, The Multimedia Guy, is an ex-aerospace engineer and program manager who started his special interests video production business in 1992 after studying with Leonard S. Smith, Jr., an Emmy winning member of the Directors Guild of America, and Barb Besteni, a professional videographer and trainer.
In 2002 he posted one of the first ever Flash screen capture videos on the Internet and has been using screen capture videos every since as an easy and effective way of putting video on the Web.
Bob continues to teach people how to easily create multimedia products through his own products, articles, newsletters, videos, seminars, workshops and webinars. He also creates training videos for software developers and joint venture partners. Bob is associated with Multimedia Profits Revealed, Multimedia Guy Blog and Insider Video Alert Newsletter.
*IMNewswatch would like to thank Bob Chambers for granting permission to reprint this latest blog post.
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