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Making a Video for Promoting your Event

I was recently asked about how to make a simple video for an event. I thought I would post the answer on this blog.

Making a video is actually a process. Honestly, the best way to learn this stuff is play with it and you will figure it out. The general work flow is as follows but honestly, the description makes it seem a lot more complicated than it is. Remember, A rule of thumb is around 1 hour of edit, production time for each minute of video produced.

• Planning your video
• Take footage using your video camera, you can also use pictures and create motion using effects. I use the previous years footage generally for the promo video for this year. You can use digital camera footage. You can use a flip video camera. For best results use a high quality video camera. You can get a decent one for as low as $300. A pro quality one is a lot more.
• Import/capture your video onto your computer, perhaps using your editing software for this.
• Index your footage, I usually have one column for film clip, time on clip and an appropriate name for the clip.
• Put together a storyboard in your mind based on your footage
• Use a video editing program to edit your video, cutting pieces of your footage and ordering it as appropriate
  • I used Adobe Premiere elements and Adobe Premiere Pro for more complicated videos. Adobe Premiere elements can be had for less than $100 (I actually saw it in google shopping for $68), if you have a mac, you can use iMovie for simple stuff and  finalcut pro (very expensive) for more complicated stuff. There are less expensive options, but in my experience, they tend to crash a lot. A free option in windows when first trying is to use moviemaker which comes with Windows, but it only can output to WMV format which if far from standard.
  • I recently learned that you want to keep your clips relatively short. A person’s attention span with video clips (scenes without movement) is around 7-10 seconds.
• For each video, you have multiple different layers of video and sound, that you can lay down and the software usually comes with built in effects and ways to transition between clips. Using these do the following:
  • Choose music and edit into video using the video editing software. Be careful about playing whole copyrighted songs.
  • Add Titles for different sections
  • Add transitions between each cut and each title. All you usually have to do it drag and drop these in your editing program.
  • Add effects… All you usually have to do it drag and drop these in your editing program.
• Render(share) the video into a format that you can use for web(mp4 or flv), or DVD(mpg).

I hope that helps. I would do a Google search for videos to help you with each step.  It’s all not too bad… just takes a lot of time. One good reference for learning new things is the eHow website and the dummies.com book series. These are what I usually start with when I am learning something new.

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