How to Make a Simple Movie

 

The world is moving forward. This has been known for quite a long time. In the past, memories of trips and vacations were kept only in memory. This fleeting, my own. They could later be passed on to younger generations. Of course, it’s best by word of mouth. During a family gathering or by the fire.

The next stage – photos. I already remember coming back from vacation with dozens of stuck plates, the anxiety and tension of waiting for hundreds of prints, and then the joy of watching them together and… throwing them into a box. It was then that the time to record vacation videos began. There were a lot of handy cameras powered by 8mm tapes in resorts. On these tapes, dads caught the moments and after returning home they treated their guests with them. Often hours, because there was no way to assemble these materials. Okay – you could play start / stop and VCR. The method is annoying, time-consuming and not very effective or effective.

Recent history – digital photos. There are no restrictions here anymore. Numbers go into thousands. And this is from single weekly trips to my grandmother’s plot. After all, there are so many interesting things to capture (By the way – remember my text about choosing the best SLR for your vacation ?)

What’s happening now?

Now holiday videos reign supreme. I admit that I really like them myself. I am still a huge fan of decent photos (and that’s probably why I still have photos from almost 3 years ago waiting for me to process and print), but it is the movies, the ease of making them and the speed of simple editing that make me fall in love with them more and more.

I observe this trend not only in family films, but also (or even above all) in company films. In our  Synergy Studio, the movies are made like mushrooms after rain. There will always be an explanation for making such a video.

Why make videos?

Customers don’t fully understand the product manual – in this case, our great invisible wiper ? No problem. Maciek will explain everything beautifully in the video:

Do you need to show the advantages of the product efficiently and fun? (Here again the invisible doormat plays a major role, but for a completely different purpose) There is no problem here either. Franek will show you the difference before and after:

We were on a company trip and it would be nice to show what was going on?

At the beginning, I mentioned family movies. There is only room for filming and editing. See what happened in the summer🙂

How to do it?

The process of creating such a movie is not complicated, despite appearances. It consists of three steps

1. Video recording
2. Assembly
3. Publication

Of course, you also need step 0, which is the concept. However, there is no simple recipe for this. For the rest there is. So to the point.

Video recording

You have to have something to do it. When it comes to home resources, I see two main options here:

1. Phone / smartphone

Now, virtually each of us has a smartphone. Most of them allow video recording in very decent quality. Even my worn-out Huawei P7 (which I have already described on the blog ) can do it. And what about the bitten apple equipment – iPhone 6 , or the latest version of a Korean competitor 

2. GoPro

This little webcam can really do a lot. There are zylion available configuration options. I am using the GoPro 4 silver version and I am really satisfied. As if Żaneta Kaleta would say it – I recommend it! There is also the issue of accessories (among which, of course, you need a replaceable battery – the not very strong side of gopro), but it is worth waiting a while to choose them so as not to choke on a thousand available options. The most important accessory, of course the selfie stick, can be done by yourself. I invite you to read the tutorial that we created together with Krzys.

There are plenty of cameras on the market. I have listed only those that are the most used and most accessible.

Now let’s move on to the next step

Assembly

When the material is ready, the easiest thing to do with it is… give it to someone for cutting and assembly. 🙂In our case, of course, this is not the point.

1. GoPro Studio

GoPro Studio is a free application for very easy editing of movies. Of course, it was created with the owners of gopro cams in mind, but it can also be used by others. I’ve heard that it’s not really going to import clips in non-gopro formats. I admit that I have not checked it. Nevertheless, you can do it yourself. The program is free and available at this link. GoPro Studio

Assembly in GoPro Studio consists of 3 steps.

1. View & Trim – that is, the selection of clips, cutting them to a given (more or less) duration and initial conversion.
2. Edit – all the magic happens here. The easiest way is to load a ready diagram, substitute your clips generated in the first step, add a few effects like slowmotion or color modification and it’s ready
3. Export – here we choose the target movie format

As you can see, the matter is very simple. In a dozen or so minutes we are able to create quite nice videos. What are the disadvantages of this solution?

1. GoPro Studio is a heavily underdeveloped program. It crashes a lot, crashes, refuses to import clips, etc. Generally it is not a program you can rely on and you may lose your work.
2. When we use templates (and only in this case I see the sense of using this tool) we are limited to these templates. There are only a few (literally a few) of them and each of them has a fixed number of clips that make up the whole. So when you want to work around the system a bit and use, for example, more short clips, you have to do the job several times and put together movies from several movies composed of smaller fragments. That’s a pain in the ass🙂

2. Adobe Premiere Elements

Adobe has some pretty cool programs in general. My favorites are of course Photoshop and Premiere . One for photos and one for movies. As today I will write more about the films about Premiere. In terms of simple use, which is mentioned, Adobe Premiere Elements is enough – a slightly reduced version, but it already has the most necessary elements. Premiere allows you to cut material from practically any format, preview your work on the timeline, apply any music, create subtitles. And in fact, these are the elements that are sufficient to create a nice video from both holidays and a company trip or product presentation.

Publication

The finished movie has to be uploaded somewhere. The easiest way to do this is to use Youtube or Vimeo . The content posted there can be easily forwarded as, for example, a link in an email attachment or shared on social media (although if our goal is good promotion of the movie on Facebook, it is worth placing it there directly).

Summary

Here, the matter is fabulously simple. Start recording today. Take the phone, set it horizontally (it is not obvious, contrary to appearances, 🙂and record. Editing – download GoPro Studio and start having fun there. Then reach for Adobre Premiere ( available here in a trial version for 30-day tests ) and create more extensive productions straight from Bollywood🙂

Good luck and have fun!