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Improvising with Video Production

Oct 12, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

How to make a music video on the fly.

My first alternative was Adobe Premiere Elements, version 8 ($99), which has some fabulous features. One is the ability to auto-analyze your clips, automatically fix shaky and underexposed video, and detect faces and dialogue in your content. When building an InstantMovie, Premiere Elements factors all this in and adds theme-specific effects, transitions, and audio, which works great with video from vacations and days on the beach.

When you're trying to circumvent hours of (what you're hoping to call) professional editing, however, the devil is in the details. Specifically, all of Premiere Elements' templates have effects packages that you can add into the video. The stars, picture frames, and guitar fly-bys in the music video template look great for shots of your 8-year-old playing Guitar Hero, but were inappropriate for what I was trying to do. And (here's the detail) you couldn't leave out the effects without also forgoing the transitions. In a fast paced video with lots of cuts, I like inserting short cross-dissolves to smooth the flow—otherwise it's too visually jarring.

So it was close, but no cigar, though I did feel like I was making progress. Then I remembered that I had the latest version of Avid Pinnacle Studio 14 ($49 and up) lurking around, and that it also had a music-video-like tool called SmartMovie. Interestingly, though it lacks much of the intelligence of the Adobe solution, it does cut the video into short, tasty chunks and insert them to the beat with dissolve transitions in between, which was all I needed. Sometimes (you know what's coming) less really is more.

I tried two themes: first the Fast Paced music video that resulted in a cut per second, or about 240 for the 4-minute muvee. Heck, at that pace, no one could tell if the video was good or bad. Think about 240 1-second clips for a moment, and you get a feel for the utility of these tools. If you did this by hand and spent even 1 minute finding each 1-second chunk, you would've saved 4 hours of parsing, plus at least another hour cobbling it all together.

Then I tried the Simple and Elegant template, which averaged about 3 seconds to 4 seconds per clip and seemed more appropriate. I rendered in DV, which input into my project nicely, and finished the DVD soon thereafter. I haven't gotten feedback yet, but I've got an item checked off the pre-trip to-do list, and I expect to hear great things. I'll report back next issue and maybe even share a link.

So. Maybe you're an event shooter, maybe a corporate producer. Whatever. You have X amount of video that you have to consolidate into Y amount of time, and converting it into a music-video-like production might be the ideal solution. You can do it by hand, or try one of the programs listed above. Despite my travails, muvee would still be my No. 1 recommendation. It's that good when it's working, and it probably will for you—after all, I'm the one with the black cloud over my head.

In the meantime, if you're traveling through southwest Virginia and overhear a bouncy, blond concert promoter crowing about the wonderful music video she acquired on a shoestring budget, this is our little secret, OK? In two weeks, I'll report back on how I enjoyed shooting a conference and (very sorely needed) two-day break with my new Canon Vixia HFS10 camcorder.

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