Putting Together A Video

I've been working on putting together a video of our total solar eclipse for a couple of days and it is in its final edit stage now.  

The most time-consuming thing was actually viewing each and every video clip in its entirety.  Once I did that, then I needed to decide how much of each clip to use, where to use it in the video, and whether it should be viewed in real-time, slow motion or fast speed like a time-lapse.  

Since this eclipse was a rather long event...  well, things happened quickly but the entire event was pretty close to a half day long, a full day if you include set up and tear down...  I knew that most of the clips would be in some multiple of fast motion.  It turns out that much of the video footage in this video is at around 10x real time speed.  When you speed up video, you can no longer use the embedded sound because it will just sound like Theodore, Simon and Alvin on too much caffeine.  So, the answer to that is to go through all the video clips in real-time once again so I can extract short soundbites.  I can then place these short soundbites over the fast motion video where appropriate.  This required a lot of time and effort.  

Honestly, I really like the real time video clips but, in real-time, these are video clips captured over four hours and with multiple cameras.  The fast motion clips are nice too though.  Below is a photo of the timeline of my final video.  The timeline is at the bottom of the screen in the photo.  The videos are the little icons with photos.  The blue icons are audio clips.  Other icons are text/title clips.  The timeline runs from left to right so you can see how many different clips are overlaid on top of each other so they play at the same time.  Getting this timing just right is a bit of a feat too.  

After I get the timeline sequence the way I want it and get the timing of each clip just right, then I go back to tweak each video clip with some color adjustments and sharpening.  I save these edits for last because this is where the computer really bogs down.  Once I start applying color grading and sharpening, I can no longer view the video in real-time.  So, I get the timing just right before any of the color and sharpening edits.

I use my desktop computer for editing video (it is my most powerful computer) but it starts to bog down with video that is this complicated.  And, this is only a Full HD video and not a 4K or higher video!  Many videographers are producing videos in 6K, 8K and 12K today.  I recently realized that my computer is not capable of editing and compiling 4K video so I'm stuck with Full HD video for a while.  I can easily play 4K and higher video but editing and compiling video requires exponentially more processing power.  

So, I should be adding the finished video to this blog sometime today!