Last week when I left off writing about my attempt to make videos about my art I had already recorded stuff and had the editing left to do. Now I’ll tell you what’s gone on since then.
I got the editing done. I decided to go for the “Quick Cut” look and edit between the videos of myself talking an me showing closeups of the art. It worked out okay but it took way too long and in the end I wasn’t that impressed with it. It took me two hours to edit a two minute video. That is an untenable amount of time especially since I wasn’t impressed with the results. So I decided to start over again.
First a word about microphones. As I explained last week I ended up not going with my cheap lapel mic and used my stationary Yeti mic. It sounded okay but there was a little too much difference in the sound of the heads up shots and the close up shots. The mic was in two different points in the room and two different distances away from my mouth. So I need up buying a new mic.
I bought a Bluetooth DJI Mini Mic that is sold as going with my DJI Osmo 3 camera. It also said it can connect with phones. It only cost $25 so I figured I’d give it a try. But I ran into a problem. I like to shoot on the iPad because of its big screen but I couldn’t get the DJI mic to work with the iPad’s camera app. I could get the mic to pair with it but when I ran the camera app it wouldn’t use the mic. If I opened the FaceTime app I could use the mic just fine but not the camera app. It was frustrating.
I could get the mic to work just fine with the Osmo 3 camera so I thought about doing these videos with that. The main problem with that is that the LCD screen is small on the Osmo 3. I much prefer the big iPad screen. But it would be my fallback camera.
It took a couple of hours of fiddling with the mic and looking stuff up on the internet before I found an app named RODE Reporter. This app was free and made to solve just this problem. I pair the mic with the iPad, open up RODE Reporter to choose the mic, and then open up the Camera app which will now be able the use the mic. It’s convoluted but worked.
One more thing about the lapel mic that I learned was to put it on my lapel. That sounds obvious but last week I mentioned clipping my cheap lapel mic onto my collar (I’ve seen that done on TV) and then not liking the sound of it. That’s because it being right under my chin muffled the sound. I put the new one where my lapel would be if I was wearing a sports coat (next to the button holes on my collared shirt) and it sounded fine. I even tested it on my collar and it too sounded muffled when put there. So use the tools how they are built to be used. Like I said, obvious.
This second time around recording the video I had a better idea what I was doing. I had a plan. I would do a heads up shot of me holding the art and taking about it and then a close up shot of the art on my drawing table as I taped about it. Each segment would be about a minute long. Then I’d edit the two of them together. Not in bits and pieces but one minute and then the next.
I was originally going to do a five piece art show and that’s what I stuck with. At around a minute per segment and two segments per piece I would end up with around a ten minute video. That worked for me. I shot five heads up pieces on the tripod and then five hand held videos of close up stuff.
After shooting I decided to work on my desktop using Premier Pro to edit with. Things went a lot faster than last where I was making a lot of edits to blend the heads up and closeups together. This time I edited out some of my fumfering around at the beginning of the clips and put one after the other. It worked out well.
One thing that I forgot to do was record an introduction. Last week I had an opening for the beginning of the video but I didn’t record not this week. So I set up the iPad on the tripod again and recorded the opening. Once it was done I stuck it on the beginning.
After I had the whole video done (it was about twelve minutes long) I decided to give each pice of art its own two minute finished video too. I want to post the whole thing to YouTube but I can also post the two minute videos to Instagram and TikTok. It was just a matter of exporting a segment at a time so it wasn’t that much extra work.
I ended up working on the videos all of Saturday from about eight in the morning to around four in the afternoon. But a lot of that time was mic testing, thinking about stuff, and figuring out what exactly needed to be done. Shooting and editing the videos took me only about two hours. That’s much better than the two hours to edit just one two minute video.
I think this weekend’s videos are a step in the right direction. I don’t think I have everything down just yet. For example I might want to use some music in the videos. What music and how to use it I’m not sure of. I tried looking for some free background music but didn’t find anything I liked. I even broke out GarageBand and tried making some of my own but that didn’t work out either. So I still have a way to go but I will start posting what I have done so far. That’s the plan.