Editing Your Travel or Vacation Movie
| After you shoot your footage, you should have lots of material to edit into great sequences in your travel movie. If you have so much footage that you find it a bit overwhelming, you can break down your material into likely sequences, which makes a large volume of footage more manageable. You don't have to import all your video at once; you can just import 10- or 15-minute portions of a tape at a time, organize the material, and even edit it before continuing to import additional footage. You can think through a variety of approaches to structuring your movieincluding audio, visuals, people, and time. One approach is to consider whether you want audio to guide the structure your movie. Your options are to use music alone, part music and audio, or all audio. Editing a movie to music is usually pretty easy, so that's a good way to get started. But if you have great audio or interactions from your trip, you may want to create some sequences that have audio only interspersed with other music-only sequences. Of course you can also mix music under your audio, too. You can also use visuals as a guide to organizing your footage, selecting the shots that are the best looking and that also tell the story of your adventure. Using the most interesting characters and people moments is also a good way to cull the best material from your footage. This allows you to use your best bits from interviews of groups or individuals on camera. Time is another way you can structure your movie: You have a beginning, middle, and end to your journey, so you can just start editing sequences from each stage of your trip. Using a combination of all these approaches in structuring a movie will make your movie engaging and action packed. In addition, you can add narration (which you can do by taping yourself, importing audio into your computer, and editing it in Movie Maker) to tell the story of the trip. Note If you don't have an audio microphone to record your narration directly into your computer, you can use your camcorder to record your narration and import it as a video in Movie Maker. You may also decide to edit several versions of your footage, such as a highlights movie (with just music, if you like)either on your own or with Movie Maker's AutoMovie featureand an extended version. Take your time when editing. After all, the trip is over, so there probably isn't a lot of pressure to finish your movie. On the other hand, getting a quick highlights movie done will give you some immediate gratification, momentum, and a feeling of accomplishment right away, which can propel you to the next stage of editing a longer, more detailed movie. Basic Editing StepsWhen you can take time to look at your footage, watch your tapes to see what portions you want to import. It's important to select only the best material so that you can create entertaining sequences.
As you work with your material, be diligent about editing out anything that doesn't workeither by trimming and tightening it up or by deleting it. Eventually, you will find the gems in your footage and create sequences that polish those diamonds in the rough. Tip You can edit photos into your movie by using Movie Maker. For more information about adding motion to your photos, see Chapter 9, "Project 5: Making Family Memory Movies." The "Making an Advanced Slideshow Movie" section in Chapter 9 tells you how to use Microsoft's Photo Story 3 software to add pans and zooms (and other cool features) to still photos. Here's a quick review of the steps outlined in Chapter 3:
Note Did you interview people during your trip, and you want to put them in your movie, but you never got their names? You can insert a title that's descriptive to inject humor into your movie (for example:"Man who told us wrong way to go"). |
