Family Video 101

This article contains tips for those of you who want to know how to create an interesting and memorable family video. I’ve been creating a big family video every year for the last decade or so and I’ve learned a few helpful things.

First, let me say what I mean by “family video”. I am talking about a once-a-year compilation of all the family video taken during the year. If you are like me, you take about 10-15 hours of footage every year and most of it is pretty boring.    My family videos take those hours of boring footage and compress them into about two hours of something that we like to watch again and again.

Before I start, I am assuming that you have some reasonable piece of video editing software and you are already familiar with it.   I use Pinnacle Studio v.11. It is under $100, pretty stable, and easy to use. You don’t need anything fancy to create good videos.  Here are my tips:

Tip #1: Cut it out! Good videos are more about what you cut out than what you leave in. Don’t be afraid to cut out footage.   Here is an example- Let’s say you film your little one’s soccer games and come up with about two hours of soccer footage.    You should be able to cut that down to about 2-3 minutes of highlights that is fun to watch (see “Montage” below).  You won’t miss any of that footage you cut out.     Once you can adopt a “cut it out” mentality, you will be free to shoot lots more video and take some chances, which will improve the quality of your video even more.   On final advantage of cuts is that they reduce the “barf factor” you get from shaky video. 

Tip #2: The montage is your friend.   I love music montages because they provide an easy way to link up a lot of short clips.  It is also a powerful way to compress hours of boring footage into a dynamic, fun few minutes.  It is really easy to create a montage.   Let’s say you’ve got an hour of footage from various birthday parties.  Here is an example of how to “montage” it (click here to see this example):

1. Find a great song.  Take a note of how long it is. 
2. Create a new video project for your subject.  Bring in all of the potential raw video footage you might want to use in the montage.    Notice that you have way more video than you need.
3. Take a rough draft pass to isolate the pieces of the video that you are interested in. In this pass, you should cut out 80%-90% of the raw footage.   You just want to block out what looks like it might be interesting. The clips you end up with should only be a few seconds long on average. You will still have 4-5 times as much video footage as you need.
4. Take several additional passes to cut down your clips to the bare essentials. Often clips will only be a second or two long.   Your goal is to get the total length of video down to the length of the song you picked.   After a couple of passes, you will find yourself cutting out entire clips to get the footage down. This is a good thing. Don’t be afraid to cut!
5. Add in the music track. Most video editing software will let you do this easily. 
6. At this point, you can call it done, but it you are a perfectionist like me, you will want to watch the video and see how well it goes with the music. At this point, you can start juggling the clips, adjusting their length, and rearranging things to go along better with the music.

Tip #2a: Don’t forget the photo montage. Modern video editing software includes functionality to create photo montages set to music. I put one of these at the end of my family videos to showcase the base photos I took during the year (about 100 photos). It is the favorite part of the video for my family.

Tip #3: Learn the language of fades. You only need two fades for a highly polished and interesting-looking family video: The black fade and the cross fade. The black fade transitions between two clips by fading out to black and fading back in again. This is a fade you would use to indicate a change of subject. The cross fade fades one scene in while simultaneously fading the other out. This fade indicates a passage of time.    Using these fades really helps a video stand out.  

Tip #4: DVD features can help.   Recital footage is a problem for family videos. You would like to keep it around, but it is pretty boring.   This is where DVD features comes to the rescue. Make the full recital footage a bonus feature! In the main video, just include a few short cuts from the recital, then put the full footage in as a video that can be accessed from the main DVD menu.   This can be a little tricky, but it is worth the effort. 

Tip #5: General shooting Tips: Use a tripod, especially for closeups.   Leave the tripod attached even when you are moving, because it acts like a steadycam.  Shoot from interesting angles – up high, down low, in a mirror, etc.   Get a good microphone to attach to your camera.   Take lots of footage, you can cut it later. 

That’s all. I hope this is helpful for you!