Colour - Grading, Editing and Background Music

I film myself crafting/diy, my goal is to be all the more proud of my work when I see the construction process later on in the video. That is, the videos are for myself, they are not meant to be shown to anyone but myself, symbolize how great I am, they are meant to be brag videos I can show off to myself :sunglasses:

My means (alternating):

  • Gopro/Phone camera
  • Time-lapse
  • Third person view, static
  • Gopro on head mount(first person perspective)

Which ideas do you have on how I could edit these films so they have replay value?

Topics that interest me are:

  • Colour grading(see also here)
  • Where to cut
  • How to find the right music and when to use it

The rough outline is:

  1. Analysis/Draft
  2. Building
  3. Presentation of the finished product

This can be dicey. There is a chance that footage from this camera will be very shaky. Nobody likes shaky cam. It is also difficult to make sure the camera is framing the subject in an artistic way. Consider pairing the GoPro to a smartphone so that the video can be monitored on the phone for good framing while working on your building project.

A time lapse will look much more fluid when sped up if the shutter speed of each frame is much longer than usual. For instance, if the shutter speed is between 1/8th and two seconds, then there will be a lot of motion blur of hands and objects moving while you work. These blur trails will connect to each other in a swirling smooth way when sped up. This looks much better than frames taken at 1/125th shutter or faster where motion is frozen in every frame. When frozen motion is played back fast, everything jumps unpredictably from one frame to the next with no smoothness, and it quickly gives the viewer a headache.

It may be necessary to use ND filters to reduce light enough that slower shutter speeds are possible. PolarPro makes ND filters for GoPro.

Depending on your style, grading may or may not be necessary. If “real life” looks great, as in a decorated background with clean working area and proper neutral lighting, then the footage should look pretty good straight out of the camera. I would personally put more effort into making real life look good rather than putting effort into making things look “better” during editing, because that sometimes doesn’t work.

Whenever you get bored while watching it.

Here’s the challenge since these videos are for yourself… No matter what song you pick, you’ll end up hating it after you’ve heard it 1,200 times during editing. So pick whatever you feel like listening to in the moment, then don’t watch the video again for six months to clear the PTSD.

The phrase “show, don’t tell” probably applies here. Few people have the patience to listen to a talking head video about a project for 15 minutes before seeing the actual project, even if they are listening to themselves talk. Keep any talk brief and to the point, and insert illustrations frequently so people don’t have to imagine what is being said.

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The newer gopros (and actually pretty much all expensive-ish action cams from the last 2-3 years) are amazing at stabilization, especially if the person is static and just doing stuff with the hands (I assume this is the case for crafting/diy).

For the first person view I think you could also try a chest mount as the head mount might give an unfamilliar perspective (= too high) and it might be just a bit too far from the action.

Other than this, I think Austin covered pretty much everything. There’s no perfect style, just experiment, start editing and find out where you end up and what doesn’t work. Also remember to take some days off to reset your mind, hearing the same song hundreds of times during editing will completely ruin it for a while.

GoPro has something called TimeWarp you should try out.

By interchangeable I did not mean, mixing everything as in timelapse on the headmount etc.

No, my time-lapses are like this: steady camera, showing me and my craft in total from start to finish.

I utilize the wide-angle view to get everything on screen.

GoPro hasn’t always had TimeWarp, it starts with 5 or 6. Also TimeWarp is the same as Hyperlapse, which is a free software from Microsoft. Great piece of work, but not necessary, as the camera is steady.

Yes, the shutter-setting is interesting, I noticed the lack of temporal smooth.

Speaking of which, Virtualdub has a temporal smoothing filter, which does exactly that, is there an equivalent in shotcut or can I use vd filters in shotcut yet?

I actually like the shaky version :slight_smile:

It’s not the means of recording that I find very interesting, it is colour grading, where to cut and how to find the right music and when to use it for my footage to have replay value.

Granted, how I record adds to replay value.

Analysis/Draft is not me talking, it is screen recordings of the design in FreeCad or Blender.

Whenever you get bored while watching it.

This is how I did it intuitively.

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