Month: April 2018 (Page 2 of 2)

This video gets me.  There I am, trying to record every little scene I can in my kids’ lives.  I hope you’re doing the same.  As my parents constantly remind me: they’ll be gone before you know it!  To that end, here are several ideas I try to keep in mind when recording family events:

1. Get a good camera

I am cheap frugal, so I am loath to spend lots of money on nice video cameras; however, you do want to produce quality video, so you should be prepared to drop a few more smackers for it.  I definitely recommend a camera capable of recording video in high definition (HD).  Also, think about the media on which cameras record: I find ones that record on SD cards to be very convenient.  Recording on your smart phone is fine, too, and I often mix video recorded on my smart phone with video I’ve recorded with my regular camera; nevertheless, video cameras tend to offer many more useful features above what you get with your smart phone.

2. Film everything

It’s a given to film birthday parties, graduations, and plays, but you never know when some seemingly insignificant event might become a long-lasting memory.  Think about some of those smaller events: carving pumpkins, a quiet family dinner, your kids playing a game and laughing together, walking the property of a family farm, etc.  These moments in time may never repeat themselves, so think about recording them!

3. Think about your film technique

I did some camera work in college, but for the most part I’m a complete amateur.  [Side note: I should probably take a class or two to improve my technique.]  For my family videos, though, one technique I use quite often is to keep my camera in tight on my subject for the majority of my shots.  For example, when my child is playing basketball or soccer, I’ll keep my camera trained tight on him instead of holding a wide shot of the field or following the ball from player to player.  With wide shots, your viewers–grandparents and other friends and family–may not even be able to pick out your kids from the 10-20 others on the field, let alone see the skills your child exhibits.  When you follow the ball around, you’re usually filming other children the majority of the time: footage you’ll likely discard, anyway.  So, I generally keep my camera trained in tight on my children.  When they make a great play, I’m already capturing the full lifespan of the play and can easily edit that into my final product.  The one drawback of this technique is that I usually miss great plays by my kids’ teammates.  In general, that doesn’t worry me, but every-so-often a parent will ask me if I captured their child’s buzzer-beater and I reluctantly reply in the negative.

4. Take notes

If you’ve captured an important moment–say, your child’s first goal or some great award or honor–make a note of it somewhere.  If possible, record not only the date and time, but even the name of the video file and timestamp within the file.  That way, when you set down to create a final product (see #10 below), it will be easy for you to find the event and edit it into your product.

5. Keep a steady hand

Few things are worse than watching a home video that gives you motion sickness.  On more than one occasion, my wife and children have filmed events with their phones that I wanted to include in one of our family movies but refrained since the shots were so shaky–which is another reason to not rely solely on your smart phone for your video recorder.  A lot of the nicer video cameras include stabilization controls, which can be helpful, especially with the tight shots.  In addition, I recommend bringing along a decent tripod and/or monopod.

6. Backup, backup, backup

Don’t let all your hard work go to waste: backup early, backup often.  I try never to go more than a few weeks without downloading all the video I’ve taken and back it up to my different storage devices.  This goes for the pictures I take, as well.  High definition files take up a lot of space, so be prepared to have ample storage available.

7. Keep spares handy

I bought a second battery for my video camera that I keep charged and nearby whenever my primary battery gets too low.  I also keep spare, formatted SD cards handy in case I fill up my current card.

8. Go-Pro?  Drone?

I own neither a go-pro nor a drone, but I think either device would definitely introduce a unique flavor to your home videos.  I could certainly see recording a fun bike stroll, roller coaster ride, or rafting adventure with a go-pro.  We have two farms in the family that would be fun to document with a drone and even just recording a few flyovers of my suburban house might be fun video to have years from now.

9. Don’t always be the man behind the camera

Even if no one else is lining up to take over as cameraman, try to get in front of the camera every once-in-a-while.

10. Make a polished product

Having raw footage of your various family activities is great, but why not stretch your creative muscles and make a real video out of it?  For more than 10 years, every Christmas, I meticulously parse through a year’s worth of video footage and create a 60+ minute video recapping all our various activities.  In the early years, I used some of the free tools from Microsoft to create my videos and eventually burn them to DVD (complete with disk art drawn by the kids) that I’d hand out to the extended family.  As Microsoft has deprecated those tools, I moved to the CyberLink family of products.

Like my Christmas Letter, I always press multiple copies of my family movies so that I can eventually gift them to the kids; however, I recently decided to stop burning DVDs altogether, instead, simply creating an MP4 of the finished product that I can upload to my media server.  Eventually, whenever I gift our old Christmas Letters to my kids, I’ll also gift a thumb drive of two decades of family movies.  How cool will that be?