It never ceases to amaze me that you think the hard part of any video project will be getting the footage in the first place, yet that rarely seems to be the problem. No, shooting the video often requires a great deal of prep work, but is generally over quickly. Then you come to the mind-numbingly boring bits. Let’s say you shot 45 minutes of footage for a 3 min video…not uncommon. You spend hours capturing the footage on the computer, which takes at least the same about of time as you have footage and frequently more. Then you may have to color correct it, for those 45 min. of film set aside 25 min. Next you have to render the color correction. This is just like capturing only longer – sometimes a lot longer. And set aside a day or more if you have to work on the audio. Then you can actually start editing. Woot. This can sometimes go very quickly with things seeming to just fall into place. If it doesn’t you’re probably in for a marathon edit. In which case you’re going to spend at least 3 or 4 days doing nothing be attempting to find something that works. It’s a bit like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with out knowing what the finished product is supposed to look like. Then of course once you have it edited you have to go back and tweak. Soften the audio here, a little more color correction there, add text overlays, special effects, movement, and – if you haven’t done it already – throw in transitions. So there you are, you’ve put the finishing touches on, watched it and didn’t feel compelled to go back and fix anything. You’re done! But not, actually. Now you have to re-render everything as a whole and put in chapter markers if you’re project is long enough. Then you get to import the finished project into DVD burning software (in which case you’ll spend a day making the menu and then burning the first copy) OR compressing the video for the web or download (which normally takes at least twice as long as the finished piece). And viola! You’re made a video. No one – except other videographers – will ever appreciate the time, energy, frustration and sheer bloody-mindedness that it took to get it done, but such is life.
