Spicing Up Your Home Videos

If you're anything like my family, home movies have become a staple of your life. Why simply remind your uncle Al of the time he drunkenly spilled a whole glass of champagne on the mother of the bride when you can show him in slow-motion at the annual family reunion? These days camcorders have come a long way in taking the guesswork out of getting the right angle and lighting, and video editing software has turned the home movie into a work of art, Unfortunately, that work of art can end up looking like a Picasso if you aren't careful. With some attention to detail you can make your home movie something that kids won't groan at on Family Night. Some of the more recent software available will even lend a professional finish to any amateur film, as long as you know what to do. Plan ahead of time, and your videos will showcase your memories in a way only visual media can.

There are many things you can do to improve the quality of your home movies. Here are a few things that have helped me:

1. Quality is more important than quantity. Always follow the KISS method (for those who don't know, that means Keep It Simple, Stupid): a well-planned three-to-five minute video is far more pleasing to watch than a haphazard, rambling video that takes half an hour or longer to endure. If you plan on making a video that lasts that long, break it up into different files you can manage easily and edit into a more streamlined video later.

2. If you really need to use transition effects, stick to one or two (coordinated) effects. Giving into the temptation to utilize all the "cool" effects only make the transitions seems chaotic and choppy. The same goes for both audio and visual special effects: less is more, no matter how funny a laughing chipmunk sounds.

3. Speaking of audio, remember that how a video sounds is just as important as how it looks. A regular movie loses something in the translation when the audio is poor or non-existent; the same holds true with home movies. The reason many home movies lack decent audio is simple: video recorders are made to produce quality video, not necessarily audio. An audio editor program will solve this problem; a good program will help you adjust the audio, or take it out entirely and replace it with something else (i.e. a soundtrack.) You can even imprint your own voice and narrate the video. With a decent program you'll be able to enhance the original audio as well.

4. If you like titles and can be creative, give it a try. Every home movie can be spruced up with a brief, witty title flying across the screen to prepare you for an upcoming clip. An attention-grabbing title can create interest in any video, so long as you don't go overboard with them.

5. Editing is your friend, no matter how painful it is to take a cutter to family memories. Does anyone really need to see your cousin Bill's "milk-through-the-nose" trick? Also edit out any areas where you can't see the picture clearly for more than a few seconds. Remember, you're recording memories, not every second of your life.

6. Think of the action in your movie as scenes. If you find yourself with footage lasting a long time, you may want to break it up into a few of these scenes. Don't go overboard and shift the scene every few seconds, just use your instincts on how many scenes to break it into and you should be fine. If you don't think your instincts are working very well, there are software programs available to do it automatically for you, either by detecting gaps between the scenes or at timed intervals.

Just because you want to have clean, professional-looking home videos doesn't mean you have to pay an arm and a leg. Some companies, like Avnex, has software you can try free. Other software is packaged with operating systems, such as the Microsoft Movie Maker that comes with Windows; believe it or not this software is actually pretty decent if you can't afford a stand-alone product. You can try experimenting on you own as well, combining different elements to achieve the desired result. As long as you plan your home movie ahead of time and do a little creative editing, you'll soon find that your videos are a hit at next year's reunion.