Putting the right scenes and cutting the unnecessary footage are very essential to effective film-making. The real story of your film is being drawn out when you do your video editing workflow right. In this post, I'm gonna share you my own workflow to effective film-making.
First, think of a concept for your film! This is where you crack your brain often. Brainstorming with yourself is really difficult but it's challenging. You must think first for a particular genre of your film, whether it be a comedy, drama, action or horror. If it's a comedy, you have to think of a particular joke, and make it long by adding a story behind it. The same goes to horror genre. You can combine these elements into one film, like action-comedy, action-horror, action-drama or whatever you want. You must have a wide (not wild) imagination so you can think of a good concept and script for your film.
This is a typical "brainstorming" scene between me and my production team on what to shoot.
Second, you might wanna put the correct settings on your camera before you shoot a footage. You have to do that so you won't have any more difficulties in post-production. Correct exposure from your camera depends on what time or what place you're shooting at. If you're shooting in daylight, you have to turn down your shutter speed and your ISO (keep in mind that when you dial down your shutter speed, your camera will create a "jello effect" - the objects from your footage go slanting when you're panning the shot around). If you're shooting at low light, you have to turn down your aperture to about 2.0 whilst dialing up your shutter speed and ISO (keep in mind that when you turn up your ISO to about 3200 to 6400, your shots will have grainy effect). Swapping lenses is a good idea too, most of the time I use my Canon EF 50mm f1.8 II lens because it is perfect for film-making and for low light shots. It also has great shallow depth of field and it's perfect for keeping your subjects in focus. And yeah, by the way, the standard frame rate for a good film look on your footage is 1920x1080 at 24fps. If you want to shoot a slow motion footage, you might use 50fps or 60fps depending on the sensor of your camera. You must be careful at your exposure, so you won't have difficulties in color correction later. During your color correcting process, you might crush all the "blacks" and light up too much your "whites". To avoid this, you might wanna turn your brightness and contrast all the way down and turn down your saturation a little bit. In this way, you can easily do the color correction in post.
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| Shooting a scene from "Kawalan" Episode 3 |
As for me, I shoot a particular scene for two to three times with different angles, because I only have one camera in my gear. I do this to keep the subjects or actors/actresses in focus. Focusing is very essential in film-making, because it gives the subjects in focus the importance in the scene. I always give a 5-second extension in each shot I make so I can cut the footage easily in post.
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| User interface of Sony Vegas Pro 10 |
Third, the editing time! Make sure that you made all the shots for your film and make sure you have lots of free disk space on your computer. Usually, each of my projects eats about 3gb or 4gb of free disk space. As for me, I use Sony Vegas Pro for cutting the unnecessary footage and arranging the right footage in order. I use Sony for quite a while, because of its user-friendly interface - you can just drag and drop your footage or audio files onto the timeline. Cutting footage is just a breeze - pressing the hot key "S" allows you to cut some selected areas of your footage. In this software, I also add sound effects and background music to the footage as well. Now, for the background music - you have to be careful in choosing any music for your footage. You have to use royalty-free music or sound effects unless you might wanna ask permission to Lady Gaga first before you use the song "Bad Romance" as a background music for your dance video.
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| User interface for Adobe After Effects CS4 |
Since Sony Vegas doesn't have the full capabilities for adding visual effects, I now use Adobe After Effects. This software is very good in adding realistic VFX and 3D especially the motion tracking stuff. Adding VFX using AE is quite a pain, because most of the time it eats up your RAM, thus slowing your computer often.
After putting some necessary visual effects, I now enter to the dark realm of color correction. This is the hardest part of video editing. You must take a careful look at the skin tone of the talents, because it is very important. You don't want your talents to look like The Hulk because of their green skin.
After I finish all the editing, I now render my project into one video, usually in Windows Media Video HD format (1080p at 24fps). This is the best quality for web content videos. If you upload this on YouTube, the system will automatically set your video to 1080p HD.
Then, that's pretty much it! So good luck with making videos, and I hope this post helped you a bit in any way. If you have questions, leave a comment below. =)
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