Video Case Studies
May 17, 2011 12:31 PM, By Don Kreski
How to best capture your success stories onscreen.
Editing and B-roll
Because talking heads by themselves can be boring, Meincke and Ellis shot extra video of the Davenport boardroom, auditorium, and classrooms, while I shot still pictures. DU’s Ignacio Perez and Rick Jensen were extremely generous in finding or shooting additional stills, and I also collected images from Crestron and BlueWater. Ellis used all of this as cover video or B-roll, adding it over the edited interviews to illustrate what Griffes, Bean, and Miller talked about. “One thing I really like about Apple Final Cut Pro is its ability to import digital stills and then create pans, zooms, and other motion using them,” she explains.
If you do your job properly, you’ll have far more video to work with than you’ll ever use. In this case, we ended with about 60 minutes of interviews and 60 minutes of B-roll, plus 50 still images, which we trimmed all this material down to a little more than four minutes in the final production. An old rule of thumb is that you want at least 10 minutes of raw video for every minute you use. We finished with about a 15:1 ratio on the interviews and a 30:1 ratio overall.
“This may seem like a lot to sort through, and it is, but it’s always better to have more than you need than to not have something you really need,” Ellis explains. “That first line really was perfect, although it took a while to realize it,” Ellis says. “We started the final video probably five different ways, but I kept feeling it could work better. Still, that’s what video production is all about. The more you put into it, the more you can take away.”
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