youtube – Create SCI FI

How To Organize A Hard Drive Of Raw Footage To Entice An Editor To Work On Your Low Or No Budget Video Project

December 27, 2017December 23, 2017 by Anthony Ferraro, posted in BLOG

You spend months thinking about and prepping your project during pre-production period. You wrote the project or created it. You have a handle on it or are steering the ship. Momentum is building. You survive the shoot and now you enter the post-production phase. You have a years worth of blood, sweat, and tears on a hard drive. You need to find an editor

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You look at some editing reels and the editor you think is perfect is $650 a day your total budget for the edit is $500. You talk to several editors to try and get them excited about your project in the hopes they will join the team. I am going to stop right here. Put yourself in the editor’s shoes, you want them to edit for little or no money and to start off that relationship you’re going to hand them a hard drive with three terabytes of raw footage that contains a bunch of folders that say, Card 01, Card 02 and contains numerically labeled shots. That is hardly enticing, in fact, its a deterrent.

Here is a simple way to get an Editor excited about working on your project. You want them to be able to dive right in. You are going to prep the drive. First, create a series of folders. The main folder will be the project name, the title of the work. Within that folder create subfolders. Number them as follows: 01_project, 02_Media, 03_Music, 04_Audio, 05_GFX, 06_Docs, 07_Stills, 08_Assets, 09_Exports.

Folders copy

Now move all your media into the 02_Media folder. If you record audio separately move that into the 04_Audio folder. Add a copy of the script into the 06_Docs folder. If you have storyboards put a copy there. If you have ideas for music put those in the 03 Music Folder.

This next step is what will really help you entice an editor to start on the project. Set up the project in the editing software and make selects. Most likely you will be using Final Cut, AVID or Adobe Premiere. As of now, the most predominant DIY platform is Adobe Premiere Pro CC. If you don’t own it you can get started for under $20 a month. Whichever platform you choose the steps are the same and very similar to the project folder structure. In your chosen editing platform create a new project. In the project create a series of folders. 01_ Sequence, 02_Media, 03_Music, 04_Audio, 05_GFX, 06_SFX, 07_Titles, 08_Misc. Next, import your footage into the project. Media into the media folder, Audio into the audio folder, etc.

Project copy

This next step will really go a long way. Create a New Sequence in your project and call it selects. Start to watch all your raw footage and “select” your preferred takes and pull them into the timeline. Perhaps you like two, just pull them both. Creating a sequence and making selects is very simple. If your not comfortable or familiar with the editing platform at all a few google searches will guide you through this basic process.

Alternatively, if that seems too involved or beyond your time or abilities. At the very least Set up the drive with the folders and create a paper edit. Create a document and assign a brief description of each Footage Card and Contents. Then Do a paper edit. Watch the footage in a viewer such as Quick-Time. Make your selects that way. Create a new document, split the page into two columns. On the left will be the script, On the right will be your notes and your ‘Selects” If the script says, ‘Mary Enters, speaks to Bill. Mary: Hi Bill!” That will be in the left column in the right will be the shot into something like Mary Enters Card02, IMG-0190.mp4 at 03:04. And just map the whole script out with your selects.

paperEdit copy

The point of all this is to present the editor with a project they can jump right into. If you present an editor with a low rate and terabytes of raw footage they will politely pass. If you talk to an editor excited about the possibilities of the project with specific examples from media you’ve already organized and prepped you have a reasonable chance to get them just as excited about being a part of something. If you don’t have the money to invest you simply need to invest your time. Sharing the time investment with the editor rather than laying it all on them will encourage talented people to join you. Last I should mention be sure to make a backup of the drive and its contents and store that away safely.

For more tips and shared experience visit our youtube channel Create Sci-Fi with plenty of informative videos on creating content.

How To Add A YouTube Channel Subscription Link To Gain Subscribers

November 21, 2017November 20, 2017 by Anthony Ferraro, posted in BLOG

I want to talk about a simple YouTube channel link hack to gain subscribers. First off I call this a hack because that just gives the procedure a little more pizzazz. To be clear this is not a nefarious hack. Some of you may already know this and I share it because I am surprised by how many do not. For me, it was a Hallelujah moment.

The most challenging and important step to building your series is getting people to subscribe. If you are like me whenever you post on social media or release content you make sure to include a call to action. You simply say, “please subscribe” or you get inventive, “please subscribe, just click that link down there”. For me, it felt like it was undermining my posts. I’d have all this fun or interesting information and lose a lot of people at the end with my “please subscribe”. But you have to do it.

With blogs and websites, the email pop up as soon as you navigate to the site is a great solution to this. Wouldn’t that be great if you could do that with your youtube channel? You can! Its very simple, here’s how. Full disclosure I am using my sites as examples.

• Go to the Home Page of your YouTube Channel. We are going to add some simple code to the URL to create a link.

•Yours will look something like this, either a bunch of random numbers and letters or your custom channel name.

My Create sci-fi youtube channel is random it looks like this:

a55292bae5d1786cadf130b4f68244b4887f7061

My Galactic Galaxy web series is a custom one it looks like this:

1d4abfe14b9a013c5dc432fc57690d06cbfc34f2

* If you have a custom URL that you made before Google plus was released it will still work yours will just say /user/ instead of /c/

•What we are going to do is copy the link from the browser and paste it into a text editing document, office, text edit, google docs, notepad… any text app will work.

•Copy the link from the browser, this is mine yours will be different :

5e2cdecb5f3691c71984b30aa7946a9ebb7fdc9e

•Add this text to the end :

9e63b1b30b0ce049228617bb94d5d0738c41d82b

It will look like this:

0c4bface706f815d99ce78e30e8814f4cfe14032

37b1363bc6d3af92a7a954a802a6330fcedb774a_1_690x323

Here is a before and after.

Before:
Please check out my channel Create SciFi

After:
Please check out my channel Create SciFi

That is it. Now when you tell people to click on the link for your channel you won’t have to add a “please hit the subscribe button”. I hope you found this simple hack useful. Please subscribe to my Video Channel for some more filmmaking giddy-up.

Why I Am Filming More And More Video Content With My Smartphone, An Honest Non-Technical Answer

October 3, 2017January 7, 2019 by Anthony Ferraro, posted in BLOG

I wanted to talk a bit about the idea of shooting video content on a smartphone. I am old enough to have been creating content before there were video cameras and desktop editing options. I am also young enough to have been an early adopter of that technology. A funny thing happened to me recently that made me think about that.

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When I first started shooting video in the early days, fueled by Dogme 95, I was making Mumblecore films before that name existed. Shooting video was liberating. My experience with filmmaking had been shooting music videos on Super 16 as a job. The group I was involved with would make sure to do what was known as a weekend rental. We’d shoot the band on Friday with the equipment rented on the budget provided by the record company. Because the rental houses were closed on the weekend we would have the equipment over the weekend so we could make our personal films as long as we bought our own filmstock and had the rental back by Monday. We’d piggyback all the laborious tasks and expenses on the back of the music video budget. I remember lighting a set for hours and never really knowing if the shots were any good until almost a week later. Editing was an event. We’d rent a suite with an operator, they would provide lunch and we’d sit on a huge couch in the back of a room while an editor operated a console that looked like it belonged on the Starship Enterprise.

Then very shortly in my foray into filmmaking, these digital cameras started showing up, the Sony VX2000 and the Cannon XL1. I worked at a production house that had one coveted AVID editing system. I was low man on the pole but they were kind enough to let me edit my own projects. The catch was, I had to come in after midnight. One day they said, we just got this new thing is called, Final Cut. It was Apple’s Final Cut, version one in fact. You can use that if you want, they said. Cue Hallelujah music and sound effects. Between the new cameras and desktop editing, I was off on an adventure, one I continue to this day.

It was a rough time back then. People were very divided on the subject of film versus video. Mostly the established working people would tell you video would never look like film and how it’s not the same, and less than. And all the unestablished hard working people trying to get ahead would say, content is king and I am a storyteller and every six months the technology would get better and better. It was an exciting time. I imagine it was what it was like for kids hearing punk rock music for the first time and thinking, I can do this and starting bands with their friends.

My long journey and commitment paid off when the DSLR cameras appeared. It all worked out fine, I could proceed to tell my stories and not have anyone undermine them because of the filmic quality. I get a warm and fuzzy feeling just thinking about the DSLR. Remember the tsunami of over-cranked footage, it was so beautiful we could not get enough. Then the slider, ah perfection. And now the drone shots … a dream come true.

What is my point you might be asking yourself? Recently I have been hearing about festival films shot on a smartphone. Reading about 4K resolution recording with a phone. Giant Billboards touting, shot with the phone. My knee-jerk reaction was, why on earth would you want to make a film on your phone? It’s a phone! I remember the yellow plastic phone on the kitchen wall with a 10-foot cord. The Motorola bricks, the Razor! Shoot a film on your phone ?!?! Ah ha! There’s the rub, I realized I was reacting just like the film veterans were reacting to me and my video punk friends back in the day. Actually, I realized that after I shot a bunch of footage on my phone that looked great.

I was somewhere with an unexpected opportunity to shoot some footage and I had no camera. I used my phone out of necessity. Once I got home and saw the results I immediately adopted it into my workflow. I did some research and downloaded a camera app that was a bit beefier than the stock one on my phone. Did some more research an purchased an audio recording app for another five bucks. And I have to say, it works quite well. I am now planning to shoot my next short film with my camera.

The last thing I’ll say is I intentionally wanted to not make this a technical comparison. However, I edit video for a living and without going into boring detail, in laymen’s terms, the video looked and sounded just fine. And for a ten dollar investment? I’d upgrade that comment to, it looked and sounded amazing.

Be sure to subscribe and follow my video channel for more filmmaking How To.

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