Notes on Recording Editing and Thinking About The Central Park Memorial Video Piece

On the 5th Dec 2016, fifteen days ago, I found and paid for the PowerDirector video editing App by Cyberlink.

I was delighted, as after many failed attempts to edit on mobile I had albeit given up.

This post is a timeline in a method I adopted to create one video, ‘The Central Park Memorial Mother and Child’.

When I say a method, I mean that as a ‘human method’  and the mobile and the app supports, and does it’s best to enhance our flawed human behaviour.

What happens in reality is how ‘life happens when you make other plans’.

Getting back to the timeline, I’m wandering the city as needed some Winter Fresh Air. That was on 7 Dec 16.

I happen upon a little footpath that leads to the memorial Garden. I’d never been there before and had no idea it had existed.

Immediately, the geometry starts to line up. Centre point being the statue itself.

I’m lucky in the still photographer inside of me has almost a sixth sense to see photographs line up in front of my eyes.

I am a fan of straight photography - thereby taking a photo that closely resembles reality.

Anyway, it took me twelve minutes to record 17 short videos. Wide shots, medium and close shots as I walked round the footpaths.

I held the Moto E mobile at eye level and stood very still. I learned this from Bill Gentile and Kurt Lancaster. I’ve also found a panning shot to be troublesome unless you get it right -- so I just avoid it.

As a tip, if you get into the habit of watching any TV Show or Movie, pay close attention to the shots they use.

Also look for the shows (like New Girl and old school Dawson’s Creek) that use a single camera setup.

Not vital for my park piece, as no people and no dialogue - just still shots of 5-11 secs and ambient sound.

That was it, I left the park and came home. From desktop did a bit of googling, and in no time found the archived black and white 1964 clip of the Mother and Child statue in production. I saved a copy under educational fair use.

And then… seven days slipped by and I did nothing with the video. I have NO REASON why I did this.

I always had the intention to make two videos, one on desktop using Vegas Movie Studio and one on Mobile using PowerDirector. Then compare the two and blog it -- best intentions in the world, but it never happened.

I opened a file on desktop in Vegas and saved it on 14 Dec 16. Left it sat there until I opened it again on 19 Dec 16, but felt tired, so had a lie down and grabbed the Moto E to check emails etc.

Then THE MAGIC HAPPENED.. I was lying on my back on the bed, relaxing with arms outstretched with Mobile in hand.

I think a lot of us live in this way. These mobiles are addictive things, walk down any street, sit in any cafe and see mobiles in hand - eyes glued to screen.

After I checked email and twitter, I was getting bored (but still tired - it was late afternoon)..

So opening up PowerDirector app is NOT really editing is it? Ofcourse not -- so I began messing around with the Central Park Memorial Gardens project.

Afterall, all the videos were already there, all I had to do was load them in time order (pretty easy) and see what happened.

What did happen was 30 mins slipped by -- almost like a game. I was tapping stuff and the Moto E and App had no freezes and no lag.

How beautiful is that!?

Even now, I am typing this blog post from my mini bluetooth keyboard into my Moto E using google docs - and oops 643 words already.

Whether we are working with words, pictures or film - having a big laptop screen stare at us (and not to mention the extended monitor too) is like ‘work’ these days.

Having a mobile or tablet is pretty relaxing. Now that quad core (and now Octa Cores) are common place, these mobiles are frightening fast -- far faster than our human brains can keep up with (in my opinion).

After adding the black and white clip and doing the voice overs (using RecForge II) I was done and saved the video as 1080p at 60fps.

I could NOT believe it, and SO stress free.

I am not saying I will be mobile video editing 100% of the time, there are many features, that ONLY a desktop video editor can perform (like frame by frame, keyframe animation, chroma key, multi timelines etc etc).

If I had my time again on this edit - I would have FORCED myself to record the video clips and get it mobile edited asap while the experience was fresh in my mind.

Just think, visit said park 2:08pm. At 2:26pm start the PowerDirector edit and pretty sure I would have 1080p uploaded to YouTube by 3pm latest.

Proof in pudding will be to bang out a few more practice pieces.

The three video playlist is below - Try it out for yourself. And remember human creativity should always outweigh ANY decision over mobile brand or operating system.

That’s one reason why I am using an entry level mobile - It JUST WORKS ..

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