Snake Farm I

I recaptured the video footage from the Snake Farm (which isn't actually a farm - it's more like a small zoo) using the FireWire this time instead of USB. What a difference - Vegas Movie Studio imports the video and splits each take into its own file on the fly, so I don't have to go through manually this time. I'm hoping it fixes the audio/video sync problem that the USB caused too.

So now I have an empty project with all the media clips ready - it took me three or four days to get to this point with the Reptile Expo movie.

I'm stepping back a bit while I think about what to do this time. In the reptile expo I got about 45 minutes of raw footage which rendered down to a 15-minute documentary by the time I'd trimmed out footage that was unusable because of bad camerawork. I hope to get better with practice, but for now I'm guessing that on average I get one minute of usable footage for every three minutes of raw material. I got about 15 minutes at the Snake Farm so I'm guessing my end result is going to be about 5 minutes long - hardly what I'd call a documentary. So what I have in mind is to pull a few seconds footage of each animal, synchronize the cuts with the background music beat and just create a kind of slideshow without narration.

I also have an idea for a map at the end to show where the farm is - to do that I'll start with a still of a map then rotate it and zoom in simultaneously to a certain point, then freeze it and add a text overlay showing how to find the place.

I'm really not happy with the way vidiLife messed with my video so I'm looking at another couple of places to host the files - YouTube.com and PutFile.com have been recommended and the first one looks pretty good (I haven't looked at PutFile yet).