The holiday season is upon us (and has been since August depending on the stores you may frequent) and nearly every household has a collection of family holiday videos collecting dust on a shelf or in a drawer somewhere. How do you make sure your 2010 holiday videos are something you’ll enjoy watching later?
Plan your video. To make editing easier and the final product that much better, spend a bit of time planning your video before you start. Do you want to capture the night before, what the kids are doing, visitors and family arriving at your home or the cooking of the holiday dinner? Have a rough idea in your head of where you’ll need to be and what will be taking place so the video isn’t filled with snippets of the filmmaker running around or only half-capturing special moments because too much is going on at once.
Use wide and tight shots effectively. Continued zooming in and out in home videos can result in blurry moments as your camera desperately tries to adjust itself and refocus on what’s going on. Instead, use wide shots and move closer to your subject matter to create tighter shots without going zoom-crazy.
Consider lighting. When you move from a darker area to a brighter area using a home video camera, the camera will again try to adjust itself and you will end up with bright white or very dark frames in your footage if you say, move near a very bright window. Try to open all of the curtains in the home and keep the lighting bright but balanced from room to room if you will be moving throughout the house.
Use a tripod. Don’t be the only one missing from your family videos because you were behind the camera. If the action is staying in one spot for a while (for example while cooking the holiday meal or afterwards when everyone is sitting around chatting), set up a tripod to create both a steady shot and a memory that includes yourself.
Try different perspectives. Be creative with your home video. If you are filming children for example, sit on the floor to get down to their level. For crowd shots, film from higher up to include everyone.
Updating Your Family Holiday Videos With DVD Transfer
If you are a part of the large crowd that has a library of old family holiday videos, you could consider updating them to DVDs. Video-to-DVD transfers are not expensive, and are the best way to achieve the following:
Increasing shelf space. DVDs take up considerably less space than a video cassette, and more data can be stored on a DVD than on a VHS tape. In some cases, the material from several videos can be transferred to a single DVD. Not to mention, VHS players are quickly going the way of the dinosaur and they are just another bulky piece of technology you’ll finally be able to get rid of.
Protecting your memories. Video tapes degrade both over time and each they are played. The more you play a video or the more time that passes, the more wear and tear your videos face until one day they just won’t play anymore. Video tapes are not forever, but DVDs pretty much are. DVDs also can’t be copied over, so there’s no chance of ever again accidentally taping over most of your child’s first Christmas with the Star Trek: The Next Generation series finale.
Sharing. DVDs are easy to copy in general, and when transferring video tapes to DVD you can often get as many copies of a video as you need. This means you can either send them via snail mail or upload videos for e-mailing in order to share your family holiday videos with friends and family members.