A whole other world.

Because it always felt intimidating, I never got into video editing. Every once in a while, I’d pull out an old 720p video recorder we picked up on Woot! back in 2010 and film something. A backpacking trip to Ancient Lakes. Around our house.  K and I used it to film our honeymoon in New Zealand, for which we had J ultimately edit the footage for us. Thinking of editing and learning to use an NLE (Non-Linear Editor) was, yeah, intimidating.

But first being intimidated and then going for it helps me grow, creatively and otherwise. Like learning to ski when I was thirty-five. For video, it was time. 

Earlier this year, with my Canon R6 and a slew of lenses, I started shooting video. For real. I practiced piloting my drone. I picked up a used gimbal from a guy in town. J gave me the mic that Woolley had bought him for a potential project that never panned out. A VND (variable neutral density) filter rounded out my kit, enabling me to get wide aperture footage during the day. 

Maybe not surprisingly, my three decades of taking photographs certainly played into the ease of shooting and framing video. The intimidation of seeing the bigger picture, the full story, dissolved as I simply did the thing: I took more and more footage. I practiced with the camera settings. For what I’ve critiqued about the R6’s image color compared to my much older original 5D, the R6 makes up for in the video department by allowing me to shoot in C-log 3 (Canon’s newest gamma curve that allows the greatest amount of flexibility when color grading the footage). DJI has its own log curve that I use when filming with the Mavic 2 Pro. So when J was out last month, I wanted to do a video project with him: capture footage of him mountain biking.

It’d be a test of skill, for sure. Certainly with piloting the drone while filming, which is something I need to continue honing. I wanted to mix smooth, cinematic footage from the drone with handheld, B-roll type clips from the Canon. So for a couple of afternoons, we headed out to the foothills. Here then is my first stab at filming and editing a video. It’s meant to capture the beauty and fun of mountain biking here in our little town of Wenatchee…

It all began with the music. I feel I’ve read and I certainly believe that the music comes first. Find a piece of music for video and craft the footage and story around the music. It’s what we did for our honeymoon video, all built around the song Free At Dawn by the band Small Black. For this project, I immediately knew I wanted to use Tinlicker’s In Your Eyes. The trouble was that song is over five minutes long. That’s a bit much for some clips of J mountain biking. So I brought the song into Audition and cut it up.

I’d never used Audition before, but I've used Apple’s Logic Pro. It wasn’t difficult to figure out Adobe’s interface and get the song down to a more manageable length while making sure what I kept fit the feel for the video I wanted to make. 

Speaking of never using Audition, more importantly I had never used Premiere Pro. A while back, J gave me a quick tutorial during one of his visits. I’m not sure how much I remembered from that. Thankfully, the thing going for me was I have a lot of experience using various other Adobe tools. Part of their benefit is keeping their software ecosystem consistent between apps. That said, Premiere is certainly on the learning curve level of Photoshop, if not steeper. Hence, the intimidation factor. 

But there is so much information being shared out there it wasn’t that difficult to dive in. Honestly, it felt good to be learning something new. To be challenged in a way I haven’t been in a while. In relatively quick order, I had built a pretty decent sequence and dabbled in the world of color grading motion. Talk about fascinating! The beauty of filming in a log curve is the similarity to capturing still images in a raw format. Sure, I found a grade I like for this footage but, like raw stills, I can go back and completely change it. I can use this sequence to regrade and regrade again while I continue learning how to use the Lumetri scopes and all the complexities of establishing a color grade. The kind of thing I do in my sleep with photography now presents a unique challenge I’m definitely enjoying.

I already have another project I filmed throughout the summer that I’ve started to edit. I need to keep practicing piloting my drone. I need to get more familiar with using the gimbal for when my vision (or a client's) calls for a steadier look. I need to keep taking footage, practicing focus and exposure. Both are less forgiving in video, even with a log curve. As critically, I need to keep diving deeper and deeper into Premiere, to get to a place where I’m as familiar with it as I am with Photoshop, Lightroom, or InDesign. The good news? It’s incredibly exciting. Turns out working with video is really, really fun.