Videos

I make the occasional music video when the mood's upon me. Nobody watches them really; it's safe to say most of them get less than ten views. I'll be the first to admit they are possibly not the most interesting videos around. They aren't fast paced with lots of interesting visual cuts and fancy effects. There's a simple reason for this.

The thing is up to recently I only had Windows Movie Maker, which came with the laptop. It's okay for basic stuff but not much use if you want to do anything fancy. It possibly doesn't help that I don't have much skill with these things.

About a month ago I got Shotcut. I was looking for a good, free video editor and so trawled the usual forums and sites, read the reviews and finally settled for Shotcut on the basis that people said it was simple to use (always a bonus) and you could do some fun stuff with it. That's the baby, I thought. Fun stuff! Effects! So I downloaded it.

My laptop doesn't like Shotcut.

It takes an age to load. Once it's loaded it's easier enough to import videos and muck around with them, although not as easy as some reviews stated. But it's glitchy and stutters and splutters and doesn't play the videos smoothly, which isn't helpful. I may just uninstall it.

You see, I have Ideas. Yes, not just ideas but Ideas. I have in mind the sort of videos I want to make but of course you need money to achieve this. I'm not talking Ridley Scott level of course. But I have these visual images in my mind which would go well with certain tracks I've composed over the year.

But since I cannot afford the right sort of equipment to realise those Ideas I'll have to make do with what I can do, which is not much. I've uploaded four videos in the last four weeks where I've been trying different things. The results may not look much different to viewers but it's all about exploring different options. The conclusion is there isn't many options with Movie Maker.

It's not just a question of having half-decent software. The camera is quite important too. Obviously. At the moment I've only got the crappy iPhone camera and that has serious limitations, especially at night. It really isn't good enough.

A few months ago a friend told me he was going to get a GoPro camera, well not an actual GoPro because he couldn't afford one but one of the cheaper options. After a few weeks of using it he said he was selling it. When asked why he said he just couldn't get the thing to talk to his computer no matter what he tried. He's decided he's going to save up for the proper thing.

I've talked to people and they say "Oh, you need this, that and the other. This stuff is cheap. It's only £250, £145, £500," etc. Only! Ha ha. If I'm ever in the enviable position to be able to fork out that sort of money I will. But until that time my videos will remain a little unfulfilled.

I need to get more creative in my approach. Which does mean more videos exploring what I can do. I'd love to do tracking shots, for instance, but holding the iPhone doesn't work well - my hand shakes too much and the phone is too light so it picks up on footfalls etc, which is fine if I want to make a found footage style video, but I don't.

What I want is to be able to do a lovely slow track down a corridor or through a forest, a smooth gliding motion (which you'd get from a steadycam). That sort of thing.

Another thing I'd love to do is have two videos overlaying each other so they both play and you can see the images of both (I can't remember what this is called). Unfortunately Movie Maker doesn't do that. I've tried in Shotcut as well but that doesn't seem to do it either, at least not that I can find. You'd think this was a basic effect but no, apparently not.

I'm sure there's probably additional software that can be downloaded to do this. I'll have to have a rummage around to see what information I can find.

Maybe I'm just being too ambitious with my ideas. I look at friends videos and I think wow, how'd they do that? Visually they're more interesting to watch than mine. That's what I want my videos to be, visually interesting to watch. Not necessarily full of effects or whizz-bangs but engaging - so the visuals tell a story as well instead of being rather flat and static, which they are at the moment.

Definitely need to think deeply about this.

If you want to watch my videos, they can be found here: my YouTube page.