Today I started playing around a bit with the Lightworks software. I think with a little more play I will be able to quickly get up and running. It has a really nice setup with lots of “rooms” and “bins” that will allow me to work on pieces of my screenplay at a time. I’ll be able to work through each video and cut pieces out, label them, and store them for later use, or immediately drop them into a segment if I want. All of that from a few minutes this evening. Now I just need to learn how to add pictures and voiceovers, and I’ll be off and running.
I also started work on converting videos. The videos that were taken with my tablet are in the .3gp format, and even Lightworks doesn’t want to open it. I am using Any Video Converter to convert these to the same .mp4 format that my phone uses. In addition, some of the videos from my phone are using a different fps (frames per second) rate, and Lightworks doesn’t want to mix fps rates in a single project. So my next conversion will be to get all of those files at the same 29.97 or 30 fps.
I had an idea for capturing better video than my tablet over longer time periods: use a laptop. (Although a webcam attached to the main dining room computer would be even better, I don’t have one.) I can set up a laptop to record and just leave it running all day. I can do this again in the living room, and at Foster, and during a Beer Night party. Then I can catch more of those behaviors that are so important but too fleeting to capture. If I can run constant video for a week, I should be able to catch everything. Then I can just fill it out with the interviews.
The tedious part is going to be running through the hours and hours of those videos to pull out the important bits. I haven’t yet figured out how to fast-forward through these things so I can do this more quickly. There must be a way to do that either in Lightworks or something else.