Sunday, June 14, 2015

Intro Hand Tools Filming Complete

Whew! I finished filming for my Popular Woodworking University course Intro To Hand Tools today. This has been an enormous undertaking, almost 3 months of continuous work.

The final tally of video segments comes in at 56 (that includes topics that required splitting into multiple parts due to length). They range in length from 2 to 20 minutes. So far the total edited content is over 7 hours. The remaining parts to be edited will probably add another 2 hours.

Every minute of final edited video is 10-15 minutes of work. For each segment, there's material preparation, setting up each shot, doing the work while the camera rolls, talking into the camera (requiring multiple takes as I try to get out what I want to say), reviewing the shot to see if I need to redo it, scene selection when importing the video to weed out the bad takes, editing the scenes into a coherent smooth presentation, reviewing the final edit, generating the video, and uploading it.

The last two steps are just my Mac humming to itself, so I can do other things, but all the rest has taken up all my free time. Hence no time for blogging. I've done most of the video editing on the hour-long train ride back and forth to work.

But I have to say the results are very satisfying. I've covered lots of details. I tried to capture everything from multiple camera angles with long, medium, and close shots.

And of course I covered multiple methods when I was aware of them. Because there's more than one way to get any job done!

If you haven't seen them, check out the sample free course segment and my silent trade show trailer that I'll have running when I do live demos. The first is an example of an individual segment, and the second shows snippets from all the segments.

Note that Popular Woodworking University provides registered students permanent read-only access to courses after they end. That means you can watch the videos any time after the course end date, but you won’t be able to ask questions or use the discussions after that.