Learning to do some car video editing

[RichTT]

Lockdown got the better of me. I flogged a bunch of stuff on eBay and picked up a second hand Hero 5 Black to go alongside my little GoPro session that I've had for yonks. Bought some suction mounts and went out for an afternoon of mucking about with cameras on the car. Really enjoyed it, stuck a good few hours into the editing and came up with a short video that I'm reasonably happy with.

I'm sure there are a dozen seasoned folk on here who do this professionally but in doing this I've learned a few things. This isn't a car review or a road review, just a couple of minutes of video to get me doing something and learning something new.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCXZdH5bWVs

Positives:

I learned that if I do this again I will plan the shots a lot better.
Safety tethers are essential and work well
Editing and putting together a video with flow and a story is just about as hard as I thought it would be.
Colour grading is a dark art
No exterior shots / passing shots as I was by myself - hire a friend to help me

Negatives:

Mismatched audio track to the video. Next time will run the route with the front facing camera and the rear at the same time
Foam cover for the rear exhaust camera to remove wind noise as much as possible
Some camera angles didn't quite work as well as I thought they would
Ad-libbing in the car while driving is hard. I can sympathise with Chris Evans now, although something scripted would probably help
I picked a road nearby that's not very interesting as subject manner

[Fishlegs]

Not bad at all. I think the exposure is a little dark, but that might be our Abzshire weather. More car noise would be good, perhaps mixing the exhaust audio over the front cam video.

I think you've got a good eye for editing a sequence together though.

[StevieBee]

RichTT said:

Lockdown got the better of me. I flogged a bunch of stuff on eBay and picked up a second hand Hero 5 Black to go alongside my little GoPro session that I've had for yonks. Bought some suction mounts and went out for an afternoon of mucking about with cameras on the car. Really enjoyed it, stuck a good few hours into the editing and came up with a short video that I'm reasonably happy with.

I'm sure there are a dozen seasoned folk on here who do this professionally but in doing this I've learned a few things. This isn't a car review or a road review, just a couple of minutes of video to get me doing something and learning something new.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCXZdH5bWVs

Positives:

I learned that if I do this again I will plan the shots a lot better.
Safety tethers are essential and work well
Editing and putting together a video with flow and a story is just about as hard as I thought it would be.
Colour grading is a dark art
No exterior shots / passing shots as I was by myself - hire a friend to help me

Negatives:

Mismatched audio track to the video. Next time will run the route with the front facing camera and the rear at the same time
Foam cover for the rear exhaust camera to remove wind noise as much as possible
Some camera angles didn't quite work as well as I thought they would
Ad-libbing in the car while driving is hard. I can sympathise with Chris Evans now, although something scripted would probably help
I picked a road nearby that's not very interesting as subject manner

I quite like that. A couple of pointers if it helps...

Colour Grading - it is indeed a dark art but there's tons of LUTS, many free, out there that do a lot of the work for you.
Timing - if there's one thing I'd pick up on with what you've done is that it's a tad too long which means you're repeating many similar scenes.
Music - not a bad choice you've made. A little trick is to cut scenes where there's defined beat in the music - not on every beat but if the track is, say a four beat, cut on every forth, eighth or 16th beat. Enlarge the timeline and place the cut dead centre to the peak you'll see in the audio waveform.
Sound - capturing good quality sound on even prosumer kit is very difficult. Getting the sound right is probably more difficult than colour grading. So do what the big studios do and cheat - resources like Artlist have no end of sounds and sound effects that you can overlay onto your video.

In terms of story - think laterally and creatively. So instead of just a film of you getting in and driving, think about a background narrative. For example... you start in the kitchen, you pick up a note that says 'get milk'. Go outside and there's a car and a pushbike. Look at the bike, shake your head and get in the car. Shot of you buying milk, then getting back in the car but you look to the road ahead - adopt a sly, mischievous look and off you go. Condense a whole day's driving so that you arrive home at night and place the milk on the counter top but the milk has by now turned to cheese (visualised by OH dispensing cottage cheese into a mug of tea. Close shot of keys dropping into a bowl on a table, positioned to the left leaving space for credits to roll on the right.... aaaaand 'scene'!

[Jazzy Jefferson]

RichTT said:

Lockdown got the better of me. I flogged a bunch of stuff on eBay and picked up a second hand Hero 5 Black to go alongside my little GoPro session that I've had for yonks. Bought some suction mounts and went out for an afternoon of mucking about with cameras on the car. Really enjoyed it, stuck a good few hours into the editing and came up with a short video that I'm reasonably happy with.

I'm sure there are a dozen seasoned folk on here who do this professionally but in doing this I've learned a few things. This isn't a car review or a road review, just a couple of minutes of video to get me doing something and learning something new.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCXZdH5bWVs

Positives:

I learned that if I do this again I will plan the shots a lot better.
Safety tethers are essential and work well
Editing and putting together a video with flow and a story is just about as hard as I thought it would be.
Colour grading is a dark art
No exterior shots / passing shots as I was by myself - hire a friend to help me

Negatives:

Mismatched audio track to the video. Next time will run the route with the front facing camera and the rear at the same time
Foam cover for the rear exhaust camera to remove wind noise as much as possible
Some camera angles didn't quite work as well as I thought they would
Ad-libbing in the car while driving is hard. I can sympathise with Chris Evans now, although something scripted would probably help
I picked a road nearby that's not very interesting as subject manner

Great video, I like it.. I like videos that just focus on the car and driving. Too much emphasis is put on talking, reviewing, I just want to see cars being driven.
Which is sort of my inspiration and It's something I've gotten into recently. I've been picking it up as I go along but have a strong photography/audio background which I think has helped understand the technical side of things but putting it into practice is a different matter.

I agree with you on the points you raise as I also ran into similar issues.

Not sure if you've a separate mic/audio recorder, but for me this was a must. It requires more work in editing but I think it pays off. It also means you can layer audio to make it sound like you're driving flat out, but aren't. It may help smooth out the audio as well, relying on cameras in built mics just doesn't cut it for me. And it needn't be expensive.

Any car stuff I've done has been done in the late/early hours making lighting a nightmare but around here it's too busy in the day time. Your footage looks a little grainy for the light conditions.. was it dusk/sunset?

My latest video if you're interested - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCGZmNHi9aE

What started as a single DSLR and tripod has now grown to DSLR gimbals, Handheld Gimbals, Gopros etc. It adds up quick. It's all good fun though

Edited by Jazzy Jefferson on Friday 19th March 14:28

[RichTT]

Fishlegs said:

Not bad at all. I think the exposure is a little dark, but that might be our Abzshire weather. More car noise would be good, perhaps mixing the exhaust audio over the front cam video.

I think you've got a good eye for editing a sequence together though.

Combination of an overcast day and me trying to be all Top Geary and over saturate and add vignettes. More car noise in the next one, check.

StevieBee said:

I quite like that. A couple of pointers if it helps...

Colour Grading - it is indeed a dark art but there's tons of LUTS, many free, out there that do a lot of the work for you.
Timing - if there's one thing I'd pick up on with what you've done is that it's a tad too long which means you're repeating many similar scenes.
Music - not a bad choice you've made. A little trick is to cut scenes where there's defined beat in the music - not on every beat but if the track is, say a four beat, cut on every forth, eighth or 16th beat. Enlarge the timeline and place the cut dead centre to the peak you'll see in the audio waveform.
Sound - capturing good quality sound on even prosumer kit is very difficult. Getting the sound right is probably more difficult than colour grading. So do what the big studios do and cheat - resources like Artlist have no end of sounds and sound effects that you can overlay onto your video.

In terms of story - think laterally and creatively. So instead of just a film of you getting in and driving, think about a background narrative. For example... you start in the kitchen, you pick up a note that says 'get milk'. Go outside and there's a car and a pushbike. Look at the bike, shake your head and get in the car. Shot of you buying milk, then getting back in the car but you look to the road ahead - adopt a sly, mischievous look and off you go. Condense a whole day's driving so that you arrive home at night and place the milk on the counter top but the milk has by now turned to cheese (visualised by OH dispensing cottage cheese into a mug of tea. Close shot of keys dropping into a bowl on a table, positioned to the left leaving space for credits to roll on the right.... aaaaand 'scene'!

I'll try and find some LUTS that work for me. I followed long with a pro on a youtube video and sort of just copied what he was doing as far as saturation and colour grading to get a feel for what I was doing. But so much of its dependant on your source footage.

I did try to match the beats of the music for the second half of the video and it worked out ok. I'm just using some royalty free background music.

The external mic on the GoPro session aimed at the exhausts wasn't bad, just wasn't done on the same run as the front camera, which it definitely will next time and also have a pop filter material cover for it to reduce the wind noise.

Love the idea of a story to go along with it. Thanks for that.

Jazzy Jefferson said:

Great video, I like it.. I like videos that just focus on the car and driving. Too much emphasis is put on talking, reviewing, I just want to see cars being driven.
Which is sort of my inspiration and It's something I've gotten into recently. I've been picking it up as I go along but have a strong photography/audio background which I think has helped understand the technical side of things but putting it into practice is a different matter.

I agree with you on the points you raise as I also ran into similar issues.

Not sure if you've a separate mic/audio recorder, but for me this was a must. It requires more work in editing but I think it pays off. It also means you can layer audio to make it sound like you're driving flat out, but aren't. It may help smooth out the audio as well, relying on cameras in built mics just doesn't cut it for me. And it needn't be expensive.

Any car stuff I've done has been done in the late/early hours making lighting a nightmare but around here it's too busy in the day time. Your footage looks a little grainy for the light conditions.. was it dusk/sunset?

My latest video if you're interested - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCGZmNHi9aE

What started as a single DSLR and tripod has now grown to DSLR gimbals, Handheld Gimbals, Gopros etc. It adds up quick. It's all good fun though

Edited by Jazzy Jefferson on Friday 19th March 14:28

I tried to do some talking / chatting whilst i was driving but I hadn't scripted anything and to be honest, didn't have anything interesting to say!

I bought an external rode mic for the go-pro but the cable is very short. Might have to source a 3.5mm extension and perhaps run that at the back of the car.

As far as the footage goes, it was shot 1080p and was nice and smooth in the editor but I don't know if it's the post processing or the Youtube compression that's adding the noise to the video.

I'm already thinking about another gopro (or two!) so I can do the footage all in one take!

[SCEtoAUX]

That's a fine effort.

I would break it up a little with some dashboad shots, gearchange shots and as you have noted, some exterior shots. It's a little long too.

As to an overall look, I assume you can do an adjustment layer in DaVinci like you can in premier. In which case you should get aim to match all of your footage for levels and colour balance, then throw a colour correct over the top on the adjustment layer.

[StevieBee]

RichTT said:

The external mic on the GoPro session aimed at the exhausts wasn't bad, just wasn't done on the same run as the front camera, which it definitely will next time and also have a pop filter material cover for it to reduce the wind noise.

There's a company called Crumple Pop that make audio plug-ins for NLEs. There's a Wind Remover one which I've not used but if its as good as their de-noise and echo remover ones will be well worth the money.

Mics make a difference too. I was and still am a fan of Rode gear but recently used some Sennheiser ones and the difference was remarkable.

[RichTT]

StevieBee said:

There's a company called Crumple Pop that make audio plug-ins for NLEs. There's a Wind Remover one which I've not used but if its as good as their de-noise and echo remover ones will be well worth the money.

Mics make a difference too. I was and still am a fan of Rode gear but recently used some Sennheiser ones and the difference was remarkable.

This lot? https://fxfactory.com/products/crumplepop/

Crikey, not cheap. I was looking at it all as a bundle for 99 dollaridoos and thought, yeah that's not bad. No, it's per plugin!

[RichTT]

SCEtoAUX said:

That's a fine effort.

I would break it up a little with some dashboad shots, gearchange shots and as you have noted, some exterior shots. It's a little long too.

As to an overall look, I assume you can do an adjustment layer in DaVinci like you can in premier. In which case you should get aim to match all of your footage for levels and colour balance, then throw a colour correct over the top on the adjustment layer.

Thanks, I've been looking at some journo shots with a bit more of an analytical eye for shots they do.

[singlecoil]

I would have liked some voiceover. Whenever I go to watch a video and the music starts I know it's going to be a video with no emotional content. Because of that, although it was not a long video, it got boring 2/3 of the way through

Just like everything else posted on PH, that was my opinion and I daresay others will disagree. The editing was fine, BTW.

[Simpo Two]

The amateur way to make video is to hose off lots of footage, cobble it all together, then think about what to do about sound.

The professional way is to script or storyboard every shot, with the sound planned in, shoot every shot as required, then build what you imagined when you did the script. Lay the audio down first (music and/or VO) then edit the video to it. Sounds odd but it's much easier to lengthen or shorten video clips than it is music or VO. The music will also set the pace. Choose suitable effects/transitions. Grading is just trendy sauce on top and too much gets rather tiresome after a while.

[RichTT]

singlecoil said:

I would have liked some voiceover. Whenever I go to watch a video and the music starts I know it's going to be a video with no emotional content. Because of that, although it was not a long video, it got boring 2/3 of the way through

Just like everything else posted on PH, that was my opinion and I daresay others will disagree. The editing was fine, BTW.

No, appreciate the feedback. Two opposing views in the space of a few posts.

Simpo Two said:

The amateur way to make video is to hose off lots of footage, cobble it all together, then think about what to do about sound.

The professional way is to script or storyboard every shot, with the sound planned in, shoot every shot as required, then build what you imagined when you did the script. Lay the audio down first (music and/or VO) then edit the video to it. Sounds odd but it's much easier to lengthen or shorten video clips than it is music or VO. The music will also set the pace. Choose suitable effects/transitions. Grading is just trendy sauce on top and too much gets rather tiresome after a while.

Yeah, been watching a bunch of professionals and have a much better idea now of how to plan a video out rather than, as you said, go film a bunch and then stick it to a soundtrack,

[Simpo Two]

RichTT said:

Yeah, been watching a bunch of professionals and have a much better idea now of how to plan a video out rather than, as you said, go film a bunch and then stick it to a soundtrack,

You'll get better every time. I would try to develop your own style rather than just copying tutorials if possible. Video has so many more dimensions than stills.

When I did this I always started with the music. I listened to loads until a piece seemed just right, then visual ideas formed around that. I didn't do a storyboard as I'm not an artist, but would write down each shot I imagined and pieced them together in my head before filming started. Shorthand helps, eg GV general view, c/u close up, pan L-R, tilt up, pull back etc... where camera movement is involved you also have to consider the speed of that movement. A good trick is to take several shots at different speeds (eg slow pan, medium pan, fast pan, pan the other way) then you can pick the one that looks best or which fits the music best at the edit.

One beginner's trap is to use too many zooms. Pull backs are much easier on the eye.

You can do drive-by shots with a tripod, just not pans. Enjoy summer practicing

[singlecoil]

RichTT said:

singlecoil said:

I would have liked some voiceover. Whenever I go to watch a video and the music starts I know it's going to be a video with no emotional content. Because of that, although it was not a long video, it got boring 2/3 of the way through

Just like everything else posted on PH, that was my opinion and I daresay others will disagree. The editing was fine, BTW.

No, appreciate the feedback. Two opposing views in the space of a few posts.

The direction you go in now will (or at least should) depend entirely on what it is you hope to achieve. Do you want people to watch and enjoy your videos? Assuming you do then do you want lots of people to watch them? Is lots better than a few? If the answer to any of these is no then don't bother with the voiceover. If all of them are yes then consider how many successful YouTube videos of that type have no talking. I think you will find that nearly all the successful stuff involves talking, ideally by the driver as it's actually happening, or at least pre or post recorded VO. As Simpo points out, recording the VO before editing the video is much easier.

[SCEtoAUX]

My best buy over the last year has been a gimbal, which when combined with my Z6 really is a nice bit of kit and opens up some great shots.

This is the gimbal I bought:

https://www.lencarta.com/feiyutech-ak2000-professi...

The Z6 has stabilisation built in, then I whack a stabilied lens, and then of course the gimbal gives yet another level of smoothness.

Not much use when you're driving, but for static shots around the car you'll be in a world of possibilities.

Kit these days is incredible, and just as a bit of an aside, I used to be a professional video editor and I will always remember the first time I encountered high definition TV. It was at a trade show somewhere and the system used three of these to record or play back on HD signal.



An Ampex VPR2, those were the days...

[RichTT]

Hah, yes how times have moved on. I bought a second hand DJI phone gimbal thing for doing handheld stuff round the car but still getting to grips with it.

Went out again for a quick shoot. Didn't have a chance to plan too much ahead of time so it was a bit impromptu and understand how much I need to get more establishing shots not just of the car, and also to see if I can get some exterior shooting done as well.

This went through a few edits and I've learned a lot doing it as well. Appreciate all the comments so far.

https://youtu.be/v8AFgvTcXbc

[singlecoil]

RichTT said:

This went through a few edits and I've learned a lot doing it as well. Appreciate all the comments so far.

https://youtu.be/v8AFgvTcXbc

We don't yet know what you have in mind for the videos, so that means that any comments we make have to be made without any context. It may well be that you are aiming to produce something that you yourself like, in which case only you can judge whether you've achieved that or not.

On a purely technical note, you need to match the colour and exposure of the two cameras, and even between shots from the same camera. You won't find a better app for doing that than Davinci Resolve, and what's more, it's free.

[Strudul]

[RichTT]

singlecoil said:

We don't yet know what you have in mind for the videos, so that means that any comments we make have to be made without any context. It may well be that you are aiming to produce something that you yourself like, in which case only you can judge whether you've achieved that or not.

On a purely technical note, you need to match the colour and exposure of the two cameras, and even between shots from the same camera. You won't find a better app for doing that than Davinci Resolve, and what's more, it's free.

Thanks, that's what I'm using. Takes time learning it all though no matter how many tutorials you watch.

It's really just for me and some friends. Not looking at changing career or making money doing it!

[RichTT]

Strudul said:

Had a good chuckle at that.