I had a lot of fun making it, and actually found I didn't fit everything in I had planned in my outline. Read on if you want some behind the scenes info on actually making one of these.
I started by opening my Lightroom Catalog, where all my wedding photos are held. More than 11,000 with the keyword "wedding". I floated through the entire 11,000 in about 2-3 hours of time giving a particular flag to each photo I wanted to show in the video.
I walked away with 285. Some of the photos were not touched in the catalog in a few years, so I did a process update to everything and a quick retouch if it needed. Exported at a large resolution. I was planning my video at 1080p resolution for maximum image quality, plus a little bit extra for the ability to zoom in for closer looks.
Now, before we go into FCPX, I will outline what I did there before I started sorting photos. Chose my music first as I usually do. I used free music archive this time, and found some great stuff, all instrumental by Josh Woodward. Wedding video perfect stuff. I can't have popular, and rights-managed music on a video I want to play across all platforms (just for the record - and well, you can, but its a lot of trouble to figure out which songs will work everywhere).
Lay the music down, my little graphic at the start, music credits at the end. Double check my FCPX preferences for this project, top left corner, I want automatic photo duration to be 3 seconds. Everything same, and no mucking about. I also changed transition duration to be 0:15. Not too long not too short. I like to change these per project, it keeps me moving fast on repeating actions like those.
On a lined sheet of paper, with a pen (!) I had written a bunch of captions, or caption ideas I wanted to work through over the course of the video. I put these titles over top of the music and the flourishing generator I used in the background giving some time between each title to show relevant photos.
Had everything lined up, shortened a couple photos to fit a few more into some spots, and lengthened some large ones, that had a lot of lateral motion in them (the group portraits panning across). Finished that up, gave a few transitions at some points I thought needed them. Final tweaks, and that was it. Finished in my 8 hour work day. Also a large chunk of time goes to watching, and rewatching to see effects, etc.
Voila, my video portfolio creation process.
Have fun with your own, and I hope someone out there appreciates the lengthy description and makes some use of it!
C Gardiner Photography | Promote Your Page Too