Violinist iPhone Promo Video
This is a situation where the client had a few videos that were shot by someone attending an event where he was performing as a strolling violinist. He wanted to include the videos on his website to demonstrate himself “in action.” His first problem was the videos were shot in .MOV format which is difficult to embed in his website and share on the Internet. So he asked if I could help. This was a relatively simple matter of converting the files to MP4 which is basically the standard format for the web.
The second issue was that the videos were shot vertically rather than horizontally – – a rookie mistake that makes the videos more challenging to share on youtube and other popular sites as they are designed best accommodate video shot in a horizontal configuration, more like we are used to seeing on TV or at a movie.
The third issue was that the overall quality was pretty “marginal” as the lighting was bad, there was a lot of background sound and the camera operator was moving around rather erratically. So you will see below how I solved some of these issues in order to provide a usable video that was easier for a prospective client to view and get a “taste” of the violinist’s style and how he performs at an event.
After converting the “raw” video to MP4 I edited them into shorter segments of each song, doing my best to eliminate any audio distractions or erratic camera movement. I also used a few “still” shots to cover some erratic video segments that were impossible to edit out without ruining the audio musical phrase. Because the video was dark I thought I would additionally insert the titles of each of the tunes. I anticipated that there would be people who might say, “What’s the name of that tune?” and it also serves to break-up the action so that it is not just one “log” minute-and-a-half of basically the same shot.
I then prepared a graphic template with a 16:9 horizontal aspect ratio so that the final video will fit more conventionally into a youtube or other video player. Inside that template I inserted a graphic of a smartphone then inserted the playable video into the smartphone image. This way when the video plays it gives the illusion of the video playing on the smartphone allowing me to use the vertical video in a way that makes visual sense. In addition since we are showing the viewer that this is essentially a “smartphone” video shot on-the-fly we subliminally reduce their expectation as to the video quality. In other words we are visually saying, “Hey look at this iPhone video.”
So this is just one way we can help to take any random or extemporaneous video you might have and make it usable for your promotional or social media purposes.
See more examples of how we have used this technique here.
