By Rick Broida and Derek Fung on 30 November 2007
With the imminent arrival of a new baby, your life will become a whirlwind. If you’re planning to capture the whole experience on video, plan carefully and you’ll have a priceless record of those fleeting early days to savour long after interrupted sleep and mashed bananas fade from memory.
1. Plan ahead
2. What you’ll need
3. Choose your shots
4. Capture the moments
5. Edit your footage
6. Render, view and distribute
Build the perfect baby video
Step 1: Plan ahead
Cot? Check. Nappies? Check. Digital camcorder with tripod, spare battery, plenty of storage media and video-editing software? Better double-check. Whether you’re a first-time parent or rounding out your family cricket team, it’s almost unthinkable these days to let the experience go undocumented.
To build the perfect baby video, you’ll need to do a bit of advance planning. That’s because your memory is about to take a backseat to all things baby, a development that could lead to trouble down the road. In other words, when you sit down to edit your video, you don’t want to discover that you forgot to get a shot of Grandma with the baby. Trust us, there aren’t enough Hallmark cards on the planet to undo that mistake.
Step 2: What you’ll need
Before you even get started with this project, we recommend that you have the following:
- Camcorder with plenty of storage media
- Tripod
- Video-editing software
- DVD-authoring software
- DVD burner
- A Pentium 4 or better system with at least 1GB of RAM and several gigabytes of free hard disk space
Step 3: Choose your shots
After the baby arrives, life might get just a wee bit hectic — so try to do some planning before the big day. That means building a shot list, which can be anything from a basic checklist of important people to film with the baby to something as in-depth as a storyboard for the Look Who’s Talking, uh, tribute you’re planning to film. Here are some suggestions for your shot list:
Live video and still photos
We haven’t calculated video’s exact worth, but we do know that pictures nab a cool thousand words each. When the time comes to edit your movie, you can flex your creative muscles even further by mixing live video with still photos. If you’re already filming, many camcorders nowadays will let you take a limited number of snapshots while recording.
Photos taken on a camcorder, especially those taken while filming, still pale in comparison to specialised digital camera. So, try to use a digital camera for stills whenever you can. Either way, take lots of photos.
The “before” to go with the “after”
New parents often focus so carefully on the Big Day that they forget all the stuff leading up to it: decorating the baby’s room, opening presents at the baby shower, even just getting some good shots of mum’s big belly. You might even want to play news reader, citing some of the personal and world events that are occurring as you’re getting ready for the new bundle of joy.
Coming home from the hospital
It can be downright scary to bring that first baby into the house, where you’re suddenly cut off from the help and experience of doctors and nurses. If you’re too busy helping to make the move from car to crib, have someone else film the equally joyous and panic-stricken parents. It’s priceless footage for later.
Baby’s introduction to friends and family
Make sure everybody gets a turn in front of the camera while holding or cooing at the new baby. Sure, you’ll leave some of these folks on the cutting-room floor, but you’ll also make sure no one important gets left out.
Baby’s first everything
It goes without saying that you’ll want shots of the baby’s first smile, rollover, solid food and so on. But don’t forget the potentially unpleasant stuff, such as middle-of-the-night feedings and scream-producing first baths. It’s no fun while it’s happening, but you’ll look back on it later with a smile.
A personal documentary
Every so often, put the camera on the tripod, start it rolling, then step in front of it. Talk about what the baby’s doing, how your lives have changed, what’s going on in the world, and so on. This video diary helps establish some context for all the footage you’re shooting of the bambino, while at the same time giving you a chance to be in front of the camera instead of always behind it.
Step 4: Capture the moments
Once you’ve done your prep work, it’s time to shoot — but you can’t just point your camera at the kid and hit record. You need to decide when to use a tripod and when to go handheld. You need to frame your shots so that they avoid that amateur look. And don’t forget special effects — the good old-fashioned kind made popular by a certain Mr. Burns. Learn the ins and outs of using your camcorder before an important baby moment comes along, otherwise you’ll find yourself fumbling with batteries and settings while baby takes his first steps.
Use a tripod
That shaky-camera look is fine for NYPD Blue, but it can absolutely ruin a baby video. Consider this: the little one stays pretty motionless, at least for the first few months, so your camcorder should do the same. By mounting it on a tripod, you’ll get rock-steady footage. At the same time, you’ll free yourself to perform artistic pans and zooms — or just get in front of the lens.
If you’re planning to rely on your camera’s image-stabilisation feature, don’t. Digital image stabilisation works by shifting pixels to counteract shake but this has the side-effect of softening the image. Optical and mechanical image stabilisation is preferable, as they work by moving either the lens elements or sensor to balance out shake, and therefore don’t soften your footage. Remember that stabilisation is great for making handheld footage watchable, but the step up to video shot on a tripod is like the leap from backyard cricket to a Test Match.
Remember the rule of thirds
Photographers know this rule well, but it’s just as applicable when shooting video. Imagine a noughts-and-crosses board over your viewfinder. The lines intersect in four spots. Your goal should be to have your subject at one of those intersection spots in the frame. Or, to put it another way, keep the baby out of the centre square.
Avoid digital zoom
The same rule that applies to digital cameras applies to camcorders: optical zoom, good; digital zoom, bad. Although you may have been suckered into buying a particular model because it touted some astronomical digital-zoom number (240x! 300x! 800x!), you should never use it — unless you like grainy, pixelated video. Digital zoom is actually a big fake: as you increase the zoom level, the camcorder crops further and further into the centre of the image, enlarging that cropped portion so that it fills the screen. As a result, your video looks, well, awful. Stick with your camcorder’s optical zoom (usually you can turn off digital zoom from within the camera’s menu system), which relies solely on the lens for magnification. If you need to get closer to the little ankle biter, follow the old photographer’s maxim: zoom with your feet (or in this case, your hands and knees).
Skip the special effects
Lots of digital camcorders offer sexy special effects, everything from sepia to slow-mo. These can be fun to fool around with, but we recommend using them sparingly — if at all. Better you should start with pristine colour video, then apply special effects using your editing software (a little manoeuvre the pros like to call post-production). Likewise, skip the camcorder’s autofade features; your editing software will give you far greater control over transitions, and greater variety as well.
Create on-the-fly Ken Burns effects
As noted earlier, for the first few months your baby isn’t going to do much except lie there, making for some pretty dry video. Spice things up a bit by borrowing from documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who manages to make even 100-year-old still photos exciting. His best trick? The slow zoom. Put your camcorder on a tripod, make sure the baby is well lit, and shoot some very slow zooms. You can start wide and zoom in or start close and zoom out. Add a little simultaneous panning if you really want to get fancy. Sprinkling these shots throughout your movie can add some much-needed visual diversity.
Practice in-camera editing
It’s always better to have too much footage than too little, but there’s such a thing as way too much. Shoot images that tell a story. Shoot when something interesting is happening. If you just leave the camcorder running, you’ll make the editing process more difficult because you’ll have that much more fluff to trim away. Consider what you’re filming as you’re filming it and ask yourself if it’s something you’re likely to keep. If not, turn the camcorder off.
Mix in still photos
A baby video needn’t be all video. Photos are a great way to add diversity — and to spotlight those memorable smiles, screams, nap times, and so on. Many video editors will even let you add Ken Burns-style pan and zoom effects.
Step 5: Edit your footage
There’s a reason they give out Oscars for editing. The process of separating the wheat from the chaff, the smiles from the spit-ups, can be nothing short of Herculean. Fortunately, there are tools and tips that can make the process easier:
Make it a music video
Fellini didn’t make two-hour baby movies, and neither should you. Pick a meaningful song (Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” is always in style), then edit your movie to fit it. A music video is the ideal baby video, as it doesn’t take an insane amount of time to create, it’s short enough to keep viewers interested, and it overcomes the common problem of poor audio in your recordings (as you’re replacing some or all of the audio with music).
Keep the scenes short
Whether you go the music-video route or not, don’t linger on the same shot for more than five to 10 seconds. Obviously you can exercise some creative licence here, especially if there’s a lot of action happening, but just remember that long scenes tend to make for boring movies.
Avoid fancy transitions
Editing programs such as CyberLink PowerDirector and Pinnacle Studio offer dozens, even hundreds, of fancy transitions. Pretend they’re not there and stick with basic fades and dissolves instead. If you absolutely must use the 3D barn-door pull-away, put it someplace logical, such as in between the opening credits and your first video shot. If it shows up in the middle of your movie, it’s going to look really conspicuous — and out of place.
Consider automation software
If you don’t have time to manually edit each and every frame of your movie, try a program that will do the work for you. Muvee AutoProducer is one such time-saver; it automatically assembles movie clips, still photos, and MP3/WMA files into slick, polished music videos, all in about the time it takes to read this sentence. Pinnacle Studio offers a similar kind of automation while giving you a full roster of editing and special-effects tools. Even Microsoft’s free Windows Movie Maker has an AutoMovie feature, though you can’t output the finished product to DVD as you can with the other programs.
Don’t forget to title
Throw in some descriptive text every now and then, such as “Baby’s First Birthday”. This is especially helpful if the audio quality isn’t very good.
Step 6: Render, view and distribute
Once you’ve finished channelling Francis Ford Coppola, render your video to hard-disk in the highest possible quality. This will ensure that you have a high-quality original for your archives. Now it’s time to share baby’s best, and worst, moments with all and sundry.
Invite friends and family over for a barbeque and the premiere of Baby’s First Year. For those far-flung friends, upload your clip to video streaming sites, such as YouTube. Grainy 320 x 240 Web video won’t cut it if your nearest and dearest family members are overseas. It’s probably best to burn them a DVD and mail it. Most video editors and DVD-burning software will have instructions for laying out and burning discs, including templates for the disc’s menu navigation.
Those going down the high-def path should screen Best of Baby at home in HD, but distribute it on DVD. There’s a number of reasons for this: the format wars between Blu-ray and HD DVD are still a long way from being resolved, few homes have players capable of reading either format, and both burners and writeable discs are still jaw-droppingly expensive.
Now ship those discs out to your friends and family, have a sip of coffee and get ready to start filming the next instalment of the Baby Diaries.
