Why, other than a few hardcore fans, is a film’s director the only one who likes the “Director’s Cut” better than the movie that was released to the public?
It’s hard to delete the footage you worked so hard to get, or even sometimes to eliminate scenes altogether because they don’t help the “story” along, or make the video drag. Nowadays especially, people want their videos in bite-size chunks – no one has the patience to sit and gaze at the scenes that looked really cool in real life, but now occupy a small rectangle on their computer screen.
It’s best to let someone else have a chance to chop out parts of your edited videos if you can. As painful as it can be at times. Or you can practice by taking other peoples’ videos and seeing where you’d cut them. Many videos on Vimeo allow downloading in pretty good resolution.
Someone showed me a really nice video of South India on Vimeo the other day – six minutes of beautiful scenery, perfectly timed to a piece of Indian music. And although “Joe Marshall” probably thinks I’m arrogant for having done so, I decided to see if I could take his beautiful footage and turn it into a much shorter, crisp version of his video.
The end result is a three-minute video, with no scene longer than 4-5 seconds, and I removed the pillarboxes and letterboxes (the black bars at the top and bottom of the video). I hope you like it! I have included the original for reference.
“South India” Remix from Tom on Vimeo.
South India from Joe Marshall on Vimeo.
