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Improvising with Video Production

Oct 12, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

How to make a music video on the fly.

So there I was in the new coffee shop in Galax, Va., the opening of which was a huge event out in the country (Wi-Fi! Chai! Bagels!). The client was concerned that the opening act of the concert I was producing, fire-wielding belly dancers, had performed longer than expected—five songs instead of three. Though the act was absolutely fabulous, she was concerned that the sense of awe and danger (How do they do that?) wouldn't translate to DVD, and it was questionable how many buyers of the concert DVD would actually watch the dancers. Plus, the dancers' 20 minutes added to the 70-minute concert pushed total content on the disc to a potentially artifact-attracting 90 minutes.

Long story short, she wanted to cut some of the content. The problem was, each of the five songs featured different dance techniques and instruments—sometimes swinging lamps, sometimes burning swords, sometimes wraparound wicks. Cut a complete song or three and you lose that variety.

So, I suggested I'd pick a song and cut scenes from all five songs and piece them together into a music-video-like production. "Sounds great," she responded, and we moved on to the next point.

There was one problem, of course, that anyone who's ever produced a music video knows right away. You can't do this sort of thing on a budget, since creating a 4-minute music video can take months, especially when you're grabbing footage from (potentially) six cameras. It's also a bad idea if you need to finish the DVD in less than a day, or if you'll be leaving for a trip in five days and have 10 days of work to get done before you make the plane.

I did have a plan, however, though I'm almost embarrassed to disclose it. Kind of like admitting that you sometimes shoot with auto-exposure enabled, or (gasp!) with autofocus. Heck, I don't even share that kind of stuff with my wife.

Software to the rescue

But I knew of at least one program that does nothing but convert your raw video to a music-video-like production. Feed it the roughly 20 minutes of video and the 4-minute song, choose a template, and press the magic button. In less than 5 minutes, you have a fully edited music video that would have taken hours to produce. The go-to program in the category is muvee autoProducer, which costs $59.95 at www.muvee.com. I've used it in the past to convert raw footage of receptions and similar sequences in wedding videos I've produced (man, I'm telling all, aren't I?), but hadn't used it in a while. Best of all, there's a free 15-day trial, which was far longer than I would need.

Or so I thought, anyway. I'm firmly convinced that software programs, printers, and photocopiers can sense when you're in a real hurry—close to a panic, in fact, with blood pressure so high that your head shakes back and forth with your heart beats as you sit there waiting for something, anything, to go right. Then they crash, run out of toner, or jam right when you need them most. Since this has been happening to me for the last two months, I really wasn't surprised—it was more piling on than original insult. An affirmation like, "Yup, that's where I am right now." But enough about me.

Probably more likely, muvee just didn't like the MOV output from Apple Final Cut Pro—though it didn't care for the AVIs from Adobe Premiere Pro any better. I was working with mixed SD/HD footage edited down to SD, so I couldn't simply import the original files into muvee. Though muvee has proven reliable in the past, once it crashed on two machines (at 8 p.m.) with two different varieties of source footage, I didn't have time to diagnose the problem; it was time to move on.

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