Logo Muuuh Nature and Wildlife Documentaries

muuuh

nature & wildlife documentaries

 - Saguenay St. Lawrence Marine Park - 2021-08-27
Sunrise over St Lawrence River - Saguenay St. Lawrence Marine Park

Video Editing Workflow

There are different formats of videos published: Collection of animal behavior clips, landscape overviews with soundscapes, animal facts with trivia and more. The initial steps though are the same

Last changed on 2024-10-21

File Transfer to Hard Disk

We use Photo Mechanic to quickly transfer media files from the camera's memory card to the hard disk. During this process, Photo Mechanic organizes the files into folders by date and renames them into their final format. Videos recorded with the Apple iPhone are exported from Apples Photos App and manually transferred to the corresponding folder. Sound files recorded the same day are manually transferred to the corresponding folder where the video clips ended up.

DaVinci Resolve

I create a new project for each field trip with consistent project settings. This project though is rarely used for editing a final video. Instead, the project serves me to have a quick overview of the footage recorded during a specific day. I also make a print screen of the thumbnails in the media folder and past it into a Apple Notes documents which has print screens of all previous field trips. This document allows me to find fast clips recorded previously when working on a project.

In spite of many clips are recorded at a higher than 24fps frame rate. The project settings of 24fps matches the frame rate of the final delivery.

Dependent on the footage collected during the field trip, I may continue with one or more of the different video formats published in my YouTube channel.

Species Documentary

A collection of footage of a particular species showing recorded across different field trips. New footage will be inserted to the existing project at the beginning. If there is significant new content, I will update the video and re-publish it.

Species Trivia

These are scripted videos with extensive voice over. Production in this format takes a week or longer. Each video in this collection is again dedicated to a particular species. It shows clips of interesting behavior along some facts and a set of 10 to 12 questions about the species with answers. This format has Voice Over in English which limits their reach. They are bundled within a podcast. If I have a recording which matches the topic of one of the question, I will update the video and re-publish it.

Soundscapes

Although the final soundscape videos are 3hrs long, creating this form of videos is less time consuming. The main purpose of publishing this format is having long videos I use as screen savers on my television.

For the video feed, I start with landscape recordings taken during the field trip. I look for a 5min or longer footage which can be looped (end matches beginning). Recorded sound of these landscape video clips are processed independently. They are analyzed for quality and trimmed to exclude artificial sounds like steps, people talking, planes flying over the park, etc.

My available hardware is limited. Rendering a 3hrs long video it takes between 2hrs to 8hrs which I run usually overnight.

DaVinci Resolve Delivery

Uploading a video, publishing it, and then noticing a minor error? A final review on a uploaded video should prevent this from happening.

Checklist

Render Settings

Although I would prefer creating 4k videos, because of hardware limitation for now all rendered videos are in HD format.

References