A Day at Jones Beach and my first video with filmora

This is my first foray in to the relm of video and I was blown away at how easy it was for me to create this video with Filmora. I discovered Filmora while I was researching and watching videos on You Tube. An advertisement about making video’s popped up and it immediately caught my attention. I watched it and honestly found it hard to believe that there was software out there that made something as complicated as film editing this easy and intuitive. My mind was officially blown. Truly, the Filmora app is so intuitive that I would venture to say almost anyone could make a video using this application.

Remember how I said a few weeks ago that if I wanted to learn Final Cut Pro that I would not be able to learn via a tutorial in You Tube? Well with Filmora I can teach myself via a tutorial on You Tube and that is exactly what I did.

Film is a horizontal format so if you hold it vertically you will have to zoom in to avoid black bars on the side, but then this crops in to the image and background which of course will not look as cinematic

I shot this footage last weekend when my extended family was visiting from Paris. I shot it on my phone on the spur of the moment and really did not have anything planned out. The biggest mistake I made was holding the phone vertically instead of horizontally.

Grrrrr, I realized my mistake when I went to edit, but for moving film you should always hold the camera horizontal or in landscape. Film is a horizontal format so if you hold it vertically you will have to zoom in to avoid black bars on the side, but then this crops in to the image and background which of course will not look as cinematic. Oh well now I know for next time.

And next time I will also be shooting on my camera and not on my phone. I still plan on purchasing the Sony Alpha 5100 mirror less camera which is compact and light but features interchangeable lenses that make it on par with todays better DSLR’s but much more portable. I am super excited to start shooting and editing now, no longer put off by the thought of endless hours of tedious production work. So, what do you think? Does this encourage you to try your hand at making videos?

**And just updating things here a bit. Making the video itself was wonderfully easy. However I ran in to multiple issues when it came to exporting and having the video play on multiple browsers. I tried exporting the video and uploading directly ( IE: not to You Tube) and when I did this it worked perfectly on Safari. But that was it. With Chrome the video would play and the audio could be heard but no visuals. With Fire Fox the video would not play at all, I got the error message “error accessing this resource”. I did a little research and found a link where some described the exact problem I was having. However no solution.

So I wrote to tech support. And this is where Wonder Share like every other technology company fails…their tech support was not particularly helpful.  And as usual in these cases if you can not figure out things on your own you will not find a solution from them.

I will at some point do a more extensive post on Filmora. They did help with one very easy issue. At one point the screen was just black and this was when I was still editing it in Filmora . Everything played but no visuals. So I wrote to tech support and they let me know I had inadvertently clicked the “hide” button which is very easy to do. However in my efforts to figure out why the visuals were not playing things got moved around and I could get them back to where they had been originally. Luckily the video I had already successfully exported as an MP4 (the one that would only work in Safari) did work in You Tube. I didn’t think it would but it did. Whew. That was exhausting.

So making videos for You Tube and Vimeo in Filmora works perfectly, but if you need to embed or upload videos directly with out going through You Tube or Vimeo it is decidedly more challenging…