After shooting all the still photos for my newest egg sculpture, I goofed around with shooting some video using my old MotoX phone. All the footage came out way too dark, and with jumpy random frames (I guess from autofocus trying to do its thing). I didn’t think it was salvageable. But by using a powerful video editing application called DaVinci Resolve I was able to improve the lighting & contrast, and remove individual jumpy frames, to the point that I was able to use the footage to make the above video. It also allowed me to compress the music duration from 66 seconds to just under 60 seconds (for Instagram’s one minute limit) without changing the pitch.
Yes my little video is far from perfect, but I enjoyed the process, and am reasonably happy with the way it turned out—considering my lack of experience and equipment!
I appreciate that the makers of DaVinci Resolve, Blackmagic Design, offer a free version of it online that does everything 99.9% of us would ever conceivably need to do…in their words: “Revolutionary tools for editing, visual effects, motion graphics, color correction and audio post production, all in a single application!”
I also appreciate the YouTube music library where musicians post music for others to use for video soundtracks. That’s where I discovered Kevin MacLeod’s short composition that was just what I was looking for:
Comfortable Mystery 3 – Film Noire by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100536
Artist: http://incompetech.com/
I tried to coordinate the video editing with the phrasing of the music where possible.
It helped to watch some DaVinci Resolve tutorials on YouTube and/or query Google to find answers to specific questions along the way. Hint: use .mp4 format for posting to Instagram! It’s different than the .mov format for YouTube.