now that i have a working SD card, i’m able to shoot video again. the process of video editing, however, is all new to me. i never really understood just how much time, energy, and nuance went into video editing.

it used to be that the task of processing photos from a photo shoot were daunting, but that doesn’t even begin to compare to the sheer agony that is video processing.

though i watch a lot of tv (A LOT!), it never seemed like it was much effort to shoot some video and share it. just how hard could it be?

it turns out that just shooting video is a lot harder than one would think. learning the mechanics of how to shoot fluid video, or at least learning how to hold your camera steady enough to be acceptable was a feat if and of itself.

once you get good source material comes the excruciating task of editing what you shot. what editing? take, for example, the latest video i shot. christi had said that kyden had rolled over by himself, so i eagerly picked up my video camera to document the momentous occasion…and then he did not roll over.

what’s more, i shot about 3 minutes of video in HD of him not rolling over. this is not what we call exciting stuff by any means. still, i wanted to see if there was anything that i could salvage from these 3 minutes of video.

it turns out that 3 minutes of video is more than 600MB of data. so importing the video, editing it, and trying to do something useful with it takes up a lot of resources. what’s more interesting is that at the end of the day, i trimmed the 3+ minutes of video down to 1 minute and 23 seconds. 3 minutes doesn’t sound like a long time, but if you watched the original footage, it’ll feel like an eternity.

what’s more, kyden isn’t doing anything in the video. watching a baby that isn’t yours do nothing for 3 minutes is about as entertaining as watching paint dry, but i felt like there was still something there worth sharing in those 600MB.

and so i started my journey of snipping away at the video and trying to spruce it up in some way. what i found interesting was that it doesn’t take a whole lot of time to get bored..and that it is possible to get bored several times in as short of a time span as 3 minutes.

throw in a little background music to help keep the pace of the clip going, cut out a lot of nothing, throw in a few transitions between scenes, and you find that an hour has passed. an hour has passed whittling away 3 minutes of video to one and a half minutes. an hour! sure, i was a little slow because i’m still trying to learn the tools, but man! this video editing stuff is no joke.

and so after about an hour and half of work, i’m left with a video where kyden is doing nothing.