Video Making for Fun and Profit.

In My Humble Opinion
1

For the past year, I have been making music videos to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I taught myself how to use Adobe Premiere, and while I’m no where near to being a professional grade editor, I know my way around the program. I’ve spent a lot of time working on this hobby, and it’s all it’s ever been. Just a hobby. But now I need to make some extra money for crazy things like food.

I would like to actually use these skills I’ve acquired to make money.
What I want to do is edit people’s home movies to music and make vids for them. Maybe they give me an hour’s worth of footage, and I edit that down to 3 music videos. Something like that. (To music of either their choice or mine)
I think it could work. The problem is, I have no idea where to start.

The first problem is getting their home movies onto my HD so I can work with them. What type of equipment would I need for that? I’m completely ignorant about that sort of thing. Someone has mentioned a firewire to me, but I don’ t know what that is. Also, not all video cameras are digital, they may give me VHS tapes. Would that require a capture card? Probably. I don’t know how much I can invest into this, though. Could I just save the final result on a CD for them, or would I have to transfer it to VHS? I simply cannot afford a DVD burner, so that’s right out.

Ok, now say I get all the necessary equipment. How/Where would I advertise? What should my ad say? Where should I put it?
If I get those two things taken care of, what would be a reasonable amount to charge?

ANd the final question, is this viable? I think it is, but I don’t have much real world experience, and I don’t know if this is necessary a good idea. I don’ tknow how much of a demand there is for this.

I would really appreciate any help that you guys can offer. I think if this works out, it can be a great thing, but I don’t even know where to start.

2

If don’t have any money to invest, I don’t think this particular idea is going to work out. It’s a shame, because editing is so much fun.

In order to capture stuff on to your hard drive, you need some way of playing what you’ve got (a deck or a camera) that can be routed to either a capture card or a firewire port. A firewire port is just a really fast way of getting information from your camera or deck to your computer. Newer cameras come with firewire built in, and it is easy and fairly cheap to add a firewire port to your computer . The bad thing is that there are just too many home video formats for you to able to get playback devices for them all. You’d have to be able to deal with Digital 8, Hi8, MiniDV, DV Cam, VHS and who knows what else.

To do MiniDV, you’ll probably want to get a cheap miniDV camera (decks are pretty pricey) with firewire output and a firewire port for your computer. But that is pretty expensive and you’re correct that a lot of people will have VHS tapes.

If you want to limit what you do to VHS, you could get a capture card (which is fairly cheap) which will allow you to hook up your computer to your VCR. You can use that to both capture and record on to VHS. If you’ve figured out how to use Premiere on your own, figureing out how to capture should be pretty easy. Beware that good quality video files are huge, and you might need a bigger hard drive.

Finally, people are going to want it on DVD. If you can scrounge up the money for a DVD burner, you can make decent money just plain transfering stuff to DVD for people (around here it cost about $75.00 a DVD for this service). Film students are a good market for this. But I would only make the investment if you wanted a DVD burner anyway.

For your videos, I’d advertise locally, in laundrymats and places where family-type people might gather. You might also want to take out an ad in the phone book (but be careful about making yourself too visible if you are using copyrighted music). I’d charge $20.00-50.00 an hour. If your feeling serious, pick up the phone and call video transfer services to get an idea of what kind of prices they are charging for their work.

You might also want to look in to doing some editing for local film students or small independent productions. You can be a bit more demanding about what formats they use, and make a small amount of money (which could lead to real editing jobs in the future).

If you have any questions, feel free to email me.

3

Thanks for the reply, even. I figured it would probably be like that—gotta spend money to make money, and unfortunately, I just can’t afford to do that right now.
However, that’s just right now. It’s still something thta I would like ot do, even if I have to put it off for awhile.
If anybody else has anything to add, I’d appreciate it. Even if I can’t use this info now, I may be able to in the future.

Also, feel free to DL some of my vids–especially the top one–to see what I can do. Maybe if the editing is bad enough, you can just post a helpful “forgetaboutit”. :wink: