Taking Home Movies to the Next Level
It’s OK to think in terms of chapters and to make each one a separate file. You can always combine them into longer works.
* Keep everything simple; pick just a few transitions and reuse them sparingly; avoid the temptation to apply all those radical filters. If you choose to use a special effect, use it once and make it count. If you are using still images, a simple fade transition works best.
* Choose a reasonable scene length. If you shoot ten minutes of video without pause, experiment with breaking it up into much shorter clips. Avoid the 3-second rule currently in vogue in commercials, where each scene only lasts 3 seconds. Some software will allow the program itself to break up any video file into several scenes, either by a detection algorithm, or by a set time span. Most can do this automatically.
