Citizen Journalism Blog

Usually, if a video includes background music, I find it very hard to edit. I do not like to cut off music in the middle. The other thing is to be mindful of putting a draggy clip. When we are at the scene, the musical show or concert or even religious event maybe interesting to us. However, if it is on video, it can be a bore to our viewers.

Through trial and error, I have adopted a way to deal with getting nice padding shots and a pleasant background music. Here are some of my tricks :

1) If the real audio is bad, do not use it. For example, let’s say you have a lousy choir singing some patriotic song and the audio of your video is really bad, just cut off the audio and replace with a better one. Patriotic songs are easily sourced online. Remember to give credit and mention that your original audio quality is not satisfactory and you have replaced them.

2) I never cut parts of a song or musical concert and join them unless the joints sound ’smooth’. What I do is to unlink the audio from the video. Take the best part of the song and leave it as it is. Then, I edit the video, taking only the most interesting scenes. Layer it on the audio and things look better that way.

3) Traditional music is rare. So, what I do is to record a whole song and keep them in my archieve. For example, I have some nice traditional Indian music which will be nice to put if I am making cultural or religious videos.

4) Bad lightings. Some event venues have really horrible lightings. I have been to the Komtar Dome and it looks greenish. No matter how I adjust the white balance, it still looks bad. What I do is to take photos because photos resolution is better. I add the photos after cutting off the video, leaving only the audio.

These are just some of the things I learned through trials and errors and hope others find it useful.

The above video is a drums festival I shot some weeks back. The stage lighting is truly bad for photographers and videographers. I was cursing them for switching on the green spotlight and then, change between bright lights and dark lights. The photographers around me too were grumbling.

A few months back, I went to a Teoh Beng Hock forum and the lights at Han Chiang were also very bad. I kept bugging the organiser to pull the curtains a bit to shield the direct spotlights shining at us. The final product I get was brown coloured faces. Doh….