As stated, my first post, so hi all.

I stated it was my second vid, but my first was a holiday video where I just tried to determine if I enjoyed videography. I did, so bought another camera, and started taking more videos

So, anyway, I suppose I am just asking for critique. Honest critique. Even if it hurts. Of course, I want my video to be loved by everyone, but that ain't gonna happen

I will warn you here, it is just butterflies. The London Butterfly House was closing, and as I found it to be such a lovely place, I decided I needed to put a little video together for it. So if the though of butterflies doesn't appeal, you may want to skip it - though I really would appreciate any feedback.

So before I post the link, just a couple of things to say. I have not titled it, and this is something I know I will need to add.

Considering that this video was mainly to be used on Youtube, with low quality, I tried to keep to close shots of the subject. Butterflies can quickly lose their detail when not very close to the camera, and fluttering about. So this was a deliberate choice.

I have deliberately kept it short and sweet (well, I think its short at only just over 3 mins from 45 min footage) because long videos on web get boring quickly. Hopefully I have managed to make it fun.

I have deliberately avoided using transitions and effects. It just did not seem to fit with the subject matter. Cant imagine using anything short of a dissolve with this video, but avoided even that. My aim was to keep it energetic and fast paced (yes, for butterflies). Did I succeed? Should I have used some transitions? Does it need a bit more spark than simple cuts?

So anyway, the link is YouTube - London Butterfly House

So be brutal, and honest. Is it just plain dull to anyone but me?

I will be using any input from here to possibly cut a higher res, different version of the footage, using shots of the actual butterfly house, and medium and long shots of the butterflies.

Thanks in advance.
C

enjoyed that

whats the music ? it fits very nicely.

Nice video. I agree about the transitions. I think the cuts work well. Nice closeups. Shame about the video compression you tube does to it. My guess is this is all tripod work.

Some beautiful shots in there - good choice to keep it all up-close. I will say this, and take it with a grain of salt as I am not at all experienced in videography, but it looks like you didn't deinterlace your videos, hence the little lines through all the footage.

Most video-editing software can do this for you (I use Ulead, and I have this option), but for Windows Movie Maker, assuming that's what you're using, you'll need a third-party software to deinterlace your videos before using them on WMM.

Thanks for feedback so far guys

Michael O Suilleabhain - Woodbrook

Actually, did not use a tripod at all. And I had to eliminate a lot of footage due to that. Though a tripod would have been a nightmare to use, due to being to cumbersome.


Well, I am currently using Adobe Premiere Pro 2. It has settings which I assume are supposed to deinterlace, but nothing I do works.
I have tried jsut about every encoding option ot me in the program, but still it comes out interlaced.
Another problem I have is finding a good compression option for general viewing. I will have my web site up before too long, and would like to put the videos on there in higher quality, videos which I would not even consider good quality are like 30MB.
I think I need another program for encoding... any recommendations?

I really enjoyed your video. If you had any wide angle shots of the facility, that would be something I would like to see. Good length, good music, Nice choice of shots (and a steady hand if you had no tri-pod :P)

Very nice! Well done. Interesting and great music to go with it! Very soothing and enjoyable.

BUT WHY DID YOU PUT IT ON YOUTUBE? These butterflies deserve to be treated better than that. They are delicate, the music is soft, your editing is great -- better quality video is highly warranted. You got a winner here! Post it elsewhere with good resolution. It deserves it!

Thanks. Can you tell me where apart from YouTube hosts video, or will it have to go on my own site? Although, still working on my site. A little out of practice with web design. I suppose the site does not need to be ready to stick ther file there though.

I still however have the problem of encoding. Either the quality is not as good as I would like, or the file size is about 30MB, and nothing I do seems to remove the interlacing (in adobe) .

Have been busy the last few evening installing my new GPU and Quad Core CPU, and also feeling like death from a cold, so not had much time to play with other encoding programs. Perhaps will get a chance tonight.

C

try Vimeo. Because everyone shouldn’t see everything. the quality seems very good and the layout for the site is simple and basic.

__________________

You can Google 'video hosting' and many sites turn up, but at this point I'm still confused. It appears that you need a host for the video, then at the minimum, blog space to make 'em available. But I'm still a little confused. I'm not really qualified to answer questions about this, but there are other sites available, and these offer extremely good quality. However, I am qualified to say that you got a real winner here, and it deserves to be seen at better resolution! That's one nice video!