Meeting as a church virtually (3)

Here are the first and second posts in this series (as it has become).

So, we can now meet in the buildings.   No singing.  We sit 2 metres apart (unless we are in the same household).    In one church there are tables and chairs set out, in the other the cinema style seats are up or down and must remain so.   No one can move to another chair.    No one passes on the stairs and there are one way systems.  There is hand sanitiser and wipes.   No one else can use the space for 72 hours afterwards or we have to deep clean.     When it becomes law in England to wear a face covering in shops and the like, we will do that too.

But we are still making videos for YouTube.  Not everyone can go to a meeting.

To save the minister's time (and, I have to say, the time of her technical assistants), we film the "sermon" at Tapton Church and put that on YouTube.  We do this with a Sony Handycam video camera which the churches have bought so our elder son can take his digital SLR with him when he goes off to resume studies in the autumn.

I still compress the file with HandBrake, and enhance the audio, although I guess file size is less of an issue now we have proper 21st century broadband to upload it!

But I have had to edit the video.   It's easy to start the camera on time and end it promptly when the speaker is in her living room.   And if need be, we can record it all again.  But if we are filming live, none of that is as easy!    However hard we try to start the camera before the speaker starts speaking, it's actually very difficult, and the same with stopping the camera.   So the resulting video needs trimming at the start and end.   One week we had someone arrive after the sermon had started, they were in shot and also were welcomed by the speaker, so a section of the video needed removing from the middle.

I could not get on with Microsoft's standard video editor.   I found locating and marking points to cut impossible.  It was not easy to locate a precise point.    Also, the first time the resulting file was Absolutely Enormous, and the picture had turned into shattered pixels.   This might have been because I had compressed the MP4 file with HandBrake into an m4v file, and edited that.   

I tried various open source or free trial packages, but all seemed to be designed for making feature films or 3D animations, and were far too complicated.  I am at the edge of my knowledge as it is, making the videos, let alone editing them!  In one case the feature I needed was only available if I paid for the full version of the software.

But, the Handycam had its own software, called PlayMemories.  I had actually tried this first and not got on well.  But I learned that other software was not so straightforward!  PlayMemories allows trimming, and precise placement of "in points" and "out points", very easy with a bit of practice.   I could not see how to cut out a section, so I made two copies of the file, cut one at the point where our friend arrived late, and deleted everything after that point.   In the other, I deleted everything up until the point that they had gone out of shot and the speaker had resumed.   Then I used PlayMemories to join the two.    There was a bit of a jump, which with some more precise editing and joining I guess I could have avoided.

The videos on YouTube that are set in church, not the house, have been made this way.

We also had issues with lighting.   Set to autofocus, the camera liked the Powerpoint slides that were in shot more than the speaker, who was blurry.   When we improved the lighting of the speaker, and put the camera where it could not see the Powerpoint, focus was better.