Print It!

In the days of film — real celluloid with images stored as silver shadows — it was too expensive to print every take from the camera negative. When the director saw a take he liked he would shout “Print it!” and the script supervisor would circle the take in her notes. The printers would then only print the circled take saving huge money for the production.

Now that celluloid film is largely a thing of the past and video is so cheap, filmmakers can make economical use of nearly every take. Normally a whole take would be rejected if just one thing goes wrong, but now filmmakers keep shots if only one thing goes right.

In these days it’s not about what you “print,” but how you “print it.” Do you host it locally or on you tube (or vimeo)? Can viewers comment and share? Do you distribute DVD’s to your clients? Does it need to be High Def? If so, which file format? Do you need a teaser? Do you want to build a website around your video?

This is where a company like Skillman Video can really help you. We can build your website, kickstart your social media campaign, and use SEO to boost your video’s exposure. We integrate video, social media, web design, and SEO to gain our clients the highest return possible on their investment.

Cut!

I remember my college days sitting for forty hours at a Steenbeck cutting and splicing a five minute short, getting to know every frame intimately. Today the same short would probably take a quarter of the time to edit, but I think I would know the project half as well. There’s something about the tactile act of physically cutting film by hand and splicing it with tape that makes one appreciate their own work as well as the work of master editors and directors.

Nowadays it is so easy to edit video digitally on their home computer, that nearly everyone can do it. An entire generation of filmmakers has never actually “cut” film.

But don’t think good editing is not still an art. Editing is where the story comes together and takes a certain level of experience and expertise to take the most jumbled of raw footage, and turn it into a concise and powerful video. Professional editors not only use the best practices and technology, but they also use years of experience solving problems, shaping story, and most importantly, following the technological changes. They also know how to create graphics and polish audio — integral to creating professional looking and sounding video. They know how to compress video for the web just enough to make it load quickly without losing quality. It might take“do-it-yourself” home editor hours to read printed manuals and scan online help forums; only to end up no better than when they started. When you have a deadline, time can’t be wasted finding answers. That’s why the editors at Skillman Video Group keep up-to-date and well practiced in the latest editing techniques and usually can end up editing the project in a fraction of the time as a novice, and with far superior results!

Save iMovie for your home videos.