With 2019 drawing to a close and as I have yet to buy a single christmas present for my wife and family, I am starting to feel the christmas pressure! However here is a wrap up of what’s been occupying my work calendar for the last month and a half.

Other Video Work Opportunities

In my experience one of the most natural work extensions from my traditional real estate video walk through videos has been doing videos for Property Management companies.

These videos are generally almost identical to shoot and edit as traditional real estate videos of houses for sale. I do a lot of work here in my local area for the Sotheby’s Rental office and they have a luxury home rental division.

One of their property managers recently contacted me to do some videos for three of their high end homes they rent out for the owners. The finished video of one of those properties is below;

Notes on the Video Production:

• The overall factor which determined how I would shoot and edit this video was determined by another video (not one of mine) that the Property Manager showed me and said that it was the gold standard she was after.
• I shot the video with my Panasonic GH5 and sat mainly on the Panasonic Leica 8-18mm lens. I also used my Panasonic Leica 12-60mm lens for close up detail and all exterior shots. Link to all my video gear.
• I shot the video predominantly on my Moza Air handheld gimbal as that was the style used in the video the property manager showed me as an example.
• I edited the video in FCPX and used the letterbox effect and a slight teal LUT which I don’t normally do but again did this as that what was being used in the property managers video example.
• I had to go back to the property twice as the owner wanted more exterior shots of the property to show balconies on all levels and wanted a fairly hard to get shot from downtown Queenstown showing it’s close proximity to the town centre. I’m not a fan of the shaky zoom out but the client was very happy.

So if you are looking for more work I can strongly recommend offering your services to property management companies, especially higher end luxury style properties.

Delivering Instagram Edits

On this particular job I described above the Sotheby’s property manager also asked for an Instagram edit of the finished video for their social media channel. I quoted an extra NZ$125 for the re-edit and re-size for her and the finished edit is below;

Notes on the Instagram Edit

My two favourite sizes for delivering Instagram edits are;

1080 X 1080 pixels – square

1080 X 1350 pixels which is the format of the above Instagram video edit.

Here are some General requirements for Instagram video I gleaned off the internet;

• Maximum 30 frames per second.
• Maximum length of 60 seconds.
• Maximum file size of 4 GB.

There is also 5 options for video on Instagram being: square, landscape, portrait, stories, and carousel.

• Square video minimum resolution is 600 x 600. Max is 1080 x 1080.
• Portrait video minimum resolution is 600 x 750. Max is 1080 x 1350.
• Landscape video minimum resolution is 600 x 315. Max is 1080 x 608.
• Stories video minimum resolution is 600 x 1067. Max is 1080 x 1920.
• Carousel video minimum resolution is 600 x 700. Max is 1080 x 1080.

NOTE: One of the community kindly pointed out to me that you can also post your longer form video to Instagram TV IGTV and it will automatically make a post in your regular Instagram feed linking to the longer video. To do this upload to IGTV as normal and then you are given the option to “Post a Preview” in your final screen. Thanks for pointing that out Jonas.

How to Edit Instagram Videos in FCPX

My process was as follows and can be applied in other editing platforms;

Set up a new project with a Custom Video size of 1080 X 1350

I then copy and paste my desired shots from the original long form video into the new project. Then I use the spatial conform command in the Inspector window and set it to none so that all the individual shots fill the frame with their natural pixel size, see below.

Now I use the Scale and Position tools in the Inspector window to resize the individual video clips in the available 1080 X 1350 screen size. Some shots work well and some shots don’t so delete those that don’t work!

Next make sure the entire edit doesn’t go over 1 minute and then you are done, pending client approval.

Youtube Channel Direction?

For those of you that follow me on my Youtube channel (I hope you are subscribed) you may have noticed a bit of a change in direction and content. I will still be putting up Camera content but I’m experimenting a bit more with general video content that takes the interest of a middle aged bloke (me).

This could be loosely described as video channel aimed at the middle aged bloke based around gear, lifestyle and adventures.

For example here is a very recent video which is a bit of a tongue in cheek look at New Zealand’s largest water feature!

P.S. This is my Other Youtube Channel and it needs some love so go and subscribe….it would be much appreciated!

Christmas 2019

And lastly I would like to wish you all a merry christmas with plenty of good food with family and friends.

All the best….Grant