[Website] – click the image & visit our website

If you’ve never had a chance to stop by and check out our website, please take a second to check it out. It’s a fun way to get to know some crazy stuff about us. One of us can quote you every single word to the LION KING Also if you have friends or family looking for a fun talented videography team then hook up with the goods:) Shoot them this link so they can have a look for themselves:) http://www.2duce2.com

[Facebook Fanpage] – click the image & visit our fanpage

We have some of the most fun fans on facebook! Wow say that 3 times fast:) You can check out some of our latest videos, a little behind the scenes photos, and other crazy stuff we’re up to:) Visit Our Fanpage

[Twitter] – click the image & visit our twitter profile

Want to see a few pics of some funny things that happens through out our day? How about some fun info about upcoming events? We’ve been on twitter for awhile and have developed some great relationships we would have never made if it wasn’t for the little blue twitter bird:) Visit Our Twitter Profile

In our last “Did You Know” post we got a few (and by few we mean 2) defensive comments. So before we go any further let us say this, these “Did You Know” post are only intended to help our fellow videographers improve their craft! If it weren’t for people like us who blogged about how to do certain things, we have no idea how we would’ve come as far as we have. So if we touch on a subject that applies to you apply it to your workflow [if its right for you.] If its not right for you, just hang on till next week and maybe we’ll help you out with something else. The biggest thing we’ve learned in this industry is what works for us, may not work for you. As wedding videographers, we always have to keep an open mind and be willing to take constructive criticism:) Now with that said, lets move on to the main event:) hahaha

There are 5 things we try to avoid every time we sit down to edit a wedding. We have to think like the couple and ask ourselves, would we even want to watch this video? Would we be embarrassed to share it with our friends?

Here are [atleast] 5 things you can watch out for, so you don’t fall into the bowl of cheese:)

- Cheesy Music Selection

- Cheesy Color

- Cheesy Sloooooooooooow motion

- Cheesy Audio Inserts

- Cheesy Staged Moments

Next Friday we’ll touch on what goes into music selection for our couples, and share some great websites where you can find the perfect soundtrack.

We will however, address the biggest question we get…”Why shoot on a DSLR?” Well besides the obvious things like lens options, the crazy depth of field, how they perform in low light situations, and how easy it is to travel around with them versus traveling with our normal video cameras. (Sony HVR-Z7U) One of the coolest things we’re proud to be able to do is pull (good) stills from our videos!

Below is a still we pulled right from video on our 7D a few months ago

Now obviously most of you photographers could make this image look ridiculously good, but we’re not photographers, so don’t rake us over the coals too bad:) haha

For the longest time we’ve wanted to be able to post stills, but stills from regular video cameras look horrible. (unless of course you’re lucky enough to be shooting on a RED) We don’t care how good your video camera is, or how cool the moment was; just because you can freeze a frame in your video doesn’t mean you always should!

With that said though, we’ve found that people spend even more time on our blog posts when we do post images.

So how do we get such good stills?
The way we get our stills from our video is actually pretty simple! The first thing we do is find the clip that has the frame we want to freeze.

Most of you who own a DSLR know that bringing in footage right into an editing program without converting the footage is a nightmare. There are tons of programs out there you can use to convert footage, but our favorite is MPEG STREAMCLIP. You can get a free copy here for your heavenly Mac or your windows machine (We’re just being mean by striking out the windows machine, they do have mpeg streamclip for windows)

So once you’ve downloaded MPEG STREAMCLIP and open it up, you’ll get a window like this.

Awww yeah baby:) The process is simple go to [FILE] and click [OPEN FILES] or press [Apple+O] and locate the video file you want to use. MPEG STREAMCLIP will open up your video clip and you’ll have to scroll to exactly where you want the still to be taken at.

Once you’ve found the perfect spot in your video to capture as a video still Click on [FILE] and select [EXPORT FRAME]

Once we get to this window, we make the following selections
Frame size :: Unscaled (You can resize the image later on in simple photo editing software)
Pixel Aspect :: Computer Graphics
Gamma :: 2.2
There is no need to interlace or deinterlace.
We leave the adjustments alone and tweak stuff in lightroom
Format :: JPEG
Quality :: we go all out and move the slider all the way up:)

Click OK and you’re ready to rock!

If you notice in this particular clip, we shot it way underexposed, and there is also something small in the bride’s hair. After bugging the crap out of our photographer friends we figured out how to bring up the exposure as well as get rid of the white fuzzy in our girls hair.
It’s really that simple!

So now how about the videographers who aren’t shooting on DSLRs? First off don’t be that guy/girl who posts stills that look pixelated and crappy! We’re not saying that only videographers who shoot on DSLRs can get good stills, but in comparison DSLRs smoke other video cameras when it comes to video stills! What we used to do before we had our DSLRs was to actually get ahold of the photographer who shot the wedding with us and ask him/her for a few images we could use for our blog post! Most photographers will be more than happy for you to showcase their work on your blog.

Hopefully this has helped some of our other videographer friends who read our blog!

If you follow our blog, then you’ll know that we shoot a ton of weddings. There’s nothing more special than being with a couple on one of the most important days of their lives. It’s been said that you can’t be a good wedding videographer if you shoot anything other than weddings -we’re living proof that that’s not true.

Anyone can take a bunch of cool shots and just throw them together, but that can only keep your attention for so long. We like to tell a story to keep your attention -and that’s what we strive to do for all of our videos. People have asked us, “How do you come up with such cool shots and still tell the story?” Well, to be honest, we get a lot of ideas from our photographer friends. If we see an awesome photo, we figure out how we can convert their photo into our video. To learn new things, you must try new things -and we’re always trying to think outside the box! As we’ve said before, even though we’re always trying new things like posting stills from our video … you won’t find us doing anything else except video

Recently, the ever so sweet and talented EyeCandy Salon was having a photo shoot with Ace Photography, and they asked us to shoot a “behind the scenes look” for the salon! As you can see above, this “behind the scenes look” is a perfect example of our mix-and-match shooting/editing style. Not only were we shooting beautiful, “cutesy” models, we also were shooting hot, punk rock models. Below are the some of the rockin’ stills we pulled from our footage… ENJOY!!!