Process Video Set Up

Today I made a layout and video taped it.  I'll edit the video later - tomorrow and Tuesday as time permits.  But while I had everything set up I thought I'd snap a few pictures of my set up.

I've been watching process videos for better than a year now, I think they're fun and I gain so much from watching them.  Sometimes I'm inspired by the actual layout, but sometimes I see better ways of doing things, or organizing, or I get a glimpse into the decision process that goes into another's layout.  It made me want to share, too!  But I couldn't figure out the logistics, and there's very little information out there.  I was plagued with questions.

• How do you get the camera perfectly parallel to the work surface?
• Can you video tape upside down and flip the video right side up?
• How do you deal with the lighting?
• How do you add narration?

I have a feeling that a vast majority of process-video-makers use a tripod.  And I have a tripod, and it even has "shoulder" and "arm" that allow me to shoot straight down.  Perfect for shooting parallel to the work surface, only the thing weights a ton.  And while that's obviously an exaggeration, it is far too heavy for my work surface.  

Kerig has seen me watch these videos for a while now, and when I mentioned that I'd make them, too, if I could figure out the tripod issue, he started brainstorming about ways to get the job done. Cheap.   Free.  (This discussion took place when I was out of work with my broken arm. There was no way I could justify spending money on this.)  We talked for a while and we realized that we had the answer all along:

This is called a copy stand, and in the pre-digital dinosaur days, before all-in-one printers that cost less than a decent pair of shoes, if you wanted something copied, you had it photocopied.  Like, an actual photo.  A copy stand was used, it has marking on the platform to line up your artwork or documents, and then there's the post and arm.  There are two cranks that let you raise on lower the camera, and slide it along the arm to position the camera closer-to or further-from the post.  In its traditional set up, that arm would extend over the platform.

And that's how it was set up in my original process videos, but as you can see, the platform is an inch or so off the table.  The platform is plenty big enough for the actual layout, but it made it awkward to use the trimmer and set things down around the layout.  I asked Kerig if we could take the arm off and mount it backwards so I could just use my regular mat instead of the platform.  Turns out, you can!  

This isn't where I usually scrapbook (my usual desk is talked about here.) so when I get prepared to do one of these videos I try to anticipate everything I'll need.  Much of that gets piled on the platform so it's closer.  Handy, eh?

In the upper left hand photo, you can see the self healing mat that I use.  I used some yellow washi tape to mark off a square to corral my layout in.  I found out after the first video was done that I didn't know how easy it was to work out of frame.  With the tape down, I have a reminder that if I'm not working in the box, no one is seeing what I'm doing.  Has that been a magic cure all?  No! But I feel like I'm getting better. :)

I sold cameras for 12 years, and I know a little bit about photography, but what I know about video you can fit in a thimble. With room left over for a goldfish.  One of the things that I do know, though, is that you can't get your camera to close focus  if you've got the lens zoomed out at all.  Of course, knowing something and remembering it are two different things. It took me until the third video to realize it and lower the camera on the post instead of relying on the zoom to get it framed up the way I wanted.  

So that's my set up.  Copy stands can be found at B&H and Adorama new, and ebay both new and used.  I'd look on craigslist, and even put up an ISO post - a lot of old school photographers had them, and wouldn't necessarily think to list them.  

As for my other big concerns:

Can you flip the video? Yes, absolutely!  I'm just using Windows Live Movie Maker, and it came on my computer, but I'll bet it can be downloaded for free if you don't have it.  The program is pretty easy to figure out and once the clip is loaded into the software you can easy rotate it 90, 180, or 270 degrees.  It also easily allows you to speed up the video to 2,4, 8 times the speed and even allows you to slow it down.  If played back at regular speed, the sound ambient sound when you work is heard (so you can narrate while you work...or else it's going to pick up the t.v. and all the conversations happening.).  If you speed it up, no sound plays at all.

How do you add narration?  I use "Sound Recorder" which also came with my computer.  I had no idea what program I had, so I used the search box in the start menu and searched on "record" and it came up.  Once the video is all flipped and sped up I watch it once or twice so I know how it's going to go.  I have a Turtle Beach headset, the kind gamers use. (I'm not a gamer though... I needed them for online classes)  I start my recording software and then quickly start the video and record my narration.  I don't care about sound or noise when I'm making the video, but I'll set the furnace so I know it won't go on and turn off any fans and other noise makers.  And honestly, I don't usually get it where I want it to be the first time around.  Once I'm happy with the narration, I save it somewhere where I can find it, and in Windows Live Movie Maker I click "add music".  It prompts me to find the music I want to use, so I just find the narration I just saved.  

What about lighting? I don't really have any sage words of wisdom for this one.  My table is very tall, and there's a nearby ceiling fan with 3 60 watt bulbs and it seems to provide plenty of light, and my camera seems to do a great job of adjusting its white balance.  When I first turn the camera on, there's a yellow cast, but within a second or two it adjusts and my white is white. (yay!)   

So that's my set up!  By far the biggest hurdle was getting the camera mounted, and after that was solved, everything fell into place.  I am NOT an expert! Heck, I've only got 4 videos up.  But like I said, I had a hard time getting any answers, so I thought I'd share what I'd figured out so far.  If you have any questions, feel free to ask.  What I can answer, I will!  

Also: GoFundMe  ☺

Thanks for stopping by!

My YouTube channel

Lesson learned.

Good grief.  I'm really glad that I cleaned my desk off on Thursday.  This is a tale of before, during and after.  And I'll cut to the moral of the story: Don't be stupid, Stupid :P

So, this is a picture of my desk shortly after we got settled, taken in the beginning of July:

And that's basically the set up I've been running with. I took the Ott light off, because I just didn't need it.  I also don't ever put my laptop on top of the desk anymore.  Real estate is just too precious, so for entertainment I use my Kindle instead, and I put the laptop on a tall chair off to the side for my Silhouetting.

My desk is a vintage drafting table that I got about 18 years ago when we lived in Indiana.  My oldest had sort of taken it over and trashed it, and when we moved I reclaimed it and refinished it.  For weeks I couldn't walk past it without running my hand over the top and asking "Isn't she pretty?"  Yes.  I love it.

BUT, it's a drafting table.  It's meant to have a couple of sheets of paper on it.  NOT all the stuff that I had piled on top of it.  And, as a drafting table, the table can be raised and lowered and the top swings up - drafting is often done  with the table top angled up.  The combined affect of these facts is that the whole dern thing shifts around.

So I've put stuff across the back part, which has probably put more pressure there than it can handle. And over the last couple of weeks I've noticed the whole thing dropping down a little bit at a time.  So I asked Ted and Kerig to lift up the top, and I was going to put some old kid's building blocks under the legs so that top couldn't drop down again.  For whatever reason, I didn't think I needed to take everything off the top.  The good news is, I just cleaned my desk on Thursday so it was very close the way it looks in the picture up there.

The bad news is, this was a stupid decision on my part and everything ended up on the floor:

Oops.  Fortunately nothing broke.  And I would have preferred to just raise and reinforce the desk as we had originally planned.  But instead, I got to reorganize.  Never mind that I had just done this on Thursday.  I did decide that I needed to get a lot of weight off the back side of the desk, so now it looks like this:

One of the things that I love about my table is that it's tall enough for me to scrapbook standing up, which I prefer.  One of the benefits of scrapbooking standing up is that you don't have to have everything right there - walking four feet is no big deal when you're already up.  So tonight I just reevaluated what I needed at my fingertips. The black thing is a lazy Susan thingee (TJ Maxx $10 - l♥ve) and it has scissors (multiple pair, because they're so easy to lose), basic hand punches, tweezers, pokers (like for making a hole for brads), Zig glue pens, my Basic Grey file set and my Tim Holtz Tiny Attacher.   The red box has current pictures and a my (teeny, tiny, minuscule) collection of acrylic stamps.  They don't need to be at my fingertips, but I hope to remember to use them if they're there.  The round silver thing is my small bucket of flair.  My Fridgebinz box of adhesive is a must-keep-close item for certain.  The white Making Memories thing has all kinds of pens, paint brushes, lens and stamp cleaners, my ATG gun, SEI buttons that rarely get used but make me happy, and then the little drawers hold extra blades for my trimmer, CM circle cutter blades, Tiny Attacher refills, o-rings and teeny bits.

This was not how I had planned to spend my evening.  But that's okay.  I've been meaning to make some adjustments and this helped that.

Thanks for stopping by.  I hope to have some thing more directly scrapbook related soon. ☺
Have a great week!

And don't forget: Don't be stupid, Stupid ;)

Some thoughts on vertical scrapbooking.

(Which seems so less weenie than 'scrapping standing up')

I recently said I had some kinks to work out with my new scrapbook set up.  And that was true.  The major hang ups were that the laptop was taking up too much space on the drafting table, and while the kitchen table chair is the perfect height for the drafting table, it's sort of awkward.

I should really take some other shots to make this make more sense, but I still have some tubs of stuff that need to be hauled to the Salvation Army, and until those get dealt with I'm not taking anymore shots of my space. :P  But just to the left of this set up is a school desk that I bought for $5 (score) that has two white paper cubes from Michael's on top.

I really love these - they're sturdy, hold a ton and not awful looking.  Plus, I really prefer to store my paper flat, and these allow for that.

I used to have my wide format printer on top of two of these positioned side by side.  I'm not 100% certain I'm keeping the printer though.  It prints beautifully, but since switching to 8.5x11 I rarely print anything larger than 4x6.  Of course the wide format printer can do that, but since space is at a premium, I'm sort of lusting after a nice, compact Epson PictureMate.  Because yeah, I have money in my budget for another printer.  I need my head examined.

So anyway, I have two of those things side by side on a child's school desk, and over the weekend I realized that my laptop could easy sit on them.  Having the laptop nearby is necessary for both journaling and designing and cutting dies on the Cameo.

So that's one problem solved.  On to the kitchen chair...  In the photo above, I have it sort of pushed to the side with my FirdgeBinz on it.  I felt hemmed in, and eventually I just wanted to sit down because I was still feeling the effects of the move (i.e. everything hurt like a mo fo).   But the chairs are tall - your feet don't touch the ground in them.  So getting in and out can be a bit of a hassle.  Now that everything feels a little better (courtesy of copious quantities of Advil) I can actually scrapbook standing up.

AND I LOVE IT.

These are just snippets of the layouts that I posted yesterday.  They're special because each one of them shows something that I used that I've had for-ev-er but wasn't using because it wasn't within arm's reach of my fat ass sitting down while scrapping.  Stamp stuff? I have some, but I'm not a stamper per se, so it's always been stowed away.  But because I was standing up it wasn't any big deal at all to walk over to my shelves, bring the bin of embossing powders and rifle through to find what I want.  Same deal with the stack of sticker labels and photo corners.

It also made cleaning up go more quickly - I was already up, so putting things away didn't feel like any big deal - just grab a load of stuff and put it back on the shelves.  Piece-o-cake.

I'm still lusting over the file cabinets that I shared a couple of days ago - they would really complete the space nicely.  But for now I think it's going to work out.

Now I have to redirect my attention to my bedroom.  This morning I had a dream that I was packing for a trip and I couldn't find my pants.  I think that's my (not-so-)subconscious telling me to get my stuff taken care off.

Thanks for stopping by!

Him and Me...and FridgeBinz

Yay! Last night was another scrap opportunity!  We were supposed have a baseball game to attend, but just as we got there it started POURING.  So, oops, it got canceled.  :)  Yes. That's a smiley face.  I love watching Ted's games.  I go whenever I can.  But I don't mind the occasional two hour pocket of time that suddenly opens up when they get canceled.  So we came home and I scrapped:

This is another picture from our walk in the park last week.  It's probably not the most flattering of me, but I do really like this photo.  I think it catches our personalities - Kerig is very serious and focused most of the time.  I vacillate between very serious and focused (usually with regard to schoolwork) and annoyingly juvenile.  This works out well about 92% of the time, because sometimes Kerig needs to lighten the fudge up.  And sometimes I need to behave myself.  He keeps me from getting in trouble.  I keep him from imploding. Win/win.

If you're a regular visitor, you might remember that I went on and on about FridgeBinz from Bed, Bath and Beyond.  I spent a couple of days cutting my paper scraps down to 7.5x7.5in and 3.5x4in to store in the two sizes of the bins that I bought.  This is the final set up:

So, I have two of the bigger sizes, one is for my slight minipad addiction.  And two of the smaller size - the second one is for color mists and ink pads.  I can easily see getting several more of these for glitter vials and embellishment packs.  Maybe one more for adhesive... and washi...and dies and embossing folders. :) Love them.

I really dislike hyperbole and most forms of exaggeration.  So I'm not saying this for effect:

These dumb FridgeBinz have changed the way I scrapbook.

I don't think that I'm different than most scrapbookers.  I have paper.  A LOT of paper:

(This is spot for whole, uncut sheets of patterned paper.  And some letter stickers, which I am not addicted to and therefore only have a moderate amount.)

And that's where all that uncut patterned paper is in relation to where I sit to scrap.  And what you don't see is an Iris cart that sort of blocks the way and a chair that also blocks but also serves as a place to rest as you go through stacks and stacks of paper.  (It also serves as a nice place for visitors -i.e. kids- to sit when I'm scrapping or working on homework)  So it's not as easy to get to as I might want, or within arm's reach.  (And that's just the patterned paper.  There's a foot and a half of 12x12 cardstock that's stored behind where I sit, and 8.5x11 in an Iris cart behind me.  A LOT of paper.)

Enter the FridgeBinz:

Okay, these are really crappy shots, showing that I really need to vacuum.  Don't judge. I know you have scrap bits on your floor, too. :P

Anyway, I also have this wooden stool that generally gets tucked in under the side of the table.  It's where my kids sit when they need help with their homework.  And...it also gets used for overflow when I scrap.   But since I got all my scraps organized I just pull the bins and put them on the stool.  This is immensely liberating!  Because I have literally dozens upon dozens of scraps of paper to chose from for punching, small dies and even running through my Cameo.  Right there. AT MY FINGERTIPS. And since they're already scraps, I feel absolutely no hesitation about cutting into them.  If I'm not sure if it would look better punched out of this or that, I don't have to try to guess.  I just do it from both and decide that way.  And if I try it out of those two and I'm not in love with either one, I simply flip through my scraps and see if something else might work.  

Clean up is easier, too.

I did bust into one of the whole sheets of patterned paper, but  it was easy to deal with the scraps.  I cut the biggest piece down to 7.5inches wide and put it in with the big scraps.  All the little pieces were cut down to 4inchesxWhatever (3.5 at the biggest) and put into the smaller bin.  Once everything was cut down, the two bins were put away.

Before I switched to these FridgeBinz I was just throwing all my scraps into archival 13x15 boxes.  I didn't cut the scraps down, and the boxes were always threatening to overflow.  Cardstock and paper got bent and creased.  Rifling through it was frustrating, because there was no easy way without being very ginger and going more slowly than I'd want to.  Now, if I need a big scrap, I go to the big bin; if I need a small scrap, well: duh.  But I can pick up a tidy 4 inch stack of papers and flip through them like you might flick through a deck of cards. When I've got what I want, I just bang them on the desk to get them flat-edged and tuck them back into the bin.

I feel less wasteful, more organized, liberated and even inspired, since the color and pattern combos that come out might not have happened otherwise.  

Ok. I'm done with my free advertisement for these things. For now. But I'm getting ready to move this month and when I have a new space to set up there's a distinct possibility that one or two more of these make their way into my setup.  Because they're rectangular they use space much more efficiently than the buckets that I currently have.  Plus, since they're see through, I can see that organizing some other items might make more sense in them.