Telling the Corporate Story

Many corporate videos today are built around the interview.  Clients, employees, spokespeople are recorded talking about the product or service.  It’s a quick and effective way to tell your corporate story.  This usually involves the video production of shooting an interview (discussed Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3).  What we’re discussing today is the mechanics behind the editing of the corporate interview.

How We Shoot Interviews in Dallas

First, we like to shoot interviews with two cameras.  Lately, the majority of these interviews are with DSLR’s– they give a very nice, rich look, shallow depth of field and with the speed of the lenses, we don’t need a lot of light to make it beautiful.

So after shooting, I will have two different sets of clips and a totally separated audio file.  I use Final Cut Pro to edit and I build a timeline with one camera on video layer 1 and the other camera on video layer 2.  I also separate out the audio tracks so that the clips all keep their audio.  Then I lay down the discreet audio recorded on set separately.  The program Plural Eyes is a neat little software fix for syncing audio.  I tell it to sync the sequence I have open and within a few moments, it has analyzed the waveforms of all the clips and brought them together.  If my camera sound is really bad, I might have to manually sync it, but generally pluraeyes is great.

After that, I go through the sequence, cutting and pasting good sound bites onto a “selects” sequence.  Then from those selects, I can pick just the great ones, all depending on the length of the video the client is wanting.  I have one Dallas Fort Worth client that it’s not unusual to have over 60 minutes in selects and we need to get it to about 8 minutes.

In video productions, it’s critical to be able to shoot and edit corporate interviews.  Talking heads don’t have to be boring but can be done in an exciting way that engages the viewer in to your product or services.