What of all the videos?

Everywhere you look, people are snapping photos and recording videos. Our phones are full of these memories and yet digital dust collects on the majority of them.

Every year, new phones are released and online storage is increased so these mounds of personal media can be stored somewhere. Who is going to watch all these videos and how will it be done?

At the end of each year, I gather all of the videos that were taken in our family. All of these videos are then added to iMovie and I start a new project. This year it was “Stucki 2020.” It was quite the year to relive.

The goal is to take all the best video clips and make a single movie to represent the highlights of the year

Some tips on creating the video:

• Be sure to have the highest possibly quality of all the videos.
• Take a weekend afternoon where you can have a few hours to really go through the videos. Warning: extreme nostalgia may occur.
• It is very rare that any video clip needs to be longer than 30 seconds. Just find the snippet that really shows the feeling of the day. You don’t need the whole school choir number, just a little bit that shows the performance and who is there to enjoy it. Remember, this is a highlight reel. The full video can live somewhere else.
• Do your best to be sure all family members in your home are equally represented. You will be questioned.
• Include videos of friends, extended family, and everyday locations.
• Just grab a video or two from each event from the year.
• Try to land between one and two hours with the final movie. That may feel long, but the nature of quick highlights makes it so enjoyable.
• When you’re ready to export, chose a high quality version and give your machine the time needed to make it nice. Large video files won’t matter as technology moves forward. You want video that will look good in the future as screens improve. (And storage costs will only decrease over time.)

I have put together the Stucki videos from the last decade or so. We have them on our media server and we can watch from any Apple TV in the house. It’s a joy to watch them on a Sunday afternoon together to see how we all have gown and changed.