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I'm thinking of making a video along the lines of the one in the link below to give to the client I'm building a guitar for when I deliver it next month. I take photos all along the way during the construction of my guitars as a second set of notes so I have a bunch of photos showing the various steps. As a first draft, I took the photos for a guitar I finished last fall and assembled them with a soundtrack played on that guitar to try out some ideas.

This is the first time I've put together any kind of video using video software so I would be interested in feedback you all might have. Is it cheesy, cool, does the playing not cut it, is the photo quality, organization, sound quality, or other or ? Apologies in advance for my playing skills...


Edit: I discovered that the first video I uploaded to youtube was forced into 420 mode so the photo quality was degraded pretty noticeably. I uploaded a new version a different way in HD which worked.

Too see the photos in the best quality, click the gear icon in the lower right of the video and select the highest resolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBBwWNJYlE&feature=youtu.be

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Excellent job of documenting your build Jay!
Looks great, sounds great!
I really like the shape...

Rob

That is a really nice touch. I often give them a bunch of pics, but in this media age the vide would be great for sharing.

That *is* a really nice touch! How much time did it take to put the video together?

P.S. I really like your heel! Very clean and unique..

M

Very nice, but you should charge for that, too time consuming. I used to take lots of pics for the customer, now just a few in the middle stages, and finished pics. I'd rather be building.

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http://davidnewtonguitars.squarespace.com/

Love it!

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Wah-wah-wah-wah
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Thanks for taking a look and the comments.



Well, it was the first time using the Movie Maker program that came on my laptop so there was time figuring out how to use it. It was pretty straightforward though. The photos of the completed guitar took me about twenty minutes to take. Putting the photos into the video file was easy. It took a few minutes to choose the ones I wanted and open them in the video file. Recording the soundtrack was the single operation that took the biggest chunk of time. Again, this was the first time I've tried to do that so I had to experiment with mic position and which room to record in. I spent a couple hours getting that done. The sound quality is still not what I would like but not bad for using a handheld TASCAM recorder. Importing the music into the video file was easy. Then it was a matter of setting the durations of the photos and matching that up with the sound track. That also turned out to be easy to do. I probably spent about five to six hours total when you include playing around with options for the video and recording. Now that I've done one, I could do the next one a lot faster.



It's really not a big time sink. The photos taken during the construction are primarily for me because I use them as a form of note taking. It really helps me remember exactly how I did particular steps on a given guitar as my methods evolve. So those photos are just sitting around anyway and taking them is trivial. Now that I know how to use the software, I could take a set of nice final photos, record music, and make the video in about two or two and a half hours without rushing. So not a big deal to me on the time scale of guitar building.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

Agreed, Movie Maker is pretty easy to use for this task.
Click on my sig "A Slideshow" for my version of something similar.

Robbie - That's a very nice slide show. It's very thorough with great photos and I like the captions. Nice guitar too.

"Many hours of sanding" and "Sanding some more" I can relate to that.

_________________
Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter