By Rick Broida
(April 13, 2005)

Crib? Check. Diapers? Check. Digital camcorder with tripod, spare battery, extra tapes, and video-editing software? Better double-check. Whether you're a first-time parent or rounding out your family softball team, it's almost unthinkable these days to let the experience go undocumented.

To build the perfect baby video, you'll need to do a bit of advance planning. That's because your memory is about to take a backseat to All Things Baby, a development that could lead to trouble down the road. In other words, when you sit down to edit your video, you don't want to discover you forgot to get a shot of Grandma with the baby. Trust us--there aren't enough Hallmark cards on the planet to undo that mistake.

Build the perfect baby video

Before you get started with this project, we recommend that you have the following:

Build the perfect baby video

After the baby arrives, life might get just a wee bit hectic--so try to do some planning before the big day. That means building a shot list, which can be anything from a basic checklist of important people to film with the baby to something as in-depth as a storyboard for the Look Who's Talking, uh, tribute you're planning to film. Here are some suggestions for your shot list:

Live video and still photos
We haven't calculated video's exact worth, but we do know that pictures nab a cool thousand words each. Your camcorder probably has a snapshot function, if not a built-in digital camera. In either case, use it. When the time comes to edit your movie, you can flex your creative muscles even further by mixing live video with still photos.

The "before" to go with the "after"
New parents often focus so carefully on the Big Day that they forget all the stuff leading up to it: decorating the baby's room, opening presents at the baby shower, even just getting some good shots of Mom's big belly. You might even want to play newscaster, citing some of the personal and world events that are occurring as you're getting ready for the new bundle of joy.

Coming home from the hospital
It can be downright scary to bring that first baby into the house, where you're suddenly cut off from the help and experience of doctors and nurses. If you're too busy helping to make the move from car to crib, have someone else film the equally joyous and panic-stricken parents. It's priceless footage for later.

Baby's introduction to friends and family
Make sure everybody gets a turn in front of the camera while holding or cooing at the new baby. Sure, you'll leave some of these folks on the cutting-room floor, but you'll also make sure no one important gets left out.

Baby's first everything
It goes without saying that you'll want shots of the baby's first smile, rollover, bag of Cheerios, and so on. But don't forget the potentially unpleasant stuff, such as middle-of-the-night feedings and scream-producing first baths. It's no fun while it's happening, but you'll look back on it later with a smile.

A personal documentary
Every so often, put the camera on the tripod, start it rolling, then step in front of it. Talk about what the baby's doing, how your lives have changed, what's going on in the world, and so on. This video diary helps establish some context for all the footage you're shooting of the bambino, while at the same time giving you a chance to be in front of the camera instead of always behind it.

Build the perfect baby video

Once you've done your prep work, it's time to shoot--but you can't just point your camera at the kid and hit Record. You need to decide when to use a tripod and when to go handheld. You need to frame your shots so that they avoid that amateur look. And don't forget special effects--the good old-fashioned kind made popular by a certain Mr. Burns. Learn the ins and outs of using your camcorder before an important baby moment comes along and you find yourself fumbling with tapes and batteries.

Use a tripod
That shaky-camera look is fine for NYPD Blue, but it can absolutely ruin a baby video. Consider: the little one stays pretty motionless, at least for the first few months, so your camcorder should do the same. By mounting it on a tripod, you'll get rock-steady footage. At the same time, you'll free yourself to perform artistic pans and zooms--or just get in front of the lens. If you're planning to rely on your camera's digital image-stabilization feature, don't. All that does is lower the video resolution by cropping to the center of the frame.

Remember the rule of thirds
Photographers know this rule well, but it's just as applicable when shooting video. Imagine a tic-tac-toe board over your viewfinder. The lines intersect in four spots. Your goal should be to frame the action using one or more of those spots. Or, to put it another way, keep the baby out of the center square. That's Whoopi's square.

Avoid digital zoom
The same rule that applies to digital cameras applies to camcorders: optical zoom, good; digital zoom, bad. Although you may have been suckered into buying a particular model because it touted some astronomical digital-zoom number (240X! 300X! 800X!), you should never use it--unless you like grainy, pixelated video. Digital zoom is actually a big fake: as you increase the zoom level, the camcorder crops further and further into the center of the image, enlarging that cropped portion so that it fills the screen. As a result, your video looks, well, awful. Stick with your camcorder's optical zoom (usually you can turn off digital zoom from within the camera's menu system), which relies solely on the lens for magnification. If you need to get closer to the little ankle biter, follow the old photographer's maxim: zoom with your feet (or in this case, your hands and knees).

Skip the special effects
Lots of digital camcorders offer sexy special effects, everything from sepia to slow-mo. These can be fun to fool around with, but we recommend using them sparingly--if at all. Better you should start with pristine color video, then apply special effects using your editing software (a little maneuver the pros like to call postproduction). Likewise, skip the camcorder's autofade features; your editing software will give you far greater control over transitions, and greater variety as well.

Create on-the-fly Ken Burns effects
As noted earlier, for the first few months your baby isn't going to do much except lie there, making for some pretty dry video. Spice things up a bit by borrowing from documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who manages to make even 100-year-old still photos exciting. His best trick? The slow zoom. Put your camcorder on a tripod, make sure the baby is well lit, and shoot some very slow zooms. You can start wide and zoom in or start close and zoom out. Add a little simultaneous panning if you really want to get fancy. Sprinkling these shots throughout your movie can add some much-needed visual diversity.

Practice in-camera editing
It's always better to have too much footage than too little, but there's such a thing as way too much. Shoot images that tell a story. Shoot when something interesting is happening. If you just leave the camcorder running, you'll make the editing process more difficult because you'll have that much more fluff to trim away. Consider what you're filming as you're filming it and ask yourself if it's something you're likely to keep. If not, turn the camcorder off.

Mix in still photos
A baby video needn't be all video. Photos are a great way to add diversity--and to spotlight those memorable smiles, screams, nap times, and so on. With a video editor such as Ulead VideoStudio 8.0, you can even add Ken Burns-style pan and zoom effects.

Build the perfect baby video

This part tends to be the big roadblock for many home videographers, either because they don't know how to start or because they don't realize that they lack the proper cable. So here's a step-by-step guide within a step-by-step guide.


Step 1: Install your video-editing software.

Step 2: Get your camcorder and FireWire cable. Note that this is not the cable that shipped with your camcorder. If you're not sure what the right cable looks like, check out the photos here.

Step 3: Plug one end of the cable into your camcorder (the connector cover and connector are usually marked "DV") and the other end into your PC's FireWire port.

Step 4: Put the first tape into the camcorder and turn it on in VCR (playback) mode. When you turn it on, Windows XP should pop up the New Hardware Found balloon and automatically install the camcorder as an AVC device. If you get a message that Windows can't find the driver, choose to select a driver from a list, then manually select the AVC device driver. You'll likely get an error message (We don't recommend...), but continue through the process. After you click Finish, it might say "This device will not work properly," but Windows will most likely identify your camcorder correctly.

Step 5: A pop-up dialog should then ask you which application you would like to start. Choose your video-editing application.

Step 6: In most video editors, you can choose Capture from the menus. The software should indicate that it sees your camcorder and give you onscreen VCR controls to control the tape.

Step 7: Check the settings to make sure that the software is capturing in DV format (the highest quality possible) and that it's capturing both audio and video.

Step 8: Simply play the tape, clicking the Capture (or Record) button when you reach the portion you want to download, and clicking Pause or Stop when the segment you want ends. You are better off capturing a lot of little clips rather than digitizing the whole tape as a humongous file. Many video editors can automatically split the tape up into separate clips, a feature known as Scene Detection.

Repeat steps 4 through 8 until you've downloaded all the video you want to work with.

Build the perfect baby video

There's a reason they give out Oscars for editing. The process of separating the wheat from the chaff, the smiles from the spit-ups, can be nothing short of Herculean. Fortunately, there are tools and tips that can make the process easier:

Make it a music video
Fellini didn't make two-hour baby movies, and neither should you. Pick a meaningful song (Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" is always in style), then edit your movie to fit it. A music video is the ideal baby video, as it doesn't take an insane amount of time to create, it's short enough to keep viewers interested, and it overcomes the common problem of poor audio in your recordings (as you're replacing some or all of the audio with music).

Keep the scenes short
Whether you go the music-video route or not, don't linger on the same shot for more than 5 to 10 seconds. Obviously you can exercise some creative license here, especially if there's a lot of action happening, but just remember that long scenes tend to make for boring movies.

Avoid fancy transitions
Editing programs such as CyberLink PowerDirector 3.0 and Pinnacle Studio 9.0 offer dozens, even hundreds, of fancy transitions. Pretend they're not there and stick with basic fades and dissolves instead. If you absolutely must use the 3D barn-door pull-away, put it someplace logical, such as in between the opening credits and your first video shot. If it shows up in the middle of your movie, it's going to look really conspicuous--and out of place.

Consider automation software
If you don't have time to manually edit each and every frame of your movie, try a program that will do the work for you. Muvee AutoProducer 3.0 is one such time-saver; it automatically assembles movie clips, still photos, and MP3/WMA files into slick, polished music videos, all in about the time it takes to read this sentence. Pinnacle Studio 9.0 offers a similar kind of automation while giving you a full roster of editing and special-effects tools. Even Microsoft's free Windows Movie Maker 2.0 has an AutoMovie feature, though you can't output the finished product to DVD as you can with the other programs.

Don't forget to title
Throw in some descriptive text every now and then, such as "Baby's First Birthday." This is especially helpful if the audio quality isn't very good.

When you're done, render the video to your hard disk in the highest possible quality. The DVD you distribute will be nice, but you want a high-quality original to archive. Then, follow your video editor's or your DVD-burning software's instructions for laying out and burning the disc. Most of these software applications include templates for the disc's menu navigation.

Now ship the discs out to your friends and family and get started on those vacation videos that have been lying around gathering dust.