Home Movie Production Odyssey - Part 3 - Adobe Bridge

 I read in a blog on home video production that you don't want to create huge, ponderous videos out of your home movies.  The blogger asserted that people don't want to watch 30 minutes of your child learning to crawl.  What!?  I had to think about that for a minute.  You see, my first video project (done 15 years ago) was exactly that.  30 minutes of my eldest child's first year and it doesn't even make it through a whole year!  As I thought about it, this blogger made sense.  It also explains why the kids never watch my huge home video I made.  It's too long.  I need to make shorter videos.  I'm thinking clips that are about movie trailer length.  Make them more fun.

The next thing the blogger recommended was organizing your clips into themes.  I love that idea!  I immediately thought of all the times my kids had fallen asleep at dinner, in their high chair, and just face planted into their food.  I would love a clip of just that!

Well, this very good idea but it creates a very real problem.  I have about a year's worth of footage split up into a couple of hundred video clips.  I'm not going to remember which clip has what.  Ugh!  I need to be able to sort my video clips.  How do I do that?

That's where Adobe Bridge comes in.  It is a media organizer designed to catalog all of your resources.  In my case, it allows me to add attributes to each of my clips.  I can add the date the clip was taken, who was in it, where it was taken, what was happening in it, etc.  There's really no end to what you can do because it allows you to create any attribute you want.

So, to make my "falling asleep in the high chair" movie, I just have to run a filter to give me all of the clips that were marked "falling asleep in the high chair".  Bridge then shows me all the clips marked as "falling asleep in the high chair".  Cool!  But wait, it gets better.  With Bridge I can then select all of the clips and export them directly to Premier Pro.  This will make gathering clips for my short home videos super easy!

There are just a couple of snags.  

First, I was planning to use Premier Rush instead of Premier Pro.  Bridge doesn't export to Premier Rush.  One of the advantages to having the whole subscription is that I can simply switch to Premier Pro.  My problem is the 16 GB minimum requirement.  

I went back and looked again.  

Turns out I was wrong.  Premier Pro only requires 8 GB of memory.  Well, I think I'm OK there.  My intel i3 may be a bit slow but I should be able to slog through 5 minute videos.

However, the second problem is the big problem.  To use Bridge effectively, I have to manually assign attributes to each of my video clips.  Every single one.  As much as I would like to find a short-cut, computers aren't smart enough to go through my video clips and assign them the attributes I want.  I'm going to have to do it myself.  This will not be a quick and easy process but, hopefully, it will pay big dividends in home movies that are fun to watch.