Welcome back to Gear Daddy. I am your host Daddy Troy.
Today, I am talking about Birth Videos. Now, I do not mean videotaping the actual birth of your child. Although, I will talk about that today. Instead I am talking about birth movie. There is a little venue, a kind of birth video announcement of your child, and this whole week, DadLabs has been sponsored by Boon, Innovations for Modern Parents. I am giving away a Potty Bench this week. So, stick around to the end of the program and I will tell you how to get one.
Now, in order to make a Birth Video, you actually need a video camera but what I recommend is a digital still camera that also takes movies. This is the Canon Power Shot series also called the digital ELPH, takes really great movies and also has a really good microphone on it. There are few other accessories you want to get besides the camera. The first one would be a larger memory card because video takes up tons of memory, maybe buy two or three in a pack if you can if, kind of pretty cheap now.
And you also want to make sure you get a tri-pod. A tri-pod does three things for you. Number one, it allows you to get pictures of both you and your wife at the same time. This is a partnership after all. The second thing you can do with a tri-pod is that you can get really steady pictures instead of a shaky camera pictures that make people sick when they will hutch it and the third thing the tri-pod does for you is that it allows you to, once you get to the hospital and you are about to deliver the baby, you can simply put the camera on the tri-pod, let it roll and you can focus on the birth rather than being the photographer.
Think of your birth video like a birth movie. It comes in three acts. The first act is pregnancy, the second act is labor and delivery, the final act is the baby. During the first actual, obviously to take a lot of pictures and movies of mom. Do not forget to include you in some of those pictures, you as a couple. Take a lot of pictures and video of your house as it was before you had kids. Maybe a roll movie of you guys setting up a nursery.
Say, the second act is labor and delivery and since you really should be helping pregnant mom, thread lightly here. Snap a few photos between contractions to a pan of the delivery room. Maybe set the tri-pod on the corner and press record when things start to get interesting.
The third act includes your new baby, fingers, toes, glowing mom, glowing dad, baby sounds, make sure you know how to turn off the flash in your cameras so you do not bombard the kids flow times. And then the great finality of the movie is the pushing of mom out to the corner in a wheelchair or an actual putting of the baby in the car headed right home or you might want to get a friend to help you out with this.
In order to make your movie, you need to get all of the footage and all the still features onto a computer and then get some free software like Apple’s iMovie or Windows Movie Maker in order to put all the clips and still pictures together.
Here is a really important thing. Keep the movie under five minutes. Nobody even your best relative wants to watch any movie that is over five minutes. Keep is short, keep it sweet. Once you have all the stuff together, five minute piece, put your favorite soundtrack down for it, maybe some cute credits like produced by Mom and Dad or best boy which is a position or film set and then use the export for web function in this program to keep the file size small.
Finally, upload it to some place like YouTube or maybe your own passport protected website or best of all, come over to the DadLabs crib to the new feature we have by which our users can upload a videos and pictures. And, if you go there now, you actually see a much more examples of birth videos.
This whole week at DadLabs, it has been sponsored by Boon and we are giving away a Boon Potty Bench. All you have to do is go to the dadlabs.com and leave a comment on any of the episode we did this week, that’s episodes 317-320. They will be automatically in the d
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