Hairbrush singing

Selfie music videos

My seven year old daughter, Karla, had two of her older cousins (Tanisha and Kailee) stay over night recently.  They’re all good kids and can keep themselves entertained.

I didn’t think much of it when Karla woke me up early to ask if they could use the good camera to make a video, but I told her just to use her iPad instead.  Working afternoon shift meant I didn’t see the kids that night, but the next day Karla told me that they had made some music videos.

As I’d suggested, Karla had set up her iPad Mini on her bed and filmed the three girls dancing and singing into their hairbrushes with the front facing “selfie” camera.  She wanted me to put the videos onto her YouTube channel, but I had to explain that having full length songs running as the backing soundtrack in a video might have some Copyright issues.  Asking relatives to watch multiple 4 or 5 minute videos might be a bit much too, so I offered to edit the clips into one video.

Editing

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any video editing, so I had to work out how I was going to put Karla’s hairbrush singing videos together.  Windows 10 doesn’t have a built in video editor, so I first tried looking for free software that could do the job.  I soon discovered that you get exactly what you pay for when it comes to video editing programmes.  The free software was crap!

I wasn’t going to fork out cash for a professional Adobe editor when this might be a once off project.  Having used Windows Movie Maker in previous editions of Windows, I found an old version but couldn’t get it to install onto my Windows 10 machine.  Then I remembered buying a Nero suite of programmes a few years back.  I even managed to find an old email with my Nero registration key.

Re-downloading, installing and activating the 2015 suite was trouble free.  I now had access to Nero Video Editor!

The video

Re-learning how to edit video wasn’t too hard, but somehow I had imported the clips in preview size, meaning the finished video was less than a quarter of the screen size.  Yep, I’d stuffed up and had to start again!  Never mind, I wasn’t making a feature film, so I imported the full size clips and put them together into the video below.

It’s a bit girly, singing into hairbrushes, but the kids are still young enough to be cute and funny!