Best Ways to Plan Your Video Editing While Travelling

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By Maria B

Taking a trip? Here’s how to coordinate with a video editing professional to make videos from your footage while you’re abroad.
How to Plan Travel Video Editing While Abroad

You’ve spent a lot of time and effort planning your big trip overseas. As the crowning touch, you want to document your trip in video to share with your friends and social network while the trip is going on. You could put something simple together during the trip, but you’d love to present something more polished and professional that really captures the excitement and adventure you’ll be experiencing.
To create a travel video of this scope you’ll need the services of video editing professionals, working to create finished videos while you’re on your trip. But it won’t be enough just to hire someone and ship footage to them. You’ll need to coordinate with your video editing professionals in a number of ways, before and during your journey to put together the high-quality video you’re looking for.
Preliminary planning
Your first steps in coordinating your efforts begin before the trip starts. Video editing professionals will want to have a clear idea of the scope of the trip – how long you’ll be gone; how much footage you’ll be sending them, and how many videos you’ll want to produce. Sit down with them and go over your itinerary and discuss your ideas. Experienced video editing professionals will often have some excellent suggestions on how you can tell your story through the video footage you shoot and the organization of the different videos they’ll produce.

One other important piece of information you’ll need to discuss with them is the means of communication you’ll use. Depending upon the internet and phone service you’ll have available to you, you may be able to have lengthy Skype conversations, or you may be limited to short text messages. Check ahead of time to see what you can realistically expect in communication options.
Location information
In your preliminary discussions you had a chance to explore your itinerary with your video editing professionals. As your video plans solidify, talk to your editor about what specific features of the locations you would like to see featured. For each planned video put together a checklist of the general location shots you want featured.
While this information will be useful in helping your editor assemble the video, be sure to give them more specific information about the location shots you’d like to be used when you’re communicating notes with them and passing along footage.
Communicating video sequence and the storyline
You’ve talked with your video editing professionals about the scope and organization of the videos they’ll be making while you’re on your trip. For each anticipated video, put together a rough shots list or storyboard for them to follow. This will aid them in assembling the video, and aid you in capturing the vital footage you want to tell the story of your adventure in a compelling fashion.
Not everything will go according to plan, so if you have consistent internet service, consider putting together shared documents of your shot lists and other notes so that you can quickly make changes and communicate them to your video editor with less chance of confusion.
Organizing footage
You can take great footage, but even the most seasoned video editing professionals will have their work cut out for them if they have to search through a random collection of video clips to find the footage they’re looking for. A system for organizing the material you send to your editor is essential.
One of the best methods will be to set up a set of shared documents, preferably spreadsheets, where you can list the content of each clip or set of clips. This will let your video editor quickly find the images and video clips they need to put together the video based on the existing notes you’ve shared with them.
Practice makes perfect

Video editing professionals want to ensure that they provide their customers with a satisfactory product. As we’ve seen, coordinating the process of making videos from your footage while you’re abroad involves a lot of careful communication and planning.
One way to ensure that everything will go smoothly is to do a practice run. Get together with your video editor and plan a video in exactly the same manner as you would for your overseas trip. It doesn’t matter where you’ll be going – it could be anywhere in your neighborhood. The purpose of the practice run will be to run through the entire process. Set up your plan for the video and all the shared documents you’ll use to track the progress and editing of the video, along with the systems you’ll use to upload and share video footage and to communicate with each other. Then run through the entire process of shooting the video footage and having your editor create the video remotely.
This extra practice and preparation may seem like a bit of overkill, but it’s probably the best way to ensure that you get the results you’re looking for. As a final word, remember the advice that one of my video mentors gave to me. “Proper preparation prevents poor performance.”