Abi Coop

Melissa Richard

Kristen Ryan

Family Home Videos | by Laura & Nicolas Froese

May 15, 2023

Family Home Videos

Family Home Videos

My husband and I “live every 12-year-old’s dream” to quote our mortgage guy who was trying to sort finances with us.  I’m a professional photographer and photography instructor and he’s a professional videographer turned full-time YouTuber.  I know almost nothing about video and he’s an… okay photographer – shhhh.  No, he’s decent.  Needless to say, I take all the family photos throughout the year and he makes our annual family video.  Now, while we both do our jobs professionally and both teach our skill sets to others, our family home videos are more in the camp of “done is better than perfect”.  If you think about it, though, done really IS better than perfect, right?  Wouldn’t you rather have a bunch of okay home videos to watch each year rather than just one amazing one and a bunch of footage you need to get around to at some point?

three little boys baking

I’m going to give you our best tips for getting these videos ACTUALLY MADE.

1. Film Horizontally

Whenever something cute happens and we pull out our phones, we always make sure to film it HORIZONTALLY.  Yes, if I think I might want to use it for a reel, I’ll flip my phone vertical and take a few more seconds of footage.  However, for your family memories, you want them to fill your screen if you can.
Family Home Videos: dad videoing children baking

2. Cloud Storage

We pay between $1.44 for me and $4.49 CAD for my husband to have extra cloud based storage on our phones each month.  (It’s a business write off).  This allows us to not RUN OUT OF ROOM on our devices if something cute happens.  The other great thing about this is that all of our videos are uploaded to one spot.  My cloud IS separate from his, but I can air drop him a link easily enough.
Photo of three kids with cookies from above

3. Putting it Together

Every January, my husband downloads the big cloud dump and puts it into an editing software of his choice.  He uses Premiere and I use iMovie.   We select our favourite clips and try to choose just 1-3 seconds of each one, and drop them in the timeline mostly just in chronological order – we don’t worry about getting too fancy with transitions just for this.  Then we choose a song to put overtop, and trim it down from there. We get our music usually from musicbed.com as it can be properly licensed through there without copyright issues.
Family home videos: back of video camera

4. Exporting

Lastly, we export and enjoy!  I watch these videos whenever my kids drive me to the point of needing to remember how cute and awesome they are.  Here is one of my favourites as we moved that year. 

Want to Learn more about video? Check out From Stills to Motion with Laura & Nick Froese.

If learning more about video is something on your bucket list, Nick and I will actually be running our course, From Stills to Motion, for the first time ever LIVE this Spring.  We will teach you everything from how to use Premiere, to make clip selections quickly, to order them for story and to edit efficiently.  Whether you are wanting to learn just for your own enjoyment or for client work, we cover it all!

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