Branching out into RE Video

Prior to receiving a call from an agent I met some months ago at an open house, I had not considered shooting virtual open house videos. His request that I shoot a virtual tour of his listing opened me to new opportunities for my creative work and a viable income stream.

In this post, I’m sharing two different edits of this first real estate video job. Many versions of the video were created as I learned the software. Each version taught me something new about how I can improve on the next shoot, how to shoot to avoid certain editing needs, how to edit to improve my footage and even how to coach for voice over recordings. I learned many things that fall into many different job categories: software features, shooting technique, lighting, voice-over, music overlay and editing it all! This first shoot was a very interesting and fulfilling experience.

I used Premiere Pro 2020 for the first round of edits. I have the Adobe Suite for my photography so it was an easy choice to begin with. The primary issue I ran into with Premiere is that processing (rendering and stabilizing images) took a long time. After watching several training videos I realized my six year old computer doesn’t have the power to process video in the default quality size of Premiere Pro 2020 fast. From several threads I read on forums, many folks talked about how they left Premiere for DaVinci Resolve. The cherry on top of the high quality output from DaVinci was it’s price tag: FREE. Adobe went to a subscriber model a few years ago and I am now paying over $600 a year for a product I don’t use nearly as much as I should for that price. I thought it prudent to give DaVinci a try. I noticed right away that processing was much quicker. That being said I couldn’t figure out how to add titles (the way I wanted them) in DaVinci and ended up exporting the DaVinci video into Premiere to add my text.

All in all, I’m looking forward to building on what I learned to provide a great service and product.