Viewfinder: The Future: Boredom-Free Home Video

Homemade movies and videos deservedly have had the reputation of being very boring. Typically, the footage documents family activities ranging from birthdays to vacations. They tend to be of most interest to the home video's creator, the people featured in the video and their friends and family members. Almost everyone avoids watching home videos (other than his or her own).

One of the reasons that home videos tend to be boring is that they are usually unedited. Professional documentary video production is based upon the notion of capturing many hours of footage and keeping only the best scenes so that the final product contains the very best five percent (or less) of the footage. I have great confidence that if you read this magazine, you edit your home videos, so you've already succeeded in reducing viewer boredom.

Perhaps you could edit more aggressively by dutifully omitting any scenes that are less than perfect. However, by doing so, you'd be catering to a larger audience at the cost, perhaps, of your own appreciation, and that of your friends and family, who'd appreciate those marginal scenes. It makes one wonder, wouldn't it be great if it was easy to make two versions of eve…