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Foxvideo Productions



Having spent the best part of 40 years looking through a viewfinder of a stills or video camera, sitting in front of a computer editing photos or videos, producing websites and managing content and social media accounts for organisations or individuals, it’s a very strange feeling to now say “I’m retired".

Despite no longer taking on commercial paid work, it’s virtually impossible to suddenly stop what you’ve been doing for the best part of your working life so, for the past few years I’ve been taking on work on a ‘pro-bono’ basis for church, charity or voluntary organisations. I hope that my experience, skills and equipment can now be put to good use by those who perhaps, don’t have the budget or funding to produce what they want or need for their media requirements.

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AI for Logo design?

written by: Dave Farrants
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I had a conversation with a good friend recently about AI, he was interested in creating a new logo for his website and I suggested that tools like Gemini or ChatGPT could probably design something. However, he mentioned he’d tried a similar route recently but found the results disappointing.

I mentioned the key to obtaining a good result from AI is crafting a well worded prompt - it was no use just entering “make me a logo for my business called ‘anybusiness.com”, AI needs to know a lot more about what you actually want, I used an example of ‘describe to a child who doesn’t speak English’ what you want and to then use that as a prompt in ChatGPT or Gemini.
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Shooting Shorts

Filed in: Video |Production and editing written by: Dave Farrants
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I edit and upload YouTube videos for my local Chapel and we'd normally expect around 30 hits per YouTube video uploaded. I'd considered using 'shorts' recently (see https://foxvideo.co.uk/?post=from-facebook-ad-to-diy-video-shorts) and found that our hit rate was now in the thousands per 60 second video! Two other people I help with video editing were suddenly interested in me producing 'shorts or 'reels' for them, so I produced (with a little help from my good friend Gemini) a PDF to help them. Click READ MORE to read it or download it.
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Mission Glimpse

written by: Dave Farrants
Ever wondered what a mission trip is like? Discover the heart of Sindangan, Mindanao, Philippines in this short video. Glimpse the local culture, the warmth and generosity of its people, and the unique flavours we experienced during our trip with Gorsley Baptist Church and The Peace and Hope Trust (July/August 2024). We'll show you the place, introduce you to the people, and some of the food they shared with us! The video ends with Geoff Crago reading "So Send I You." by Elizabeth Givens. What inspires you to serve?
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From Facebook Ad to DIY Video Shorts

written by: Dave Farrants
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It started with a Facebook ad...

The offer was simple: take a full-length sermon and extract two 1-minute clips to post on social media. As someone who’s been exploring the idea of sharing “reels” or “shorts” lately, it caught my eye. Every Sunday, I record the full sermon at my chapel, broadcast it live via OBS, and it goes straight to YouTube. So, this seemed like a logical next step.
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How do you get your head around ChatGPT?

written by: Dave Farrants
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I edited a piece to camera for a good friend, it was about keeping the church graveyard grass mown and the relationship between us, and those who have passed before us and who lay under the ground that he was mowing. We couldn’t decide on a title for YouTube for the video so I threw the script into ChatGPT which then came up with around 15 different suggestions, we chose “A Cut Above the Past’. I could understand how ChatGPT managed to do that from what I supplied but, what followed was beyond my comprehension...

Peter asked if I could find a photo of a Husquvana ride on mower in a graveyard situation, mowing the grass...I did try my usual picture source, Depositphotos and found nothing, so I provided a descriptive prompt to ChatGPT and you can see the result!

Yes, it could have been achieved in Photoshop or similar but it would have taken considerably longer than the 2 minutes it did in ChatGPT!
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DaVinci Resolve Studio 20 Beta

written by: Dave Farrants
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Blackmagic Design just dropped Resolve Studio 20 Beta in time for NAB with an incredible range of new AI features, but for me the one I’ll use the most has to be the ‘AI Music Editor’ that automatically edits music to any desired length.

Ever since the early days when Adobe Premiere started to be taken as a serious NLE, Smartsound produced a Premiere plugin for their range of catalogue music that could be adjusted to any length to suit the clip or edit, I’ve often struggled to make a music track fit, my ear for finding a cut and duplicating the track to the length I wanted just never seemed to quite work!

I’ve just tried the new feature and it works perfectly, I’ve still yet to play with all the other new features but for me, just this one is a game changer!

UPDATE.

One other feature (was in v19 but I understand has been updated in v20Beta) that I find I'm using more and more is 'Smooth Cut'. I've started to produce Shorts and Reels from the Sunday sermons I record at my local Chapel, these sometimes need tiny edits to cut out a sentence or word and a 7 to 9 frame smooth cut transitions makes the cut virtually invisible.
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A NEW Browser...

written by: Dave Farrants
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Over the years I’ve tried them all, from the early days of web browsing with Netscape (remember that?) to the current range of more well known browsers, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, they’re now the browser choices for most people and they ‘do what it says on the tin’. But what if you want a browser that you control, not the other way around? Try Vivaldi, a fully customisable browser with power user options that’s quietly attracting attention. Vivaldi is available for Desktop, Android and iOS…..
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Google Search - 10 items only?

written by: Dave Farrants
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Like many people I use Google Search many times a day, I had my Google prefs set to show 100 results, sometime recently Google removed this option and now only show 10 results per page which infuriated me! Using Google search I looked for answers and found several methods to change back to 100 results per page although the method was slightly unclear so I thought I'd post the method on here……
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