The internet says that you can do awesome things with crayons, glue, a canvas, and a heat gun, and my wife did exactly that on the weekend, with very colourful results. I figured the dripping wax might look cool on film (or on an SD card, rather), so I grabbed the camera, and as it turned out, it looked awesome:

The music is my most recent track, Texel, which seemed like a good match for the video. It was all shot with a hand-held Canon 550D and a 50mm f/1.8 lens, hence the shakiness — it took some time to go through all of the video and find the usable bits, where the camera was both steady and in focus.

I used Kdenlive to edit it all together, and I’m glad to say that it was much more solid than it was during my last video editing project. In particular, it automatically cropped the extra lines out of the 550D’s 1920×1088 files, so I didn’t need to transcode anything. I didn’t apply much processing this time, which may have helped — there’s just a few simple transitions and some colour correction work.

Kdenlive’s ability to use proxy clips — small, low-resolution copies of your original high-res clips that are used during editing — helped keep the preview playback smooth while editing. The original clips are used while rendering the video, though, so the proxy clips don’t affect the final output quality.