Travel recap video: how to make one from a week of phone clips, with the days in order
A week away produces a hundred clips and a promise to edit them on the plane home. The plane home is for sleeping. Travel recaps differ from every other montage in one way: the order matters. A party is one place and one evening; a trip is seven places in seven days, and a film that shuffles them reads as a reel of pretty views with no story.
What a travel recap needs
- Days in order, with the day or the place visible at each change. It turns views into a route.
- Arrivals. The first shot of each place: stepping off the train, the hotel door, the first look at the sea.
- Food, briefly. Two seconds per meal. Everyone films the food; nobody wants to watch it.
- People, not just places. The traveller in the frame, even badly. In ten years the view is on Google; the person is not.
- One shot of transit. The window of the bus. It is the glue between days.
- Sound from the place, under the music: a market, a bell, the sea. Ten seconds with the track ducked does more than another drone shot.
Length: one minute for a weekend, two for a week, three is the ceiling. Nobody asks for more.
By hand
Sort by date before you sort by quality. Pick the arrival and one highlight per day, then fill to the song. Add a caption at each day change. Cut on the beat where the music is driving, and let the quiet shots run longer where it breathes. Our free BPM detector exports beat markers for Final Cut, Premiere and Resolve; the video splitter cuts a long clip at its shot changes so you can grab the good seconds.
In one tap
In Life2Film, set the period to the trip’s dates and choose Travel. It keeps the days in order, burns a caption in at every change of shooting day, starts at a minute with 30, 60 and 120 second options, and cuts to the track you pick. The picks are spread across the days, so the one afternoon you filmed too much of does not take over the film. “More of the coast, less of the airport” re-cuts it in seconds.
For the long version, the same period with Chronicle: every clip in order, up to ten minutes, no music, dates on screen. It is the film the people who were there want.
If you shot on a DJI Osmo Pocket
Life2Film connects to the Osmo Pocket over its Wi-Fi and downloads the originals to the phone, so the pocket camera’s clips and the iPhone’s land in one film. The phone leaves the camera’s network when the download is done. GoPro owners have had this inside Quik for years; this is the equivalent for the camera most people who left GoPro ended up with.
Where the footage goes
Travel footage is a map of where you were and who with. Most automatic recap tools upload it before they cut it. Life2Film’s analysis runs on the iPhone, so it works offline, on the plane, with nothing leaving the phone and no account. The comparison covers the others.