A year in photos and video from the 2021 Speed Championship.

• 81 Drivers
• 15 Rounds
• 6 Classes
• 5 Championships

The original BlatChat Post about this video can be found here. 

The content of that post was

Hi All,

  I hope you all enjoy the latest Club video we've put together. This one is a "season in review" of the 2021 Speed Championship. We had nearly 900 photos and over 50 videos submitted for this video, so I hope you'll excuse the length of video on account of the great content we got.

  If you could all go and watch the video (even if you have it on in the background while you do something else) that would really help get our YouTube content out to as many people as possible. As many of you know, the more people who watch the video the more likely YouTube is to promote it to other people. That means more people get to see how much fun the Speed Champs are.

  If you have a YouTube account then please "like" the video and "subscribe" to the channel, that also makes a big difference. Finally on the promotion side, if you leave a comment on the video then YouTube really likes that too and will again be more likely to promote it to other people.... you don't need to say anything profound, just a thumbs up or a "well done" will suffice. And of course it's a free world, so you can also say you hated it if that's the message you want to leave :-)

  For those of you that like the production detail, I'll also do a blog post on this site at some point about the making of this video.

  This video was shown on Sunday at the Speed Champs awards ceremony and I hope to have a video of the those awards to share with you all over the next few weeks.

  Thanks for Graham Howard for his patience in putting the video together! :-)

The Detail

At the end of the season Graham asked all the competitors to provide video and/or photos that they took through the Speed Championships in 2021. They each then uploaded their contributions (if they wanted to) to a Dropbox folder which gave me about a month to produce a video.

It has a 38 minute and 47 second run time. Graham first asked me for a 10 minute video, but that was going to be a challenge given all the media I was provided with.

The 900 photos and 50 videos created a video that was about 2 hours long. So I spent the month chopping that down to something more palatable and adding some music, titles and graphics. I know not everyone likes the music but on the whole reactions are more positive than negative to music so that's what I'll keep doing. The music for this video is essentially selected from a set of Jingle sound effects which are included in Apple's Final Cut Pro video editing software.

All in all there's about 1100 items in the video: video clips, audio, transitions, titles, etc. Each needs to be timed correctly to achieve some sense of rythm... hopefully I've achieved that through the video.

In terms of the time it took to create this video... it probably took somewhere around 50 hours in total.

The tools used for this video were:

• Apple Final Cut Pro (Video editing, music, titles etc)
• Apple Motion (Motion Graphics, lower 3rds)
• iZotope RX9 (Audio repair)
• Pixelmator Pro (Thumbnails, stills, logos etc)
• MotionVFX (a few plugins for Social Media graphics, intro animations etc)
• Google Text to Speech (for the spoken bit at the beginning I used Google's speech APIs to produce some speech that wasn't me! )

Things I would do differently:

• Try and get the club to pay for better music - I struggle to find even reasonable royalty free music to add to these videos and it can take a long time to fit what I can get into the tempo of the video we're trying to go for
• Ask the speed champ guys for a few more videos of cars on the circuits (from outside the car) and some more videos of things in the paddock.
• Perhaps narrate some more of the video and produce more of a story
• Get people to send video/audio through the year rather than just at the end.

As of December 27th 2021 the video has been watched about 1,000 times and is one of the more popular videos on the clubs YouTube channel.

John