Yearly Recap Video
A year of footage is a lot of raw material and very few finished films. The difference is almost entirely in the constraints you set before you start: length per day, orientation, and what counts as a day worth including.
Decide the length per day first
This single choice determines everything else. One second per day gives a fast, rhythmic film of roughly six minutes across a well-documented year. The format most people mean by a recap.
Three seconds gives each day enough time to register as a scene and pushes the same year past fifteen minutes. Five seconds makes something closer to a documentary of your year that few people will watch in one sitting. Pick early, because the rhythm is what the film is.
Import the whole year in one pass
Rather than adding days one at a time, set a date range of 1 January to 31 December and let Dayjavu scan the library. It reports how many days in that range actually contain video, which is usually the moment people realise the year is more documented than it felt.
From there the work is triage: move through the calendar, keep the obvious days, and set the start point on the clips that need it.
Export, then export again
Render on the device and it saves to your photo library. If the first cut runs long, drop the per-day length and export a second version. The source clips are untouched, so nothing is lost by trying both.
A workable recipe
- One second per day for a six-minute year.
- Import January to December in a single date range.
- Set start points only on the clips that need them.
- Export twice: one short to share, one long to keep.
FAQ
- How long does building a year actually take?
- Most people finish a full year in five to ten minutes, because the work is choosing rather than editing.
- What if some months have almost nothing?
- Those months pass quickly rather than leaving a gap. The film follows whatever you filmed.
- Can I add music?
- Dayjavu exports a standard video file, so you can add a soundtrack afterwards in any editor if you want one.