Tips and tricks for creating a memorable (and watchable) birth video from DadLabs' own shooting and editing guru, Daddy Troy. Create a simple three-act structure, from pregnancy to delivery to baby, in snuggly little five-minute bundle. Your friends and family will appreciate it, and you'll enjoy it for year to come. Brought to you by Boon. DadLabs Ep. 320 Gear Daddy.

Daddy Troy: Welcome back to Gear Daddy, I’m your host Daddy Troy. Today I’m talking about birth videos. No I don’t mean videotaping the actual birth of your child, although I will talk about that today. Instead I’m talking about birth movies – a little vignette a kind of birth video announcement of your child. And this whole week of Dad Labs has been sponsored by Boon – Innovations for modern parents and I’m giving away a potty bench this week. So stick around until the end of the program and I’ll tell you how to get one.

Now in order to make a birth video, you actually need a video camera, but what I recommend is a digital still camera that also takes movies. This is a Canon power-shot series - also called the digital Elf, takes really great movies and also has a really good microphone on it. There are a few other accessories you want to get besides a camera. The first one would be a larger memory card because video takes up tons of memory – maybe buy 2 or 3 in a pack if you can; they tend to be pretty cheap now.

You also want to make sure you get a tripod. A tripod does 3 things for you, number one - it allows you to get pictures of both you and your wife at the same time – this is a partnership after all. The second thing you can do with a tripod is that you can get really steady pictures instead of all shaky camera pictures that make people sick when they watch it. And the third thing that a tripod does for you is that it allows you to, once you get to the hospital – you’re about to deliver the baby, you can simply put the camera on the tripod, let it roll and you can focus on the birth rather than being a photographer.

Think of your birth video like a birth movie. It comes in 3 acts, the first act is pregnancy, the second act is labor and delivery, and the final act is the baby. During the first act you’ll obviously take a lot of pictures and movies of mom – don’t forget to include you in some of those pictures, you as a couple. Take a lot of pictures and video of your house as it was before you had kids – maybe roll a movie of you guys setting up the nursery.

Since the second act is labor and delivery and since you really should be helping pregnant mom, tread lightly here. Snap a few photos between contractions, do a pan of the delivery room, maybe set up the tripod in the corner and press record when things start to get interesting.

The third act includes your new baby. Fingers, toes, glowing mom, glowing dad, baby sounds. Make sure you know how to turn off the flash on your camera, so you don’t bombard the kid with photons. And then a great finale to your movie is the pushing of mom out to the car in a wheelchair, or the actual putting of the baby into the car for the ride home- and you might want to get a friend to help you out with this.

In order to make your movie, you need to get all of the footage and all of the still pictures onto a computer and then get some free software, like Apple’s I-movie, or windows movie maker, in order to put all the clips and still pictures together. Here's a really important thing – keep the movie under 5 minutes. Nobody, even your best relatives want to watch any movie that’s over 5 minutes - keep it short, keep it sweet. Once you have all the stuff together at the 5 minute piece, put your favorite soundtrack down for it, maybe some cute credits like ‘produced by mom and dad’ or ‘best boy’ which is a position on a film set, and then use the export for web function in these programs, to keep the file size small.

Finally upload it to someplace like Youtube or maybe your own password protected website, or best of all, come over to the Dad Labs cribs – it’s a new feature we have, by which our users can upload videos and pictures. If you go there now you’ll actually see a bunch of examples of birth videos.

This whole week at Dad Labs has been sponsored by Boon, and we’re giving away a Boon potty bench. All you have to do is go to dadlabs.com and leave a comment on any episode we did this week - that’s episodes 317 through 320 - they’ll automatically be in the drawing to win one. We’ll see you next week on Gear Daddy at dadlabs.com.