Okay, so today was all about reliving that KCC T20 Elite Championship from last year. Been meaning to put together a highlights reel of the best bits people might have missed since, honestly, live cricket flies by so darn fast.
Finding the Raw Stuff
First thing, I dug through my messy storage stack. Remembered I’d saved all the match recordings somewhere. Wasn’t easy. Went for the external drive rack first. Plugged in drive #3 – nada. Drive #1 was just backups of vacation photos. Finally hit the jackpot on Drive #4, buried in a folder labeled “CricketStuff Nov 22”. Big win right there.
Copied everything over to my main editing machine. Took ages. Grabbed a coffee, checked some emails, refilled the mug… stuff takes time, right?
Sifting Through the Chaos
Opened up DaVinci Resolve – that’s my go-to editor lately. Way better than the old software I used to wrestle with. Imported all the match files. Instantly realized the scope: this was hours and hours of footage. Like, days. Oof.
Started skimming through the finals day. Made markers whenever I saw something tasty:
- A super tight yorker smashing middle stump
- A six flying over the sightscreen
- A ridiculous diving catch near the boundary
- That bowler losing his cool at a dropped catch
Had to be ruthless. Just the absolute top-tier moments. Anything vaguely good got skipped. Took forever. Snack breaks were crucial. Ran out of coffee. Twice.
Cutting it Down
Now the hard part: turning 500 potential clips into a watchable 8-10 minute video.
Dumped all my marked clips into a fresh timeline. Looked like a disaster. Just a massive pile of great bits. Way too long. Started trimming clips down to the absolute essence: the build-up, the impact, the reaction. Cut, cut, cut.
Got the sequence kinda logical: grouped bowling magic first, then awesome fielding, then the biggest batting fireworks. Still felt messy though.
Added the soundtrack. Spent way too long on this bit. Wanted something upbeat but not distracting. Found a decent royalty-free track with a good build. Slapped it in. Adjusted clip lengths to hit some beats – tricky!
Rendered a rough draft. Hit Play. Noticed immediately:
- A few transitions felt jarring
- A clip looked slightly blurry on rewatch
- The pacing sagged in the middle
Back to the timeline. Tweaked, polished, re-trimmed.
The Unexpected Snag (And That Weird Link)
Everything was ready for final export. Feeling good. Went to export a high-quality MP4… and Resolve froze. Froze hard.
- Waited 10 minutes. Nothing.
- Closed it (lost the last few tweaks, naturally).
- Restarted the whole computer.
- Loaded the project file again. Held my breath.
It worked. Re-did the tweaks. FINALLY rendered the final video successfully. Huge relief. Went to upload it…
Then I realized, why am I even doing all this manually? That “KCC T20 Elite Championship 2022 Highlights” video everyone shared last month? Turns out my neighbor’s cousin knew one of the tournament organizers. They had like, five pro cameras, instant replay trucks, the whole nine yards. They edited their own slick highlight reel months ago! Was chatting with my neighbor last week during that big storm when the power went out and he mentioned it casually. I had NO idea! All this time, I was sweating over clips saved on some random external drive, while the real deal was polished and ready somewhere.
Kinda funny really. All this effort spent finding drives, marking clips, battling software, just to discover a perfectly good version existed. But hey, my version has that dropped catch tantrum which was way funnier than theirs. Small victories.
So yeah, check out the official one if you want the super smooth version. But if you want the rawness with a side of chaos, mine’s there too. Still need coffee.
