Originally Posted by: jasensmith 
It's an interesting arrangement and I think it sounds pretty darn good.
Also those Special Edition collections are sounding better and better as time goes on.
BTW how did you get that footage? Is that some stock footage you found somewhere? They didn't let you fly a drone through Arlington National Cemetery did they?
Thanks :)
This took alot of massaging to get them to sound nearly realistic, there are a few parts that a trained ear will probably hear right away, 1 spot in the second verse, the beginning of the key change, and the grand canyonn pan / flag shot, and maybe a few other places, but I feel like I am getting a much better idea of how to do this.
As to the footage, it all came from Youtube, each scene from longer clips that I cut out to string together the video you see.
The Declaration is actually just an image, and I programmed the movie software I use to pan down the image.
There was also the dilema of watermarks, many of the clips contained watermarks, and I wanted clean video with no distracting and ugly watermarks, so I zoomed in slightly so that the watermarks were not visible in the video, for example, the slow pan of Lincoln at the beginning (which is why the top of his head is slightly cut off haha). One video, I used the same technique of zooming into the image, because the drone propeller was visible in the video (the Mount Rushmore flyby).
Finally, the video needed to line up correctly, so I time stretched some of the video clips to make it timed exactly to the music. The Lincoln video was time stretched, the Declaration was programmed, so no stretching required, and everything else was the left alone all the way until the very end, starting with the grand canyon where I had to stretch that scene and the flag scene I think I sped that up, and the jet flyby was also sped up dramatically.
As to the cemetery footage, this is not Arlington, I believe it is a cemetery in Georgia, where they built a replica of the reflecting pool and washington monument, this is what you see just after the key change / modulation. The actual real Washington Monument is significantly taller, and the real reflecting pool is significantly bigger.
Arlington does not allow photography without a permit, which is why there is very little amateur footage available of it.
The video editing itself was done with Vegas Studio, and I used a plugin for Firefox to download the video, and an online video editor to cut out the parts I wanted from the videos I downloaded. Once I had everything, it was relatively easy to just drag and drop everything in, and once I learned how to use the software, the time stretching, text, and zooming was very easy and straight forward to do, as well as programming the pan across the image. Vegas Studio was made for this exact sort of thing, it seems to have everything you could ever want for putting together a video collage, with exception to font choices and font animating (programming animated text is a pain in the butt, so I didnt do this... I originally wanted to use a handwriting font for the text at the beginning of the video).
Anyway, more info than you probably wanted to know haha...this was my first time using Vegas, and probably my 10th complete composition, Im starting to really get the hang of it.