Personally i deal mostly with Adobe software, gernerally on a P.C. I'll be doing an introduction to editing with premiere and combining photoshop and aftereffects projects into film footage. This software is also available for the mac, and the tutorials should basically cover both. Firstly a once over of the programs you'll be using. Alot of the information on this page will also be useful for final cut users. Premiere A timeline video editor. You import your footage, cut it into as many pieces as you see fit. Then you place the clips on the timeline in the order you want. Crossfading, cutting, effects and sounds are all parts of the timeline. Once your video is ready you render it into one file. Photoshop Used to edit photos, create titles and credits, or perhaps to edit single frames of your film. A great feature is that you can import single layers of a photoshop project into premiere. After effects For more complicated in movie animations. If fact alot of the possibilities of after effects are now in the newer version of premiere pro but if your using and older version of premiere you might need after effects too. Three steps to maing a movie Gathering footage Idealy you'll want at least a mini DV camera with a handy firewire connection to your computer. From premiere you'll be able to control your DV device and capture you clips straight onto your computer. If in the case you have an analog camera your going to need a specific input on your computer and then a program to capture it, with an awful battle of codecs and compressors inbetween. Apart from that your footage can come from photos, animations projects or already exsisting movies. Also your soundtrack and effects falls under the heading footage. Editing prosess Once you've collected all your footage and files for your piece you'll want to send it through an editing program to put it in order, experiment with effects and add a soundtrack. Once the editing is finishes, you have to "render" it into one file. The word render will come back to haunt you and give you many a headeache. Rendering takes all the clips, effects, layers and sounds and makes one single playable file, your finished movie. Releasing The movie is finished, now the next step is get let others view it. Hosting on the web is the easiest way. Finding a site that will host your video or making one your self is easy. A few places take your video away and host it usually slapping some kind of advert on it. Othersites can give you a limited amount of free webspace to host it yourself. These sites generally have a bandwidth limit. Otherwise if you have your own server you just host it yourself. Setting up a premiere project Most importantly, keep your files orderly. Know where you are importing from and saving to. My guidelines from a project are : Make a folder on your computer, somewhere you have a lot of space. Call it "my video project - working folder". In that folder make 5 more folders. Premiere file - RAW footage - Stills - Sounds - Renders. Keep everything assosiated with your movie in these folders. Your clips, your credits and images, a copy of your soundtrack and the various sound effects you want to use. This way your project stays nice and clean, you always know where a specific file is, in case it needs further editing, and importantly if you want to move your porject to another location or aother computer you'll have everything in one folder. It's just a matter of copying the working folder and all your links will stay the same. Okay your ready to start up premiere. I'm using premiere pro, but most versions work pretty much the same, so with alittle clicking about the place you should get the same result. Premiere starts up, admire the horse, because unless you've got a powerful machine and nearly no plug-ins premiere can take a while. Premeire pro will automatcially ask you what you want to do, contiue a porject or start a new one. When you start a new one it'll ask for project locations (this is the first folder you made in your working folder). It will also ask you to give this certain project a name. You'll see this on the bottom of the pop up window. Later you'll be able to find the project files and nessisary bit's and bobs in your project folder. The rest of the window will be filled full of strange numbers, formats, templates and settings. Where are you? What part of the world. Some regions play NTSC videos (america and that end) others will play PAL (europe and my house). It's up to you to figure that one out. Click open the preset that suits you. In my case it's DV - PAL. You'll get 4 options. They are Standart and widescreen, followed by 32hrz or 48hrz. The first part is the resolution of your project standart or wide sreen, 4:3 or 16:9. This stands for the Width:height ratio of your final video. The second part deals the samlping rate or quality of your sound files. Venture into the custom tabs if you feel like figuring it out yourself. Or for now just go for Standart 48hrz, it's a nice base to work from. Everything ok? Then click OK. Your computer does a bit of thinking and then throws a number of windows at you. Generally your top left window is the project window. This is where you stash all your seperate clips, sounds and blah. In that window you'll already see one file. Sequence, this brings use to the timeline. This sequence file is your first timeline which should be stretched out along the bottom of your screen. This is where the editing happens. Then, above that you should see the mointor window, where premeiere shows you a preview of your finished file. Other than that, under the window button at the top of the screen you can open and close other little windows. History, info, audio mixer and others. But for now we''ll be dealing with the Project window, the timeline and the monitor. You should also have a tool bar with 11 difefrent icons on it. Firstly, right click on the empty space under the squence file in the project window and select new bin. A bin is for grouping certain footage and files together. Create a raw footage bin and a sound bin. Get into the raw footage bin by double clicking on it and then head to the file menu. Half way down you'll see the import option, with ctrl I next to it. Shortcut - Ctrl I to import. Choose a piece of footage from your project folder and import it. Now you should see that file in your raw bin. Doulbe clicking on it will give you a mini preview of the file, now click and drag it into the timeline. Ta-da your first step. Right, in your timeline you'll see a number of tracks. A few video tracks and a few audio tracks. Set the cursor to the begining of the time line and press play (space bar), now you should see a preview of your clip in the monitor window. Right now go and import another clip and put it in the timeline. Next to the first clip. Now when you play the timeline it'll cut from one to the other, fine if thats what you want it to do. Now for a cross fade. Grab the second clip and move it up to a higher video track, now move it back alittle so there is an overlap. Play the time line again and it'll cut to the clip thats on top when it's reaches the overlap point. Film on top is viewed, remember that. The cross fade function is known as a transistion in premiere, you can find your effects and transistions in the project window. If you look closely at the project window you'll see that there are two tabs. Project and effects. Go and have a look throught the lists of audio and video, effects and transistions. The one your looking for in this case is video transisitions - dissolve - cross dissolve. Click and drag that transistion into the timeline and put it ontp of the overlap in your video. Put it on the top video because thats the one that you want to fade. The transition should automatically fix itself to the size of the overlap, otherwise you can click on it to select it and hover near the edge you want to make longer. The cursor should turn ito a little red line with arrows, then click and drag your fade to make it the right length. Now play back the scene and it should happily fade from one clip to the other. Other transitions and effects all work on the same line, click said effect and drag it to the clip you want. To edit the effect, select the clip that has the effect and then go to the monitor window. On the left side of this window you get your effects controls. Change your effects here, if you want to actually see the effects changing in your clip you'll need to add keyframes from each parameter. A quick tutorial on motion and keyframes. Select a clip, go to the monitor effects control. There your see motion and opacity as defaults. Opacity is for maunally fading clips, and making them kind of see through. Open up the motions tab. you should see options in positions, scale, rotation and anchor positions. For this little excersize we are going to resize a clip to 50% and then let it get bigger visually in the time line. First select the clip and set the scle to 50%, look at your monitor to see your your smaller clip. Right now for keyframes, set your cursor in the timeline to the begining of the clip your resized. Then go back to the effects controls window and look closers at the scale option. Just to the left of the word scale you should see a small white cirle with a funny pointy bit at the top. If you click on it, it gets a small dot, you've now turned keyframes on. To the right of the word scale you see a smaller timeline, this is the timeline for the single clip. Changes made here will also effect your overall movie. On that smaller timeline you see a white dot, this is a keyframe from your scale control. In your main timeline move your cursor ahead by 2 seconds. A keyframe gets added each time you make a change in the settings of that effect. Change your scale value back up to 100% You've just made a change in the settings so a new keyframe is added. Mental note, I know i'm repeating myself but change a setting a new keyframe is added, so you can easily make new keyframes you dont really want by messing around with settings. Right now you have 2 keyframes in your clip, you'll see the effect on screen. Play your timeline again and you should see your clip going from 50% scale to 100% scale in two seconds. The basics of keyframes, if you turn keyframes off again it'll delete all the keyframes you made and leave you on your current settings. Right, little exersize, with keyframes and opacity, make your clip fade in from darkness in 3 seconds. Alittle sound, go to your sound bin and import a sound file. Drage it to your timeline and put it in an audio track. With souns transitions your can make it fade in and out. Mess around with effects too. Credits, make a still image of your credits. In photo shop preferably or other wise in any other picture editor. Credits - My film, music by me, editing be me and starring me. The standart resolution is 4:3 720 pixels by 576. So if you make your image file this big aswel it'll fit nicey in your clip. 720x576 burn this number into your brain. Import your file into a bin in premiere, drag it to the timeline, stretch it out so it's the length your want and make it fade in and out using keyframes. If you want a scrolling type credits you have to make the image file bigger than the video resolution and then make it move by using position keyframes. Nearly there, have a look at your timeline again and you'll see a yellow bar above it. This is the work area bar, handy for rendering the whole clip or only certain sections of it. Move it around the place alittle, get the hang of it. Right time to render, everythings in place. Render, argh i hate that word. Until now I hav'nt mentions file types. Unfortunantly now i have to. windows media files, quicktime movies, real movies, avi's, mpegs, div-x, m2v, VOB, mp2, mp3, mp4, .wmv, .rm, argh this defintly give you a headache. I'm going to skim over it now. So for now we'll be going for .AVI uncompressed. A huge file type that'll suck your hard disk empty and leave youe video card gasping for breath as it tries to keep up with the resolution. But a very high video quality. Set your work area bar to the length of the clip you want to render. Then go to the file menu, then down the list your'll see export. And the top option there is export movie - CTRL M (shortcut to render screen). The pop up screen asks you where you want to render the movie. Put it in the renders folder we made earlier. Give it a name and then press settings not save. Settings. Yet another pop window with loads of options. The list on the left is the 4 main catagories of options. In the general list. Change the top option to windows avi, not windows dv avi. Then the next option, change it to work area bar, this will give you control over what part of the movie is rendered. You can also say render whole project, but for future bebifits it's good to get into the habit of choosing the time yourself. Other than that you can turn on and off the audio tracks and choose if you want your neww clip brought back into your project imeadiatly. Browse through the other settings too, im your own time. Go to the video section and change the compressor to none. Here you can also change the resolution of the movie and the frame rate. Press OK. Now your ready to render so press save. The program starts to render, and a glorious blue bar starts to slowley crawl across the screen. Enjoy. Eventually your movie will go ping and it's ready. Leave premiere and go to your project folder and to the render folder in it. It there you'll find your freshly rendered video waiting to be viewed. Hopefully it works too. There you go, that was'nt so hard was it. I've only skimmed of the tiniest bit of potential the program has, now it's up to you to explore the program it's self. Come and join us on the forum if you've got questions, or if you've found so cool combinations of effects. |