Transcripts
1. Course Trailer: Hi, I'm Allan Michael, and welcome to faster, fresher, more exciting my Premier Pro CC video editing course. Over the next 11 lessons, you'll learn techniques that will make your videos look professionally edited. You'll be guided step-by-step through my process for editing videos and make an impact. For years, I've been creating a large variety of video content as a professional editor. No matter whether I'm working on a TV commercial, music video, or a personal project, I always have to use edit techniques that drive the story forward in an engaging way. Whoever my client or audience is, my goal is always the same. How do I hook them in so that they stay with me until the end of the video? I'll show you how to do this using only Premiere Pro CC's built-in features and free stock footage, sound effects, and music. You'll finished this course, knowing how to create powerful videos using pacing, creative music edits and color correction, and Premiere's built-in effects. This class is perfect for beginner level editors that have a basic understanding of Premiere Pro, as well as intermediate level editors that want to make a bigger impact with their edits. Although you'll be following my edit as a guide, I'll encourage you to upload your own work in progress and your finished videos so you can get feedback. This course will help you push through your own creative boundaries. By the end, you'll have your own original video, which you can use to bulk up your showreel or show it to a potential client. I look forward to you joining me as we create awesome videos with attitude.
2. Project Overview: Hi everyone. Welcome to lesson 1. In this lesson, I'm going to show you the video I made for this course and I'll go through some of the elements and creative decisions that went into it. Along the way, you'll hopefully be able to understand the creative and technical process I used for my professional work. In this lesson, I'll also introduce you to your course assignment and give you some great free resources where you can find material to work with. Let's jump in and let's watch my video. I actually made this video using almost entirely free resources and a few of the video effects that are built into Premiere Pro CC. The only personal shot that I used is this shot of my wife training with a light steak. To create this video, I first cut the music track down to about 45 seconds, and I made sure to include a music pause in the middle. I did this in order to break the monotony of the music because the track is actually quite repetitive. I wanted there to be a little pause there in the middle and for it to be a little bit unexpected. In order to keep the edit exciting and fast, I overlaid some shots and played around with transfer modes, as well as using some dissolves and a simple built in Premiere Pro CC video effect that I end up using quite a lot in my edit. I then finished the video off by adding some creative color grading. I also created a simple animated title. This video is really just a creative exercise that I'm using to illustrate some of the techniques that professional editors use to make their edits feel fresher and more exciting. A lot of the techniques and theories that you're going to learn in this course you'll actually be able to apply them to any kind of video that you make. Whether it be a music video, whether you're working on a documentary and perhaps you want to have a faster sequence in the middle of that documentary that breaks the monotony of the interviews, whether you want to have a really pumping and exciting showreel, or if you're working on like really exciting sports, action videos that need a lot of pace and power, there are a lot of applications for these ideas. Your assignment for this course is to create your own original 45 seconds video using all of these techniques that I'm about to show you. Feel free to use your own footage if you've got it or get the freebies from the websites I'll talk about in the next lesson. Okay, so join me in the next lesson so we can get started in creating your own awesome edits.
3. Gathering Free Materials: Some of the really cool free sites, I'll just go through them in a list. The first one here is called Dissolve, so this is actually a paid website and they have tons of really high-quality footage. But it's expensive, if you're working on a bigger production and you have a budget, this is definitely a great site to checkout for quality footage. What I like about here though is that they give away three free clips a month and they're often really good quality. If you just check it out here and I think these change at the beginning of every month. As you've seen, I've actually used this middle one in my edit. The second resource is called Beachfront B-roll, and these guys are just really awesome. Some of the footage here is just amazing and there's tons of it and it's completely free. I actually got most of the footage for my edit from this website. It's broken down into categories, so it's really easy to see what different varieties of clips there are, but this is definitely an amazing resource to check out for downloading footage. Like I said, I got most of my stuff here and it's just amazing. While I was here, I actually chose shot that I found visually striking, rather than thinking too much about what story I was going to tell. I did this because I knew that the main driver of our piece is going to be audio, it's going to be the music track, so I focus mainly on visuals and I thought, great, what is just awesome, what makes an impression on me on here? I'm happy to say there are a lot of great shots and it was actually difficult to choose from the best, but I selected about 20 clips or so and I downloaded those to work with. The next resource is called Epic Slow Mo. At the moment they don't have any free clips, but they do sometimes have some great slow-motion clips, so this is something that you can check out to see if there'll be something online when you're doing the course. They are also sponsored by a company called VideoBlocks, which I actually use quite a lot for my professional work. They have subscription service, and I think it's $100 a year, and you can download tons of really great footage. The next resource is the YouTube Audio Library, and they've got a bunch of music tracks in here that are completely free. This is where I actually got my music track. You can actually search by genre, or by mood, by instrument, by duration, which is really handy. It's definitely a great site to go on just to get totally free music. The place where I get all of my free sound effects is called Freesound, and this is a really cool resource for just getting tons of sound effects for free, for using in your edit. You can search for whatever you're looking for. For instance, in my edit, I use the record scratch, so I just type record scratch, and I go acquire a few scratches, you can preview them here and download them and use them really easily in your work. The final resource is a really great eBook called Edit Like a Pro. This is such a cool website and it's just such a nice book. You get 50 tips that pretty much break down most of the fundamentals that go into video editing. A lot of video editors including myself do these things maybe naturally or because we've learned them from someone else or just through the years of experience. But here they've actually created a great guide that lets you understand pretty much all of the different elements that go into editing. I definitely recommend going to this website and downloading the free eBook. You'll be able to find all of these links in the additional resources section of the class project. In this lesson, I showed you some great free resources for finding stock footage, music, and sound effects. If you take advantage of these and get some great material data with, you have taken your first step to creating an awesome video. Join me in the next lesson where I'll show you how to set up your premier project using my own personal template, how to choose your project settings, and keep all your assets well organized.
4. Setting Up The Project: Hi everyone, welcome to lesson 3. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to set up your Premiere project using my own personal template, how to choose your project settings, and keep all of your assets organized on your hard drive. Because I work on such a large volume of edits, I've created a Premiere Pro CC project template, so that I can get started really quickly. It lets me have all of my folders and bin setup within Premiere just with a click. Let's have a look inside. So I have this template set up in a way so that I have all of my main bins already created for me, and that allows me to just get started really quickly. I'll just go through these bins one by one so you understand what I'm doing. I number them so that they actually stay in the sequence that I like them to be. So the first bin, I normally put my sequences in here, then I put video in this bin, audio, I have a graphics bin. I put all of my still images in this one. This one, we won't be using for our course, but I do normally use it very much when I'm doing my professional work, and I call it AE Linked. So this is where I actually put all of my aftereffects compositions that are linked into Premiere. Here in the layers bin, I actually put all of my adjustment layers, which I sometimes use to do color grading on the clips, and I also put all of my titles. In the final bin, I put all of my reference files, which will sometimes be PDF files that have text or even references from other jobs that I've done. There might be a video in there where I'm referencing a color or a particular sequence, so those all go in here. So let's jump into the Finder and look at how my folder structure is for my projects. So here, I have my project folder, which I've called Skill Share course 1. Inside of this folder, I have three other folders, which pretty much break down everything that I need for a particular project. So I have an assets folder where I put my graphics, I put my music, my sound effects, my still images, and I put my video. I also have an exports folder where I will export drafts too. I can also export all the final edits too and I can also export my tests. I normally do a lot of tests when working with footage because I'm working with different cameras or different frame rates, the different frame sizes, so I like to have a test folder there at my exports. I also have a projects folder. Here, because I'm working completely within the Adobe world, I have my folders named how Adobe names its software. So although for our project we're only going to be using Premiere, which is PR, I do often have an AE folder where I put my aftereffects projects and the Photoshop folder where I put all my Photoshop images. I'll also, sometimes, even have Audition and Illustrator folders. So let's jump back into Premiere now, and now let me show you how to choose your sequence settings. So one of the really quick tricks that I use for getting a sequence started is a lot of my projects will often be using this very similar type of footage. So a lot of the stuff I work on will be showing a DSLR, for instance, and it'll all come in as an H.264, and it'll usually be 25 frames per second. So normally what I do is I'll actually find one of those clips that I know is going to be the same as what my final output is. I'll right-click on it and just select, create new sequence from clip. So this will automatically create an H.264 sequence at 25 frames per second, which I know my output will be. Conversely, I also work a lot in another codec called ProRes LT. The benefit of this is that it's actually 10-bit instead of the 8-bit that you get with H.264, and I actually find that it exports much quicker from Premiere and it feels more stable to me. So sometimes I'll actually convert all of my footage to ProRes LT and edit with that. So for my project settings, I normally like to keep the different aspects of my projects on different hard drives. I actually find that Premiere Pro works really well when you do that. So if we go up here to file project settings, scratch disks, we can have a look to see where Premiere Pro is putting our video previews, audio previews, and where it has the auto save. What I normally have is Premiere running off of my solid-state drive on my computer. Then, I'll have all of the footage, sound effects, and music running from a separate hard drive, which in my case is actually connected via Thunderbolt, so it's super fast. Then I'll have all of the video previews, audio previews, and the Projects Auto Save going to a third and separate drive. So here, if you click on browse, you can actually choose the different places where you can have all of these files go to. Like I said, having it in three different places, speeds of Premier Pro is so, so much. It's unbelievable. So in the next lesson, we're finally going to sink our teeth into editing. I'll show you how to customize the music track so that it's more powerful and fits with the length of your project.
5. Music and Sound Effects: Okay, cool. Lesson four, everyone. I hope I haven't been moving too quickly. But the cool thing is that from now on, we're going to get more into editing, so it should be a little bit more fun. In this lesson, we're going to start working with our first story element, which is music. In my video, the music track is really the thread that's holding everything together and it's also providing the energy that drives the story forward. As we can see from the audio waveform, the track has a lot of punctuation points, which is one of the reasons that I chose it. Well, it's good to have these punctuation points so you can edit with. You also have to be careful not to keep the track being too repetitive and we can see from this audio waveform that it's a really repetitive track. That's why I decided that I was going to cut it up and give it a pause in the middle, and then have it end on a really strong note again. Okay, so let's have a listen. [MUSIC] Okay, so I really like how that starts off, because I want my video to start off with a really big bump, but it does get really monotonous very quickly. So, I actually want to find a place where I can break it down, okay, and have a pause in the middle in a way that feels really natural. And one of the best ways to do this is normally to go to the end of the track and see how the track resolves there. So let's have a listen to the end. [MUSIC]. So now I know that I can bring the end of the track to one of the beats that are kind of new at the beginning of the track. So let's start bringing in the music into our sequence so we can start playing around with it. If you remember from the last class, we created a sequence by right-clicking on a clip in urban. We can get rid of this clip now because the sequence settings are already set. So that's really cool. So we'll just delete this and start bringing in our music. [MUSIC] Okay? So I want the music to start in from the beginning. [MUSIC] Okay. So right there is the point where I want to bring in the end so that I can have a really clear but natural feeling pause. So I've already set an end point and now I will hit "O" and set an end point for the track, and you can just drag it in. Okay, if you hit the "Plus and Minus Key" over here, you can zoom in to your piece of music, and if you double-click in this little section here, you can expand this track so you can really see the audio waveform much better. Okay, so let's zoom in a little bit more by hitting the "Plus Key". Now I know that I have a break in the music right here. So let's have a listen again. [MUSIC] I know that at the end of the music track, I also have exactly the same beat before it stops. [MUSIC] Okay, so it's right here. So I'm going to hit "I" and set an end point there and we'll drag this back in down here, and let's have a listen. [MUSIC] Okay, we're still about one beat off over there. So a really easy way to move this clip back one frame at a time is to select it and to hit the command and the "Left Arrow Key" to go left. So let's try that. [MUSIC] Okay, cool. So that's really good. It basically feels and it sounds like the music is resolving right there. Now, I want the music tracks to come back in, but I want it to be the second half of this track which I know picks up, there's a kind of a tolling bell that comes in and the music is a little bit more animated towards the end. So let me find that beat to bring it back in. So let's listen to the track up here again. [MUSIC] So it's right there when I hear that bell toll, I know that that's where I want it to come back in. So, I'm going to set an end point there. And again, I'm going to drag this track back down into my sequence. Okay, and let's listen to see how that feels. [MUSIC] Okay, so it's a nice long pause there. [MUSIC] Okay, cool. That's perfect. That's exactly what I wanted. Now, I want the piece to resolve again. So all I'm going to do is really just repeat the same process. [MUSIC]. So it's right there again with that 'woop' sound. Okay, so again, I can select the clip. I can mark it by pressing "M". Okay, and again it will go to the end. [MUSIC] Find that same sound again. Press the "C Key" to bring up the cutter tool. If we go back to where the marker is with the cutter tool, we can cut this. Now again, we select the middle clip, we press option "Delete". Okay, and now it's brought those two ends together. Let's have a listen. [MUSIC] Okay, perfect. So now, I've got my music track edited down to more or less the length that I wanted. I've got a nice kind of thumping beginning, I've got a nice pause in the middle, and I have the second part of the song coming in right here. So that the second half of the video comes in with a lot of power as well, so that's exactly what I wanted. Okay, so the final piece of editing the sound for this video is really going to be provided by the sound effects. Sound effects are really a great way to add depth to your edit and a lot of times they can make your visuals feel more impactful and alive. For this piece, I knew I wanted to have a sound in the beginning that introduced the piece before we went into the music and because it's kind of a hip hop track, I thought a scratching like a record scratching sound might be really good. So using the resources that I showed you in the previous lessons, I downloaded a record scratch sound. Let's have a listen. [MUSIC] Okay, and for the middle, for the pause, because I'm thinking that I wanted it to be somewhere in the sea but I have a shot of the sea with my wife. The shot where she's playing with the light stick. I thought I might get a sea sound, but I wanted something a little bit trippier. No, I didn't want just your typical sound of waves. I wanted something that was a little bit different. It was more magical. So I found this sound also on Freesound and let's have a listen. [MUSIC] Okay. So I thought that was pretty cool. It has a little bit of kind of sea and wind in there, but also the kind of wind chime sounds which I think are pretty cool. Okay. So when I zoom into this track here I'll see that in the beginning of the track I've got complete silence which is cool because this is exactly where I'm going to put my record scratch. Okay. So again, I'll set an out point by hitting "O", and an end point by hitting "I", and I can drag the record scratch sound. Now, if we double-click over here, we can see the audio waveform. Sorry, let me just make a little bit more space here so you can see. By hitting the "Plus Key", I can zoom in a little bit more. Okay. I see that I've got a gap here of silence. I don't want that. So, I can just do this just to bring it a little bit closer. Now, let's have a listen. [MUSIC] Okay, that's still a little bit too far away. I actually want the record scratch to almost still be going on when the music kicks in. So we need just a little bit more. Okay. Basically what I want to do is I want to line up this part of the audio waveform where the music comes in to this part of the audio waveform, which is when the scratch just about finishes. Okay, so just a tiny bit more. Let's have a listen. [MUSIC] Okay, cool. Okay. So hit the "Minus Key" to zoom out again. We know that this is all good. Now, here is where I'm going to want the sea and wind chime sound to come in. Basically, it's because I don't want to have complete silence. A lot of times in video complete silence feels unnatural. So once the music track fades out over here, this complete silence might start to feel a little bit unnatural, so I wanted to put something in there. I'll double-click over here on this kind of wind chime sound and drag that into here. Okay. Let's have a listen and see how that feels. [MUSIC] Okay, cool. That works for me. Okay, and then at the end, because as I mentioned before in a previous lesson, I want the video to resolve itself in a similar way to the way it began I'm going to also put the scratching sound at the end. [MUSIC] Okay, cool. That works for me. Now, obviously when I add the visuals to this, this sound is going to have to work with the video that I'm putting on top of this. So in this lesson, you'll learn how to edit down the music so that it fits the length of your project. I've also shown you how to create arcs so that the music has kind of a beginning, a middle, and an end, and also how to keep your music feeling exciting and unpredictable in that way. Finally, we covered how to add sound effects to add depth and impact to your piece. Join me in the next lesson where I'll show you how to outline your visual narrative by creating a rough cut.
6. Creating a Rough Cut: In this lesson, I'm going to cover what a rough-cut is and how you can use it to quickly lay down our narrative on the timeline. A rough-cut is normally the first editing step in creating a story. In the professional world, we normally have a script and a shortlist that dictates that story. I'm normally working with a director to choose the best shots from multiple takes that were shot during productions, and I'm laying those down into a rough edit. Your assignment for this course gives you total creative freedom. Rather than choosing from multiple takes of the same shot, you'll be deciding how to use the shots you've sourced in a sequence that has some flow. Remember, the main story driver in our videos is going to be the music. We can play a lot more loosely with the visuals. In my video, I wanted the beginning to be quite powerful and hook people in. Then in the middle, again, I wanted the sudden pause, and the shift in pace to help break the monotony. Then I wanted the ending to be a B, but I wanted the video to have something that felt like a resolution. In my rough-cut, I'm not going to pay too much attention to the music, I'm just going to get my favorite shots into the timeline in a way that feels like it flows. Again to recap, I want to start with a bang, I want there to be a pause and something slow and shifting in the middle, and I want to end, again, in a way that feels like a resolution. Like I mentioned before, I'm actually thinking that I'll end it in a really similar way to how I began it, so that it feels the story is coming full circle. Let's jump in and see how we can do that. The first step is to lock down our audio here, so that it doesn't move. I'm going to hit these two little lock symbols here, just to make sure that that set, and actually, even for the finished at A, I have a feeling that I won't be moving the music track at all. What I might move is, are the sound effects a little bit but the music track won't move, so this will stay locked actually throughout the whole project now. What I want to do is, I want to actually go into my video bin and actually start looking through some of the shots I downloaded. In order for me to have this bin tone window, I can Option, double-click on this. Now open this bin in its own little window. Also, if I click on here, I can switch the icon view, so I can see what these videos look like. I wanted there to be exciting beginning, and I wanted it to work quite well in contrast with the sound that we're hearing in the beginning. So if you remember, we've put this record scratch at the beginning, let's have a listen. When I saw this image over here, I thought it would be really cool, the match rubbing up against the matchbox to strike the match. So let's have a look at this. If we double-click on this, it's going to open it up here in our source monitor. Because I'm working with an editor that I previously made, I can see the in and out points that I have here. If I hit shift in, it's going to go to the endpoint that I previously selected. Now, let's watch that back. Okay, cool. I really like that. It's this really well shots, slow motion shot, there's a lot happening there, visually and I find that just so striking. I love the fact that it's in focus here in the foreground and the background is out of focus. I love the fact that even, if we watch the way we watch it now, it's in complete silence. I love how this might feel once we put a completely different sound under it. So let's drag this in. We can either click on this, that will film reel icon and drag it, or you can use the comma key, which is an Insert, Edit, and because we locked all of the tracks below this, they're not going to move. If we hadn't lock these, it would have actually pushed all of this stuff forward. Let's have a look. Okay, cool. I like that, but it actually feels a bit slow. But like I said before, we're working on a rough cut, so we're not going to focus too much on exactly how everything works with the music or the speed changes just yet. Really the procedure is, to go through these clips, and find the parts of the clips that work best for you visually. One of the main fundamentals of editing is that we end up cutting a law on movement. So sometimes when I'm looking through clips of all look for beginnings and ends where there's movement. I'll set an endpoint before movement and also the outpoint right where we're in the middle of movement because I know that it'll often quite well with the subsequent clip. So then, I know after this match strike, I'm going to want my title to come in and when I was looking to download footage, I saw this really cool clip of a light bulb which is flickering and I really like this because, if we look at it up here in our source monitor, I liked the flickering because I already knew what my music track was going to be and it has this up and down, it has quite a lot of beats which fits in with the flickering, plus I liked in this image that there is a space here which naturally creates borders for the title. So I'm going to bring this in. This might also work really well as a dissolve because I've got the brightness of the match and I'm matching up with the heat and the brightness of light bulbs, so that might work really well. Then the next shot, actually I really liked, was this shot of the lawn mower and it's really great because it's in slow motion. Again, I like the slow motion shots because sometimes they're really cool to speed up, so you can play with them really slowly and then speed it up to create some contrast. This is actually shot at 240 frames per seconds, so it will work really well in slow motion, but it'll also work really well if I speed it up. Actually what we'll see when I do the fine tune in the next class is that I'll end up speeding it up for the beginning and then slowing it down right when the beat changes. Let me see a little bit more of my timeline by hitting the minus key. I know now, I've just passed the area in the middle where we're going to pause in the middle of my video and now I know that the music track actually kicks in here with a thumping bell tolling sound that we heard before and I know that that's happening right here. I found a clip that might work really well with that. It's basically this clip, if we just watch back. I think it might be the inside of a piano, and I like the fact that this moves and it could be the sound of the tolling that we're going to hear in the music track. So I'll bring that in and now I know that the music gets really fast. I wanted to bring in some really cool elements that I can play around with and maybe in this area, I might end up cutting a lot more quickly. I've got a clock that I can put in, I've got this levels measure, and so basically, I'm going to be playing around with these and maybe doing some fast cutting once I do the fine tuning in the edit. Then, I've got the record player, I've got two versions of it, so maybe I'll put the extreme close-up and first, and then we'll see it from above. I also have this really cool shot of traffic, this was shot back and a speedometer which I thought could work really nicely because we've seen cars in there. I also have a couple of levels shots. We've got a bunch of shots happening now and I'm not really, like I said before, I'm not paying attention to the music yet, I want to see how they feel cutting together. As you can see, there's a lot of movement and a lot of these shots which sometimes makes it easier for them to cut. They're not really static any of them, so even for me, having a rough cut like this already starts to work simply because of the movement. So in this lesson, I've showed you how I lay out my visual narrative in the form of a rough cut. A rough cut is really exactly what it says, it's really a way to get an idea of how your story could flow. Now, in the next lesson, we're really going to go in and refine this and I'm going to be cutting all of these clips down to the music, making some page changes, and I'm going to be making some unexpected changes to the visuals, so that it fits better with a music track.
7. Fine-Tuning The Edit: Hi everyone and welcome to Lesson 6. Let's jump into the edit fine-tune. If we see here, I've already gone ahead and done some fine tuning. What I'll do is, I'm going to go through some of the creative decisions that I made and explain to you how and why I did them. If we expand the music track over here by double-clicking on it, and we just zoom in a little bit at the timeline. I'll actually make this a bit smaller over here by dragging these windows over and making the timeline bigger. I can actually see a lot of the punctuation points of the music, and I know some of these points that I'm going to want to make cuts. Let's have a look and listen to this demo and see how that feels. Here, if I just go through these points, you can see that a lot of the cuts that I'm making are happening on the beats. If we look here, I have a lot of cuts happening right on the beat. That makes the whole piece flow a lot more smoothly and just make it feel completely in sync with the music. It's amazing how many times I watch people showreels, and they're not actually synced up to the music. It's a waste of a massive resource not to play with your music and not to incorporate your music into your edits in that way. We can do quite a lot of cut into this punctuations. We should definitely be careful, though, not to make a cut on every single punctuation. If we do that, the video will also start to feel really repetitive and it will be even worse than not syncing to the music at all. So there are moments here where I'm keeping the clip on for quite a long time, and the whole thing about this is to create a feeling of something that's unexpected. If you're cutting on every single beat, that will get repetitive, it'll be really expected. If you do it this way, you're keeping the audience on their toes a bit. There are fast beats, there are slow beats, and it actually keeps it more entertaining for them. I'll just go through a couple other things that I'm doing in here and just show you a little bit how they work. So what I've actually done here is, I've done a bit of speed remapping to make the clip play really fast in the beginning and then slow down. If we remember, the clip was originally slow motion anyway so what I really had to do is speed it up in the beginning and then bring it back to its normal speed. If we zoom into this to have a look, right-click on your clip here, you have different options to what this line over here can represent. You can actually make adjustments for Scale, you can make adjustments for Opacity, and in this case I've actually chosen to do it for Speed. Time Remapping, Speed. If I want the speed change to be over here, what I can do is, I can press the command key, I can click right at the point where I want the speed change, and if I raise this, I'm speeding it up, and over on this side, it's actually staying at the same velocity as the original clip. I'm speeding it up in the beginning and keeping it at its original speed near the end. Like I said before, I actually want the slow-down to happen around here. I want it to be really faster in the record scratch, which we have over here and I want it to slow down right after the record scratch. I have it going really quickly when I have the scratching sound, and then I have it slowing right down. Then I also did a speed remapping in the middle clip over here. I've done exactly the same procedure. So basically, I've found the bit where I wanted to remap, and then I've played with the speed settings. So by dragging this line up or down, I can make it go either slower by dragging it down or faster by dragging it up. The final creative decision I made in this fine tune is actually related to the end. If you remember from one of the previous lessons, I had mentioned that I wanted to wrap the video up in a similar way to how it started. What I simply did was, I just took the match that we see in the beginning, and just played it back in reverse. That works super well for me with the scratch. I think in the next lesson, when we actually start blending these together using Dissolves and Overlays, it will work really well again with this image that's coming right after the light bulb. Simply what I did here was, if you just right-click on it, you can click on "Speed and Duration", and here you can just click on "Reverse Speed." Another really easy way of doing it, is just pressing "Command R," and that will bring up the same window and you can just reverse the speed over here. So to recap, what I did with my fine tune edit, is basically take the clips that I had laid down in my rough edit, and start cutting them exactly where the punctuation points of the music are. Obviously, when you're working with your own music, it's going to be different. But really the takeaway from this, is to know that it's important to use a punctuations, but it's also important not to cut on every single one. We want to have variety through the edit. That really is the key point. That's really what keeps everything exciting for people. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow, sometimes it blows up, sometimes it pauses. Go through your edits and understand where you want it to speed up, and then make sure that if you have 10, 20 seconds of something sped up, make sure it slows down, to keep people really excited and interested as to what's going on. In the next lesson, we're going to enhance our visuals and we're going to make everything more dynamic and exciting by using Dissolves, Effects, and Overlays. I'm going to show you my edit in a more advanced state, and I'm going to show you some of the techniques I use to really make the visuals pop.
8. Adding Effects: Let's jump right in. I'm going to show you how I make my visuals more dynamic and exciting. Going back to the music, what I'll do a lot of times is actually add these visual elements, right with the music cues again, in the same way that I do with my edits. If we double-click on here, we can see the auto waveform again. I'll just go through and explain to you the four different types of techniques that I use. The first one is overlaying shots and playing with the blending modes. As you can see here, let me just make this a bit bigger. I actually have two shots blended together, so that these shots appear composited. It's a really quick and easy way to combine two-story elements and create a more powerful and dynamic edit. I'll explain to you just basically how blending modes work, and then I'll show you some examples in my timeline of how I've done that. In this case, I've taken this clip, which if we put it back to normal mode over here, you can see what it is. It's a clip of a stereo levels. Blending modes are broken down into five categories. But really I only ever work with three. Just this really basic overview of how these work. This first section here, which starts with darken, pretty much knocks out all of the lighter, wider sections of an image, and really focuses on the black. This section here starting with lighten, does exactly the opposite. Basically, it knocks out all of the black parts of an image and focuses more on the white. This section here is exactly in the middle of that. It uses 50 percent gray to determine which part of the image is darkened and which part is lightened. Basically anything that's darker than 50 percent gray will get darker and anything that's lighter than 50 percent gray will get lighter. Out of all of these, I normally work a lot with either multiply to darken an image, screen to lighten an image, or overlay to actually add more contrast to the image and blend to completely separate images together. If you want to find out more about this, because it can get quite tricky to understand, there's a great resource online, I'll just show it to you now. It is actually in SLR Lounge. There's a great article which shows you, talks about all of the blending mode. In this case it's talking about Photoshop, but it's exactly the same thing in Premiere After Effects and there's some really cool videos that show you exactly how all this works. For the example of my video, it really is just about sticking one image on top of another and playing around with a blending modes to see what works best. I don't ever just know straight off the bet what's going to work. There's a lot of experimentation here, but that's the fun part of editing, and that's the really fun part of making creative project like this. I'll show you a couple more sections here of blending modes. If I put this back to screen, I've put this projector image on top of the lawnmower image and this is actually where the original clip look like. But what I've done here is, I've actually placed the clip on top and I've selected a multiply blending mode. Basically, so what it's done is it's taken out all of the lighter parts of this projector, which was the really bright bits that we had in the middle of the projector, which we can see here. The reason that I like this is it actually creates a vignette around this, and brings more focus into the middle. So I really like that. Then as the projector actually darkens, it goes from just being a vignette around this to making it feel like the lawnmower is within the projector. Then again, I continue the blending mode into the next shot. I'm using this to blend these two shots together using the projector as the transition point. The final example of where I'm using this is over here. I have this video of a hard disk, and again, working with a multiply blending mode, I'm actually compositing this hard disk on top of the image below. It's knocking out all the bright colors and you're left with the black outlines in this hard drive. Another example is over here. I'm compositing this digital clock on top of the green levels below it, and here I'm using the screen blending mode, so the original clock, if we select the clip and click f, we can see that is red numbers with a black background. Over here on our edit, we are knocking out the black background by choosing the screen mode, so we are basically focusing on all of the bright colors and getting rid of all the blacks and that way, the red numbers appear to be composited with the green levels below. The second technique that I use is actually a creative dissolved, which we can see here again. Basically, I will have one image dissolving into another in a way that the first image works with the second image so if you just see that. Here we have the match dissolving into the light bulb. What I've basically done is, I've taken in the clip of the inside of the piano, and I've placed it on top of the show of my wife playing with light stick. The cool thing about this is I'm playing with a music cues over here. If we see over here, this is exactly the point where that gong music cue comes up. If we play it back, you can see that the piano strikes right at the point where we have that music cue. It also looks like at that point it's actually hitting the image that's below, and at that point I also have the image below reversing direction. I have quite a few elements happening there, and it's all really brought to life by the dissolve. This dissolve lets me put the piano right on top of the image below, and it seems like they're interacting based on the music. One of the ways that I understand whether creative crosses over will work or not, is to look for shots that have parts of the frame that are completely empty. In this case, I have this part of the frame and this image that's completely empty and in the case of the inside of the piano, I have this part of the image that is empty. Now, this isn't completely empty over here on the right-hand side, but it's quite monotonous and there's no movement happening over here. Most of the action in this frame is happening on the left-hand side. When I mix them together, I have the empty left-hand of the frame of the beach and the sea, and I have the empty right-hand of the frame of the piano, and that works really well. Now you can find tons of different images that work in that way. Also, I'll just give you one more example of how to dissolve things based on framing. Over here, I've done something similar where I've taken the image of the speedometer and if you see the actual needle and direction of the speedometer is going in the same direction as the highway. That for me works again really well as a cross dissolve. The next technique I use is using some of the built-in effects in Premiere Pro CC. If we see here is an example, I use the invert effects quite a lot. Basically, what the invert effect does, is it takes the color information of an image and literally invert it exactly how it says. The way that I normally do this is, rather than using key frames or anything, I will actually create my edit as we had seen in the rough car or even the fine tune edit and then when I see the B points, as you see here, I'll actually cut the clip first, add an invert effect just for a few frames, and then I go back to how the clip is normally, and then I do an invert effect again, and then back to normal. The invert effect is pretty handy because it's a way to link two very different shots, or to highlight music cue in the image. I'll show you another example of where I've used it over here. Basically, I use it over here to cut from the light bulb to the lawnmower and the transition that's a little bit smoother. Normally, if this doesn't work as well, if there isn't a music punctuation here. But in this case, as you see here, I have the music punctuation right there at the moment where that happens. The fourth technique that I use is scale changes. Basically what I do there is again, working off of the music cue. I'll actually scale an image up just for a beat or two, especially with something here, it works really well. Here in this clip, as you can see, so right when I have the beat here, I have the scale change. Join me for the next lesson where I'll show you a quick trick so you can do some creative color grading.
9. Creative Color Grading: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Lesson 8. In this lesson, I'm going to be adding some creative color grading. It's really easy to do this now, especially with Premiere Pro CC's new color panels. But if you're using an older version of Premiere, the process is pretty much the same, except instead of using the color panels, you're going to use the three-way color corrector. This color grading is really, really easy. The reason I use this color grading changes with my professional work is to make the video feel more stylized, and it also creates some subtle connections between shots. So it helps transition from one shot to the other. Let's jump in and have a look to see how that works. You'll see the color grading that I'm going to do in this shot, let's play it back. So you have the first shot starting with its original color and then it's changing to be purple. The following shots starts in the purple and it fades out to be its original color. So if you're using the newest version of Premiere Pro CC, you can just click over here where it says Color and switch over to the color panels. Here, you can see that what I've done is I've gone into the color wheels, and I've made a purple adjustment over here in the midtones. Once I've made that adjustment, I can actually pop back into the clip. So if we go back to the normal editing window, I can pop back into the clip over here and we can see that I've set a couple of keyframes. So basically, over here, I've set the first keyframe, and in this keyframe, there's no changes at all. The midtones are completely unchanged. I set one more keyframe at the end where the midtones are pushed all the way over more into the purple region, really easy. We start off here with no changes at all and finish off with the changes. All I did was I basically take that same color correction, I click on it, I press Command C. I go into the clip that follows and I press Command V, and it's pasted the exact same effect. Now, the only thing is that the keyframes are still in the same order as with the previous clip. So what you want to do is we want to switch them around. So all you do is you take this keyframe and move it to the beginning, and take the other keyframe and move it to the end, and there we go. We've got the color fading out in this clip and we've got the color fading in in the previous clip. So there we have it, creative color grading in a few easy steps. Join me in the next lesson where I'll show you a trick to make a simple animated title, all within Premiere Pro CC.
10. Simple Animated Title: Let's jump right into Lesson 9 and create a simple animated title. This is a technique I use when I want a really quick title and I don't want to go into After Effects. Let me show you the title I've created and then I'll show you exactly how I did it. The idea is to write out the title first, and then place it over your shot in the position you think it looks best. In this case, I've got this natural framing from this piece of wire that's part of the light bulb element, which works really well. You need to make sure you get the positioning of the font, and the font size is right. Because we're going to be chopping this title up in a way that if you want to change that afterwards, you're going to have to change it on multiple clips instead of just one. So that's going to give you a little bit of extra work if you do that. You can open up the Title Tool either by going to File, New, Title, or you can just press Command T. It's going to ask me to name this title. I'm just going to call it Digitano, which is the name of the actual one of the words that I'll be using in the title. I'll drag that over here. By default it's going to show me the frame that the playhead is actually on in the moment. What I want do is I want to create a title to place within this element. If I click here on the Type Tool, and then I can click here, and then write down the word Digitano Media, which is the name of my company. Now, I want to highlight this and go over here to where it says color, and make it black. I also want to change the font to, in my case, Avenir, and I'll make it Avenir heavy. I actually want to scale this up. I want the font to be a lot bigger. Now for me to position this, I just move it down so that it fits within the element correctly, and maybe scale the font up a little bit more. Great. Now I've got my title, we can go ahead and close the Title Tool. So I can actually go into my layers bin and I grab that title and just drag it into my timeline. I want the title to end actually, at the end of the light bulb shot. So I'm going to press C over here, cut the front of the title, press V, and then Delete. We've got the title and it pops up right when the video happens. Let's watch that back. Cool. What I want to do is now I want to take the title and break it up during the beats, and I'm going to change the color of the title so that it looks animated. So what I'll do is I'll make a cut here, I'll make another cut over here, I'll make another cut over here, and another cut over there. I'm going to use a really simple but really powerful effect, which is called the tint effect. If I go over to the effects, you can type tint over here, and this is going to be the only one that comes up. What I want to do is I want to drag this effect, first of all into the clip after the first cut that I made. The tint effect basically lets you remap black and white to a different color. In this case, because the title is black, I just want to remap the black to a different color. I'm going to choose a color that's actually already within the shot that's below the title. If I click on this Eyedropper over here and click there, you see that the title is going to change the orange. Now for the next one, what I'll do is I will select this clip, go to Tint, press Command C to copy it, click on the following clip, press Command V to paste it. I'll choose a different color for this one, so I will make it more yellow. Then I'll repeat the step again. So I'll press Command C and copy the tint effect, and then press Command V to paste it. Again, I'll change the color. I will make it brighter color now. Here I actually wanted to change to black when I'm on the clip that has the invert effect. So what I'll do is I'll just move this over. The cool thing about cutting up the title clip in this way is that you can add all animation to it. I've shown you a really simple example of just changing color, but you can make each individual cut a different scale so that it pops up and down, or you can play with other effects that are built-in to Premiere Pro. There it is, a quick and simple animated title all within Premier Pro CC. In the next lesson, we'll review the export settings and render out your final video.
11. Sharing Your Work: Okay, so we've been through all the steps of editing a fast and exciting video. Now it's time to show with the world. A Premiere Pro is great because it makes it really easy to export in pretty much any format you'll need. If we'll be sharing our work on YouTube, Vimeo, or even Facebook, there's some standard export settings that work across the board. Actually if we go back to when we actually set up the sequence, it's going to be pretty much the same settings. Vimeo, Facebook, and YouTube are really good at working with H.264 codec, which is kind of native and a lot of the DSLR cameras that are used for video production nowadays. Okay, so let's jump into the Export window. So from your sequence, you can either go to File export media or you can just press "Command them." Okay, and that will bring up your export window. If we look at the settings here, you can see that my sequence settings are pretty much matching what my delivery settings are going to be. So I just want to have a look here and see I normally am exporting and QuickTime. But you can also go to H.264, which will basically make an MP4 file. So instead of being a.MOV, it'll be a.Mp4. For most of my work, I actually just use QuickTime and that works perfectly like I said on YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook. Here, where you see video, I'm just going to make sure that I've got the H.264 codec selected. I'll make the quality up to 100. If we just scroll down a little bit over here, I'm going to make sure that the field order is progressive but it will be anyway because my sequence settings were correct in that way. Also that it's 25 frames per second. That's correct. Okay, in here, we've got the bit rate. So basically what we want to do is we want to export our video at the highest bit rate setting without making the file size too big. So obviously a video like this, it's only 45 seconds. It's not much of an issue. But when you're working with five or even 10-minute video, the higher the bit rate, the higher the file size. Sometimes a file sizes can be over a gig in size and that can be difficult for uploading. So what I like to do is, I'd like to maximize the bit rate, which will maximize the picture quality without actually making the file size too big. Normally, I will set this to 20,000 kilobits per second. I find that it's a good medium where you can get really high-quality file without it being too big. So I'll set that to 20000 kilobits per second. I'll check use maximum render quality, and I normally check use previews, but we haven't really rendered anything in the timeline. This is useful if you've actually rendered part of the timeline and the Premiere Pro has created preview files. So I'll check that anyway, just because it's out of habit. Okay, in here I'll just check that both Export Video and Export Audio are selected and on output name, I'll click on that, name it. So I'll just name it Skill Share Demo 02. So I'll put this in my final exports folder. So click "Save" and hit "Export". Cool. So we finished our video and it's going to be exported in no time. Check out my final lesson and I'll give you guys some parting advice on editing.
12. Now It's Your Turn: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the final lesson. I hope you've been able to learn new ways to make your videos more exciting and engaging. Creative editing can and should be fun. While it's important to understand and sometimes follow the fundamental editing conventions, I encourage everyone to play around with their edits. Try different ways of telling your story, mix-up shots to dissolves and overlays, and play around with your speed changes. Taking these liberties is really what makes editing the most exciting for me. Most importantly, make sure you share your work so that you can get feedback. Share it with me, with your friends, with the people that you work with, find out how it makes them feel and how they react to it. Understanding these reactions is really what's going to let you know what you're doing right and what you need to improve on and it's ultimately going to help you become a better editor. Remember, upload your work so I can check it out. I really enjoy giving you some insight into my creative process. Creating this course has been a great experience for me and I'm planning to publish more content soon on Skillshare. Give me your feedback on this one and also I'd really love to know what you'd like to see in the next course. I look forward to seeing your work, everyone.