Transcripts
1. Welcome to the Process!: Finally, finished. Video editing can be a very daunting task. Where do you start with shots? Do you choose which edits do you use? Music, sound effects, color story. You want this edit to be good? No, you wanted to be great. But it can get overwhelming. Here. Let's roll the intro. Asked for the post-production process and the start of your projects right up until the end, throughout my career, I've had the opportunity to improve it or find my own editing process, analyse, taking the time to dissect filmmaker and editor cooper Canada. In this class, I'll break down the post-production process and provide practical steps that you can apply to your own project. You will learn how to prepare for the Edit, why they choose certain clips over others, and where to start and also where to go. I'll teach you editing techniques.
2. Class Project: Thank you so much for taking my class. I'm excited to have you here. We're gonna have a lot of fun, learn a lot, and create an awesome project. Our class project is roughly a 30-second motivational edit. Be patient. Don't judge each day by the office to read. But by the seeds that you've plotted. Day determined darkness will cover you. You will struggle to see the light. Hold onto hope. Your day will come. The footage for our class project was originally intended for another project that we shot. And we never ended up using it because things ended up going into a different creative direction. It was a work in progress, and I decided that I tailor it to this class project. I got some additional voice-over for it and created a short little story. I'd say this project is more of a creative edit in it's ambiguous in terms of what the finished edit can look like. And really that's what's great about it. By no means do you have to make this project identical to the one I've created? You can use whatever clips you want and use as much or as little of the voice-over as you want. You can completely change the tone. You can make it a horror movie if you want. And I'm excited to see what you might do with this. What's great about this project is that you can do as much or as little work as you want on it if you want to flex your editing skills, do that if you want to work on sound design or color in particular, go for that. If you find that you're having trouble with any of the process along the way, just do your best to get something out there, a rough cut, a work in progress, editing anything will help you become a better editor and also solidify the process for you. It's also important to remember that sound design, sound mixing, color grading, all of these things. They're specialized jobs that creatives we'll focus on for their entire lives and perfect and master. As an editor, you're kind of expected to be able to do all of these things. So keep in mind that we are doing everything, but we're not doing it to the same level as someone who is focusing on that skill independently. Takes a lot of practice. It takes a lot of skill, so don't beat yourself up, Just have fun. I want you to be able to take this process and apply it to any project you work on. You get to do that in a UA to be creative. And I'm just here to encourage and guide you through that process. You will need to have some sort of editing programs to complete this project. I will be using Premier Pro to demonstrate, and I recommend that you use this program. But if you want to use a different program, you can, especially for the overall processes that you will learn and some other big ideas that we will be discussing. Some of the lessons you can take the big ideas from, but eventually you will be applying them with some filters or processes within Premiere Pro that might not be exactly the same in another program. It's also advisable that you have the technical skills of editing before you start this project. Now, I will be teaching on processes throughout the different stages of editing, but I'm not necessarily going to go into detail about how to create a sequence or navigate the panels. For example, if you have a project you're currently working on, I encourage you to work on that and make sure you posted for review or write a sentence or two explaining how you apply the lessons learned to your own process. After taking this course, I hope you're not daunted by the unexpected difficulties in your project, whatever the problem you face, you can simply revert back to the process and feel good about what your edit is going to be at the end. Let's begin the first stage of the process by creating limitations for our edit.
3. The Creative Brief: In this next step of the process, we're going to spend some time focusing on creating limitations for our project. This step is so important because it helps us map out our edit and it saves us time and potential wasted effort. Let's say hypothetically that you work for a surf company. And this surf company has a bunch of awesome serve footage and has tasked you with creating a video out of it. They say, you can do whatever you want. You're thinking, awesome, I got total creative freedom. You look at all the footage and you don't know where to start, you don't know what to do. What's the point? Well, this is the problem. You don't have any set limitations to guide your decisions. Creating guidelines for your project. What's known as a creative brief. And depending on the company or the project, you might have a creative brief or you might not, but it's still your job to create that creative brief for yourself or limitation breeds creativity and allows us to focus our efforts. So let's go ahead and create some limitations for our project. The very first and most important question to ask when starting any project is why? What's the point? What's your stores purpose for the project or working on? It's a short excerpt of a larger project. So what's the point of this? Well, when I first came up with this course, I thought that this footage can be used as an inspirational piece. So my intention would be to inspired the audience. And that intention in turn can help us discover the purpose of the project. Maybe we want to remind people that the smallest things in life and the slowest things in life can create the biggest impact. Then of course, we also need to consider our voice-over, which is the patient don't judge. Each day by the hall fist you read, but by the seed stock you plot and stay determined. Darkness will cover you. You will struggle to see the light, but hold onto hope with time, your day will come. K, Let's think here maybe the goal is to encourage people, even if they're in a rough spot, having a tough time, are struggling. That it's part of the growing process. Perseverance will eventually allow them to come out of it as a stronger person. Okay, so now we know our purpose. We want to get this message across. And the way we're gonna do that is to attempt to make the audience feel something. And we do that through the tone of the film. The intended tone aims to make you feel something. This makes me sit at the edge of my seat, heart pounding, exciting. This, on the other hand, makes me scared. It creeps me out, It frightens me. And then this, it's a lighthearted and feel-good movie that inspires me. You might cure the words, tone and mood thrown together synonymously. And in this class I will be using the words mood and tone interchangeably to an extent, but it's important to note that they're not entirely the same thing, but they're both important. Imagine having a conversation with someone. The tone is how you might say something to them. You might say something angrily or empathetically. And how you make the other person feel through your tone is the mood that you create. It might make them sad, mad, angry, happy, inspired as storytellers, as editors, we have control over the tone of the film, but we don't always have control over the mood that it creates for everyone who watches it. Coming up with a few intentions. Like I want the audience to feel inspired. I want them to feel encouraged. I want them to feel hopeful. All of these intentions are great ways to emotionally connect to the audience, to the overall purpose of our film. It's this tone that we want to establish that helps connect the audience emotionally. The tone and the overall purpose of the film go hand in hand already right here. This gives us a huge advantage in telling the story. You can use these intentions and the overall purpose of our edit to guide all are editing decisions from here on out. And this is the most important thing to nail down as early on in the process as possible. Another example of this is from the movie recommend for a dream. After I finish watching this, I was petrified and it made me not want to touch any kind of drug ever. The overall tone of the film, It's very dark. It's incredible how they're able to make you feel this isolation while watching the film. There's a lot of editing decisions that contribute to that mood that the tone created. But one particular technique that really added to that sense of isolation was the use of split-screen. Even in the scene where Harry is talking with Marion, they're in the same bed. They're having this intimate moment, this intimate conversation. And yet you feel this incredible disconnects between the characters and it's unsettling to watch. Now take the same scene and imagine if they didn't have split-screen, you'd view it in a completely different way. The tone forms, music decisions, pacing, rhythm, sound effects. It's the emotional connection to the overall purpose of the film. Without the tone, the purpose is kinda useless. There's lots of different interpretations of this film and ideas of what the purpose of this film is. But any one of these interpretations gets across through the tone of the film and the way it's impacted people emotionally. You've all come out of movies feeling varying degrees of emotion. And in the best cases, the film will change us. And yes, a lot of aspects go into this. But as editors, every edit we make is either helping create that emotional connection, driving a deeper into the story, connecting you to its purpose, or it's taking you out of the experience. The next thing to consider is, what is the story? And what I mean by the word of the story is the chronological sequence, the beginning, middle, and end. And in our case, we're editing a gardener digging a hole, grabbing a seed, placing it in the hole, covering the seed with dirt, and then finally watering the seed. So we have a simple beginning, middle and end, nothing earth-shattering. We also have a beginning, middle, and end with our voice-over. This project is pretty straightforward, but in a lot of projects, they can be ambiguous. You might have loads of footage, loads of scenes, and you need to decide what is the most important to your beginning, middle, and end. This will help you narrow down your footage greatly. Another hugely helpful limitation is understanding how long you're finished edit might be. You can determine the length of a project right at the outset. You'll have a much better time working within that limitation. Length limitations can help you choose music better. If you know a project will be roughly at the one-minute mark. You can aim to find music that's suitable for that minute or five music that you can potentially cut down to that minute. I also love the time limitation because if I know I only have to fill thirty-seconds of footage, I can really be choosy about the clips that I pick. Your target audience can also be an effective way to guide your project in the right direction. I used to work in production for a furniture company where the target audience was the busy mom between the ages of 28 and 34. Some companies will go extremely deep into these character profiles and be very specific about what type of target audience that they're aiming for. And this is great because it can really help you decide which clips suit that audience the best. More specifically, the target audience can affect the music choices, rhythm and pacing, the length of the overall piece, really it affects the whole piece. So for example, in the schedule, There's a slower pacing overall, playful music and sound effects. There's a greater emphasis on editing continuity, which we're going to go over in the lesson on the video editing process. The episodes are only 20 minutes long. The overall tone is positive and cheerful. You wouldn't add a kid show the same way you'd edit a show like Breaking Bad. In Breaking Bad, the pacing is geared towards story. The music choices are also story-driven and tone driven. There's less emphasis on editing. Continuity. Episodes are 60 minutes long, and the overall tone is dark and it comedic, It's darkly comedic. Having a good idea of who your target audience is, or also help you head to your projects accordingly. Okay, so for our project, let's just hypothetically come up with the target audience here. We're trying to encourage people with this piece. So I'm guessing our audience will be some people who have gone through some stuff difficulties. So probably older, but it could be younger too. Maybe from the 18 to 25-year-olds range. You know, maybe we're trying to encourage kids who are just coming out of high school. They don't know what to do with their life. And they need some encouragement. Maybe they're upset that things aren't happening as quickly in their careers. Our target audience can be from the 18 to 25 year-old range. And this is a inspiring and hopeful message for those who are stuck feeling like they don't know what to do with their life. So when we say that, let's just aim for the 18 to 25 year-old range, male, female, 18 to 25. Another important aspect to consider is where will the film be screened? Will be on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok on TV. All of these different platforms can affect the editing of a film and a different way with Facebook and Instagram, a lot of the times people won't even enable audio. So that might affect the way you edit. It might affect the way you use audio or don't use audio. And obviously it'll affect the overall length of the project, how you mix the audio of the project, whether or not you need to really worry about broadcast safe, the way you deliver the project, the file and Kodak choices, these are all quite straightforward. Limitations need to follow in order to be able to even post it onto these platforms in the first place. What I really love is using these limitations creatively. I really loved this example here. This company put their ads on YouTube and they had the knowledge that the ad would be skippable after a certain amount of time, they built their ad around this knowledge that if they don't grab the attention of the audience, audience will skip the ad as soon as the Skip button becomes available. Don't thank me. Thank the savings. You can't skip this geico ad because it's already over geico. 15 minutes could say 50 percent or more on car insurance. I know that there's not much editing here, but this is a great example of how creatives might use the platform and time limitations in a creative way. So these are the basic guidelines that I go through when approaching and edit. These guidelines will help narrow down your edit immensely and allow you to be more focused with your work. But remember, the purpose of your story and the emotional connection to the audience is the most important. Go ahead and finish your own creative brief and remember you don't have to do it exactly this way. You can add your own limitations, whatever you think might help to shape the focus and purpose of your story. File organization rolls up next.
4. File Organization Rules!: Having great file and folder organization makes it faster when searching for assets for your project. And it makes project management, over all doubt much easier. This is just my opinion, but with my projects, I aim to have more folders within my main project folder, which eliminates the need for more subfolders and allows me to get to the files I need to within less clicks. Yes. With more complex projects, you need more sub folders. But I'm always aiming for less clicks to get to the file that I need to get to. This increases the speed to get to the asset and I need to get to and it also reduces the headache that comes from cooking so much. The same goes for project folder management. Try to keep the minimum clicks that you need in order to maintain some sort of organization. The less folders, in my opinion, the better. Using numbers allows you to organize your folders in the order that you prefer. Using numbers also helps create some hierarchy to your folder structure. If I didn't have numbers here, everything would be in alphabetical order. Go ahead and change the numbers if you prefer. You can change the folders if you prefer, whatever makes the most sense to you. A great way to name your project files or export files, is to include the date. So for instance, with these projects files, I have 210 515, that corresponds to 202105 for me and 15 for the day. So anytime I work on this project, if it's a new day and I've made sick and progress, I save as and include the date. This allows me to keep track of the current version of edit I'm working on. If I need to go back and say, okay, what the heck did I do on May 15th? I can do that. The same goes for sequences within your project. I make significant progress. I'll copy paste, add the current date. This way, all the work I do on this day is self-contained in this sequence. If I need to go back, I can go back to it. It's non-destructive. Also, if I make significant enough progress within the same day and I feel like I just want to backup sequence. I'll go ahead and copy paste that, keep the same date and add the letter b. If I do it again and I make more progress, I'll have the letter C. Maybe you have an idea that you want to try out, but you don't want to destroy your current sequence. If you want to do that, you can copy paste and then write ALT on the end of the date itself. So you can see that it's an alternate sequence. You can explore that alternate sequence. And if it works, great, copy paste it and make that your main sequence. If it's not great, leave it as an ordered sequence. What's great about this? It's non-destructive. You can test out edits on your sequence without worrying about destroying the work you've already done. I've included my own folder structure in the download. If you feel like using that, go ahead, but you're not required to follow this to a T. Create your own folder structure. Just remember that less clicks will save you click headaches, in my opinion, I like it better when it's helpful. Use numbers to create hierarchy in your folder structure. And finally, use the date within the name of your project files or sequences as an additional backup to see progress made and to allow for easy, non-destructive alternative routes in your editing project. I know file organization can be super tedious, but please try your best to organize now so you don't regret it later.
5. Choose the Best Clips for Your Story: It's time to select our footage. Narrowing down our footage to the best clips will help us become more efficient when beginning our first edit. This is the first step to review all the footage in its entirety. The way I like to do this is to put all my clips into one sequence, review. And as I see portions of clips or full clips that I like and think will work well with the story. A cut those portions out and set them on the second track while still having access to all the footage is essentially is like a pre edit. Editing out all the clips that you think won't work for the project and setting aside the cliffs that you think will work best. Once review the footage, you'll have a mental bank of info you can draw upon when making edits. If for whatever reason you decide that a shot isn't working, you can always go back into the sequence and say, Oh yeah, I remember we have that other shot that could work for this as well. You can quickly go back, get that shot, throw it in. No problem. While in the review process, ask yourself which clips suit the story best? And to clarify when I'm using the word story, it encompasses the what or chronological sequence. The y, which is the overall purpose, the meaning of the message. And how the what and the why are connected, which is through tone and mood, or how the story intends to make you feel. Does this clip work better than this clip in telling the story? It really all comes down to this. If we know the what and why of the story and how we want the audience to feel. The process of picking clips will be a lot easier. It might just come down to, well, both these shots to the story, but which shot is actually better? Is the shot on the left better than the shot on the right? Is this close-up on the left better than this close-up on the right. Sometimes the quality of a shot is out-of-focus in a bad and unusable way. Maybe it's too shaky or the white balance is awful. In these cases, I'd set it aside and don't use it, but don't delete it either. Just keep it in your Selects timeline. If at the end of your project you're finding that you're struggling to find coverage and you have no choice whatsoever but to use that shot, then that would be the time you'd use it. There's also a surprising times that I've used unusable clips. And one shoot, I found a shot that were the camera whips pass to the light, I thought. Okay, that's garbage. I'm not using that. Set it aside. But eventually I ended up using it in the project because it added some visual interest. Now when I shoot music videos like this, I'll think about this and I'll purposely try to get some whip pans past lights and other objects. I have some room to experiment within the edit. Take a listen to this short soundbite or darkness will cover you. To me, the performance sounds fine, but I found that it didn't suit the story as much as it could have. So I asked Mike, the voice-over artists to do second take with a direction of giving a strict morning. And that changed his performance quite a bit. Darkness will cover you. After hearing this take, I really liked the vibe of it. However, I felt like the end of the voice over here. It felt a bit forced. So all I did was keep the majority of the second voiceover and cut the part of the performance that I didn't like it. I replaced it with the first take. Darkness will cover you. I found that this meshed together soundbite, pick the best performance from either take and in turn suited the story and its purpose. The best. Darkness will cover you. Darkness will cover you. Darkness will cover you. Deciphering and actors performance can be a very subjective thing and we don't have enough time to delve deep into this. But for now, ask yourself, does it sound good to you? Does it clearly communicate parts of the story that you want to get across? Does it sound authentic? Does it sound real? We see in 3D, but on a computer monitor, Everything's in 2D. Images with great depth have that 3D quality to them. You can identify depth in an image by looking at the contrast other and the brightness and darkness of the image, or contrast and color. You can also look at perspective, which lines are leading you through the frame. It doesn't perspective create a distinct foreground, midground, and background. You can also identify depth through the depth of field of the shot, which is just the parts of the image that are within acceptable focus. And easy way to identify if a frame has depth is to just look at the layers of the frame itself. So going back to our project, here are some examples. In this shot, we have a clear foreground and a clear background. This is created with a blurred out background and the foreground is in sharp focus. In this shot here we have three layers going on the foreground. The soil is out-of-focus. The seed is in-focus in the mid ground and the background is out of focus. The depth is also created by perspective. The shot angle is low to the ground, giving it more depth. If you were to raise the angle of the shot, say for example, in this shot here, we don't get as much depth from perspective. The majority of the depth is from the contrast created between the lighter skin tone and the darker dirt. That doesn't necessarily mean that this shot is worse than the other one. They just held different stories. And again, stories, the most important deciding factor here. Here we have two shots that tell the same story. The gardener is white in the dirt off his hands. After looking at these two frames, I've chosen the shuttle and laughed because the depth is much greater than perspective on the left is at a different angle, creating a foreground with the fingers and hands, and midground with arms and the pants, and a background with the foliage. The perspective of the shot on the right is more of a profile shot, only creating two separate layers. The background on the left shot also creates more contrast with the skin tones. Then the shot on the right. Both shots great depth through depth of field. The background is out of focus, while the foreground is in-focus. Movement within a frame can create visual interest. This could be the movement of a camera or the movement of an action within the frame itself. The advantage of a shot with movement over a static shot is that it has the ability to guide the eye from one edit to the next. So in the case that I have two different shots with identical angles, one is static, but the other one has movement. I would most likely choose the one with movement. Unless of course, the static shot tells the story better. The camera pan from left to right cuts nicely with this shot with similar movement. The same goes for these two shots. One shot has a lot less movement than the other one, which one looks more interesting to you. Also, we have the advantage of using the movement within the frame that can guide the viewer's eye from one part of the frame to the other and can help connect this shot to another shot with similar movement. Sometimes you might just be relying on feeling for some of these shots. You might feel this one just feels better. I don't know why, but it just feels better. I'm going to choose it. That's totally fine. Every time you review footage, you refine your eye to the small details. You'll get better at determining which footage will work best and how it might work with the edit overall. Afterward, he might discover, oh yeah, that that shot has subtle flare on it. That's what the tone of the piece and something with a flare feels optimistic. And that's what I'm going for. What's great is that this is all non-destructive. You can always go back and use a clip that you thought wouldn't originally work. So to recap, reviewing all the footage gives you a chance to mentally bank it in your mind so you can draw upon it and later on, user projects story to narrow down your footage to the best clips. You can also determine the best clips by looking at the quality of the clip, the performance from an actor, whether or not the clip has movement, depth and what the clip is trying to communicate overall. And if it's effective in doing that. In the perfect world, you'd have all of these attributes within one clip. So the next steps for this project is to narrow down your clip choices in the folder name selects. You'll see that I've already done this process for you. If you prefer to do this process on your own, which is a great idea, go ahead and do that now. In the next lesson, we're going to learn where to start with the edit and where to go.
6. How to Assemble Any Type of Video: Great, you've got your selects picked out, but where do you start? Knowing where to start and where to go will help grow your confidence and leave out the guesswork. Knowing where to start can be pretty straightforward, but not easy when it comes to scripted projects. Can follow along with the script, plug in the footage, and go from beginning to end until you have a rough assembly. But when it comes to unscripted works, it may be a bit more difficult to know where to start. Myself. This question, what element most clearly tells a story? For example, in music videos, the music is what drives the story, is because often the music is the story. The music helps inform your edits. Another example in documentary style work, the narrative is driven by the interviews. So focusing on the spoken word is where you'd want to begin. Like in this project here, my main goal was to focus on the narrative first, have what's called the radio edit, which is where you just stick to editing the interviews. The image at this point isn't important. You can even edit these interviews without seeing the interviewee. In some cases, you might not have voiceover or dialogue or a script to follow. In that case, you might start with Eclipse and laid them out in a rough assembly using the stories beginning, middle, and end as a guide. So after you've created a rough assembly of your clips, you can start to connect the voice-over and the clips together so they match up a bit better and have some flow to that role. In this process, we're working with the edit to get a rough outline of our story through visual and VoiceOver. First, once we have our rough edit of both visual and voice-over, we can start to look for suitable music. There's a few schools of thought when it comes to editing with music or without music. Some editors prefer to lay down a temp track right away and cut to the music, which I think is okay in some circumstances, others prefer to cut the scene dry without music. The thought here is that if you can get the scene working with visuals and dialogue first, the music will enhance it, rather than relying on the music to make the scene feel right. There are moments where you just have this thought. I need to cut with music first. Especially if you're cutting montage sequence with a variety of clips, the music can really help treat structure and contain the edit overall. In other edits, you might decide not to add music at all until the very end. I would suggest you lean towards cutting the scene dry first once you have a rough edit and it started to feel okay, has good flow, rhythm. Then add the music. If you want to have certain moments that are accentuated by the music, you can refine the edit from there. So, so far with this edit, we've started with visuals, the clips, then we incorporated the voice-over, and then we started to add the music. Every part of this process will require some adjustments. So after adding voice-over, for example, you're gonna have to adjust the eclipse and voice-over so they fit better together. And then once you have the music, you will most likely be adjusting to make sure that they all are harmonious together and fitting well together. This is also part of the process and it's very important that you're not holding onto the edit. You want to be changing with the edit as it evolves. So if you have ideas, don't be afraid to try them out, and don't be afraid of altering your sequence completely. Just make sure you're creating an additional sequence so that it's non-destructive. You're not restricted to this particular order. Sometimes when I'm working on a radio edit for a lot of different types of interviews. I can get totally tired of it and I just need to do something else. Or there might be a particular moment in an edit I'm not feeling totally confident about or I can't really see where the edit is going to go. And at this point I might decide I'd rather work on visuals or maybe I'll look for some music that might be appropriate for the scene. Sometimes a little exploration will help get you back on the right path with an interview or a particular part of the story are working on. This can really help you gain confidence and help you stay engaged in the project. As editors were feelers, not robots, user intuition. If it feels right to lay down some attempt for music, do it. Or if you want to spend some time working on graphics and figuring out how that might work, edit overall, then do that. The process involves taking alternate routes. Sometimes the only path through project is to take a detour to experiment with an idea, and then realize that it works. Or maybe discover some other idea that you could only have discovered by trying that first idea out. Don't be afraid to veer off path if you're feeling stuck or uninspired. Now let's take a look at the overall process. Where do we start and where do we go with the assembly? We start with the visuals, add the voice-over, then add the music. Don't worry too much about how long the overall assembly will be. Start with working on the edit until it makes sense chronologically. If you're working on a different project like a music video, start with the music. And working on a documentary. Start with the voiceover and dialogue. Our upcoming lessons, we'll delve further into these next stages of the editing process. This will make more sense once you get through more lessons. Once you have a rough structure, make adjustments to your footage, voiceover and music through each pass of editing, focus on the pacing and overall rhythm. Work on the purpose, tone, I trace and movement, and editing continuity. Depending on who you're working with. This maybe a good time to export a quick edit for review. In the final edit phase, the adjustments you'll be making some visuals, voiceover and music will be minimal. You might start to add graphics, but of course you could add these earlier if necessary. You'll start to also work on your soundscape, which will require more adjustments. Again, these adjustments are necessary to make sure all the elements feel harmonious and maintain a good pacing and rhythm. At this point, you might send off another edit for review, make adjustments, review again, then get final picture lock approval, meaning nothing hypothetically should change in the edit. But again, it's never too late to add revisions if you absolutely need to. This is when you work on color correction and color grading. In some cases, if you're working with the log footage, especially, you may be adding lots or color correcting your footage earlier in the process. But these are tasks that you kinda wanna it locked edit so that you're more efficient and not color correcting and color grading clips that you're just going to end up deleting in the fine edit. And then finally, when everyone's happy, it's time to deliver the final product. Please remember that these are just guidelines. Every process, every team, every professional involved in production will change the process overall. So I hope this lesson isn't infuriating to those who want a specific path. There is no 100% correct answer here. But what I can't say, I'd suggest you start with the narrative. Is it visuals, the voice-over, the dialogue, the music. What drives the story? Start with that first and then get that rough beginning, middle, and end onto the timeline. If you're used to cutting to music, tried to cut the scene dry first and then add the music afterward. If you're extremely stuck and you can't see where the project's going. Try looking for music first, go to the lesson on music and pick music for your project. Remember that no matter what part of the processor in, you're always going to have to be making small adjustments to connect the elements together and make them feel cohesive. Go ahead and start your first edit. Add the visuals, add the voice-over, but don't get too far ahead because in the next lesson, we're going to go through the video editing process, which will help you with your initial edit.
7. The Editing Process: In this lesson, I'm going to go through my own video editing process and give you the reasons why I make certain edits. And I'm hoping that this will help you improve and refine your own process. A big reason to make a cut is simply for story. I really liked the shot checking out the soil. So maybe we'll just start with the soil here. So there we go. I think that's enough time. We get the idea of what's happening really, you don't need to have a clip go for longer than necessary right away. I see. Okay. It's a hand coming down in soil and it's rubbing the soil, you see that you get the point of the clip pretty quickly. It's also great about starting with this shot is that it's our widest shot available, so it gives us the most contexts for the scene. We can see that we're in this garden area. There are some foliage around. It gives us a sense of the environment. And in some cases, it's more important to have establishing shots than others. And in this case, it might not be as important because you can clearly see the context of the scene without needing that much information. Another rule of thumb when cutting for story is that you usually want to cut to a shot that reveals some sort of new information about the scene or the character or the story itself. Sometimes you might choose to not reveal information that the audience wants. That might be because you're trying to support the tone of your edit. So you're like a paint through with your canvas. This select sequence and this sequence are your canvases with all your colors. And you're just gliding over all the colors, trying to figure out which clips do we want to cut to test them out. You might mix a few clips together and they don't work, but that's fine. You just keep going and keep trying things out. And I'm going to keep going through this process until I have the entire rough story assembled. I already know this ad, it's not going to work well unless we heavily cut out some of the action. So that means that just because this hand is coming back towards the camera does not mean that we need to cut back to the hand. Moving back. I mean, you could, but in this case, I don't think we want it. I think we want to maybe even stop there, do a quick edit. And then the digging starts. I mean, I think that works even. So this is called editing continuity, which is where characters and objects are in relation to one another throughout a sequence of shots. In shot one cutting to SHA2, we have editing continuity because the hand from shot to shot two doesn't jump within its physical space. But in shot to this shot three, we cut out a whole bunch of action for breaking continuity. You never see that right-hand coming in and starting to dig the hole. Instead, we cut that action out and we cut straight to both hands digging into the hole. So we're cutting out a lot of action here. If I cut the action logically from point a to point B to point C, audiences gone to understand exactly what's going on. And sometimes that's very important, but other times that's not. Our brains can fill in the action that we don't see the action that's missing. We can also use editing continuity to draw attention to specific edits. So in this short sequence here, on these three cuts, I'm not following editing continuity. This is for pacing choices and to move the story forward quickly. Then on this cut here, I choose to follow editing continuity. I'm not cutting out any of the action. And I think it draws more attention to this cut and this is where I want to draw attention to, which is to the seed. Watch them AS my eye is following the pinky. And then straight into the next shot. My eye is already on the whole the digging action and it's already a smooth that it already. So let's just go this way, digging the hole. You don't even need it. Again, we only want to linger on the shot for as long as we need the audience to understand what's going on. And I'm not always just thinking about where something is in the frame and also thinking about which way it's moving. And this is the reason to why I look for movement within the frame and why a prioritized movement within the frame of our static shot. I'd like the movement here, and that's why I chose this shot over the shot. So basically on trying to do is follow the movement from one frame to the next. I did try creating the edit, right when the seed was coming back on my hand. But now I'm trying to figure out a way to make it work with the movement moving from right to left. So let's see how this works. Something's not working here. It's not fluid. It's also very important to remember that this takes experimentation. This took me a while to figure out how to get the movement and the eye trace working and took a lot of experimentation with different clips. So just keep at it until you get something that works for you. The hands going from right to left, twisting and also a follows through in this shot here. Each shot reveals something new. This shot reveals this part of the seed. This one maybe is more unnecessary, but we still get to see a different angle of the seed at least. And then this one, it shows the wider shot, which is basically going to connect from this shot to planting the seed. So I'm already thinking one step ahead. Going back to cutting for story. I ended up cutting this shot here because it was redundant. And even though it showed a different part of the seed, it just wasn't enough to advance the story in any meaningful way. So ended up cutting it. Another example here. Cutting from here to here, without any movement, the shot just looks too similar, but also it's different enough that it doesn't look consistent. See the seat is facing at this angle and then in this shot is facing at this angle. So when you cut from this shot to this shot, the angle of the seed is too different and then becomes jarring. To fix that, we can just start by having some of the soil coming into frame right away. So we're not Jarred by that shot. Our eye catches in the movement coming in. Because the soil falls incrementally here, we can maybe do some tricky edits so that we can keep the movement going. That doesn't work. Let's try. Let's try going here because the whole seed, it moves at this point. So let's try this cut here. So the seed stops and then moves again. That's, that's what's messing me up right now. And I see it stops and then it goes back and goes again. Maybe we'll follow that movement here. Try to fix that. Let's tuck it in a bit. Let's try this. That could work. Right now, it's just a rough edit. We can definitely figure out how to fix this, or you can go back into our selects and choose a different shot. So that is a glimpse into my process when putting together a first edit, a cover story, not overstating my welcome with a clip. Revealing new information as necessary. Using the story to decide which clip I might use next. Also thinking about the editing continuity is important to include the entire action of something throughout a sequence of shots. Or can we cut out the action? Movement within a frame? Can draw someone's eye from one shot to another. Also consider the movement of physical objects within the scene and how they flow from one cuts to the next. Some of you might be wondering, what about the pacing and rhythm. And yes, that's important and I consider that as well. When I'm editing, that becomes more important as you go through with voice-over sound effects and music, because that adds to the overall pacing and rhythm of the piece. If you want more tips on pacing and rhythm, I've linked in the notes below the pacing and rhythm lesson from my other class on video editing techniques. So think about these things as you're making your cut. You don't have to do all of these things all at once. During your assembly, you can do multiple passes and focus on each one of these things individually as you go through each pass if you haven't already done so, go ahead and finish your initial assembly or rough cut with picture and Voice-over. Now is a good time to add music to your added. So in the next lesson we're going to talk about how to choose great music.
8. Choosing Great Music: Choosing great music can bring your story to life, assist in the pacing and rhythm of your project, and help structure your edit overall. So it's important to know how to identify great music. For this lesson, I will using artless to explain how I choose music, you can use any music service provider that you prefer. I primarily use art lists and Epidemic Sound. A lot of these music subscription services allow you to sign up for a 30-day trials. So you can go ahead and do that and download a watermark track to use in your own edit. I've also listed a few sites that you can use for free music, that you can use for personal and commercial projects. Like always. The purpose of the story I'm trying to tell for guidance. You remember this diagram here from less than three, the tone is our emotional connection to the purpose of our story. And music does a great job at creating an emotional connection. So it's so important that we aim to choose music that fits the tone of our project and make sure it's great. We want to achieve inspirational mood and tone, and maybe even a little dramatic. When we're choosing music, we want to stay open, download tracks that you feel could work. They might not, but that's fine. We're going to choose more music than we need and then narrow it down from there with any of these online music providers, the best way to start is to use the tags available to narrow down your musical choices. We're not really concerned about the video theme or the instruments within the track. We're mostly concerned about the mood and the genre because the nude is the result of the tone of our project, is how we want our audience to feel. And the genre can also assist in our intended tone. Instead of clicking on all of these tags that apply, like if we clicked uplifting, oh yeah, it's totally epic. T2. And it's powerful and it's exciting and it's happy and, and it's funny. That's gonna get you nowhere. Picking too many tags will narrow down our options too much. These options just don't work for the project that we're working on. Trying to narrow down the tags to one or two or three max. So let's look at what we're trying to create here. So I think it's going to be a bit dramatic. Maybe we'll try uplifting two. Let's try that to the genre will also help narrow down our choices. Because already I know that this piece is not going to work well with blues music, rock music, no singer-songwriter, no, we don't want our voice-over to compete with the singer. So we need music that doesn't have a singer in it. Hip hop, no, holiday, no, it doesn't mean that these genres won't work for your project. If you see any genre that can fit the tone that you're going for, selected cinematic. This is a great tag. Select right away. We want to take the audience on a journey. And when you click the cinematic tag, it gives you more musical options that have that natural story than natural journey already in the music. An interesting beginning, middle, and end. And the music takes you on a journey through different layers of sound, instruments. And the song as a whole has a tone and a mood to it. So here's an example of a song that I think takes you on a journey. And you can see I've broken up the song into segments. And the cuts I've made on this track are either new instruments being introduced, different types of rhythm, a different type of feel or mood. And he changes in intensity, even a different type of effect. And I'm sure there's other attributes to music that professional musicians can cipher, but this is how I break down a track as an editor. So right here we have an example of a new instrument being introduced, a guitar and a bass, cello, I think I'm not sure exactly what that is. This segment also introduces a new field and vibe. And first we have this piano and it gives you this kind of certain feel and just a wandering kinda feel for me. And then when the guitar and the bass or whatever that is comes in and almost feels more exotic, like we've arrived somewhere. You can interpret this whatever way you want. But it's important that we note that there is a change in tone. There's a change in the mood. Here's an example of the music changing and rhythm. And what I mean by this is the amount of beads played PRE measure. So can you don't need to know what a measure is? Just listen to this segment or the amount of beats increases. So there's more notes being played per measure of this track, which makes it more interesting. That change makes it more unpredictable. Here's an example of how special effects can change the music. Take a listen to this and see if you can hear it. Did you hear that? Did you hear that subtle change in reverberation? The music sounded like it was closer to you. And then the musician altered the track by increasing the reverb. It added some spaciousness to it. It feels like we've arrived in another new location. So this effect is also adding to the story that's to the tone, it adds to the journey of this track. And lastly, there's intensity. Listen to this change in intensity from dairy intense to call serine. The intensity of a track can be determined by how many instruments are being played at once, the amount of beats at any given time, and also how loud the part of the track is. Here's an example of music that might have a purpose in some cases, but in the majority of the times I would probably not use music like this. I've broken up the track in the same way I did as the previous one. What I've noticed right away was that there's no change in beat. There's no change in tone. There's no change in intensity, really, besides the intro. The only changes that actually occur in this song are either new instruments being introduced or instruments being taken away, and the odd subtle change in chord progression, the lack of these other elements in this music makes us track a bit more predictable and not the greatest choice for storytelling. There's no nuance to the tone, feels like one tone the entire time. A very helpful tip here, look at the waveforms when you're looking at music. You can see right away when comparing both examples that the waveforms are completely different. Just peaks and valleys in this one. While in this one at all, the same. Listen to your first impressions. Okay? All this sounds way too. If you're getting a certain vibe from the track, initially, chances are that other people might get the same field from that track as well. X-files. Sounds like a some sort of crime show. Okay. This sounds like some fantasy. Right there. It sounds like Lord of the Rings or something. And then I see the fantasy tag. It's not quite the right genre for us. This is kind of interesting, quite dramatic. If it fits the tone, you're going for it, great. Try it out. A quick way to addition your track is to play back the audio in the music subscription service than tab back to editing program, press Play, and take a listen to the patient. Don't judge, change day by the office to put Bible. She's done a lot already. I can see that it's working. It's dramatic, it's adding something to that. It itself. We're going to save this one. Sometimes you'll be surprised by tracks that don't feel quite right. But then when he watched them to the video, they could work. The cells very dramatic. But for the heck of it, we're just going to try auditioning. It kills tieback. Be patient. Don't judge. Each day by the hall fish FUV, but by the sheets that you've plotted. And okay, it could work. Stay determined. Darkness, Clavey U, you will struggle to see the light. Going to o. You'll update you. Okay. I did not think that this drug would work at all, but actually, it can, it can, it can very well work. And especially if you saw the crescendo there, it happened right at the end of the 29 seconds roughly anyways, but with some tweaking, you probably time it out. Go ahead and find some music, test out a few different options. And when you add the music to your edit, remember, you're going to be readjusting the timing of your edit. You might get some different inspiration for the music choice and that will change the way your edit is, and that's great. Let it shape your edit even more. Remember the editing process is done and passes. So every new element you add to the story will need to be integrated into your current edit and your edit willing to adjust and change accordingly. So to recap, try only selecting a few tags. Start with genre and mood. Identify great music by listening to the changes in the instrument, rhythm, tone, intensity, and effect, and make sure the track actually moves you in some way emotionally. User first impressions with the tracks. Also make sure to Edition them. And when you're in doubt, just try it out. It does not hurt. Go ahead and look for some music for your own project. And in the next lesson, we're gonna learn what it means to edit with purpose.
9. Editing with Purpose: We want to keep in mind at all times how our edit is making the audience feel. How does this cut make the audience feel? What about this one? How do all of the cuts in your edit make the audience feel overall whether or not you're successful in connecting with the audience, you still need to justify every edit you make. Otherwise, what's the point of even making an edit in the first place? So for example, right here, when the gardener places the seed into the hole, right there, that cut, It's super simple, but it also has a lot to do with the overall purpose of the piece we're trying to inspire, we're trying to encourage, we're trying to create that hopeful message. And one way to do that is to emphasize our hero character, which is the seed. It's very centered shot which can represent stability. And it's also the first time you see the hole dug out with just the seed inside of it. So puts a lot more emphasis on to this moment. Also going back to the lesson on the editing process, I explained what editing continuity was and how I used editing continuity on this cut, particularly to contrast the other edits that don't follow rules of continuity. And I do this and attempts to create more meaning with this edit. I've also used a very subtle digital zoom to emphasize. Focus on the scene of him more. In the soundscape itself. I've added this explosion, which sounds more like a base hit. To emphasize the drop of a seed. I've held a bit longer on the shot. So I've actually had to copy paste these frames a few times to lengthen the shot a bit more. Lingering on the shot changes the pacing, adding a bit more tension and drama. And then finally, we have our voice-over, stay determined. Stay determined, which is the message of our piece we're trying to encourage or trying to inspire. I want to bring attention to this message. So the timing of when that VoiceOver comes up is important. The audience to feel like they're the seed themselves, they're in that position. The seat is all alone in the center of the frame. We know it's going to happen, it's going to be covered. So maybe there's a bit of anxiety around that, but the voice reminder, stay determined. We know why we're doing this. We know that we're gonna go through this transformation. It's not gonna be easy, but there's good things on the other end. So I know this sounds kinda ridiculous, but this always helps me make an edit and have a good reason for the edit that justify the edit. I have a reason. I'm hoping it hits the audience in the intended way. So all of these reasons, using editing continuity that cut at this moment, the base hit the extended lingering shot, the voice-over day determine digital zoom. All of these edits are an attempt to make the audience relate to this position, to bring attention to the purpose of the story. Lot of the time when I'm making edits, I'm thinking how does this feel? I'm even talking out loud and using the words, I feel like this cut is using these feeling words can help me connect to the emotion of the cut and will help me to justify my editing choices, making sure that that purpose is felt and seen with every single choice that I make. This is why we need to rely on these intentions. Our intention for the edit is this. It doesn't mean that the audience is going to receive that edit in that way, but you have the power to justify your edit and attempt to draw out that purpose, and having a greater ability to connect the audience to the overall purpose. Another example right here, fades are typically known to be used to create a passing of time. I felt that this dissolved would work the best for this moment, the dissolve is a smooth transition from the flecks of dirt falling match dissolving to the water droplets, the dirt and the water contrasts each other and they both have different meanings. The audience can create the meaning that they want to out of that and it can be subtle. It might not even be that obvious. But the idea is that I had that in mind to justify the cut. I'm trying to show that with time, the flecks of dirt, the dirt that's covering the seed will eventually turn into nourishing water, which represents the hope. The hope that gets you through the deep dark times. Hold onto hope. Once you hear the word hope, that's when you can see the water fully visible. There's no opacity change because I really wanted to emphasize the hope of the situation in that moment. Hold on to hope. I also decided to amplify the rain noise to emphasize that symbolism more. I've tried for every single edit to justify my reasons for making the cut. I've tried to make every single edit suit the purpose through emotion. Not every edit is going to work that way, but I've tried, this is just a few examples from my edit. And who knows? Maybe you've interpreted in a completely different way. That's fine. All that really matters is that every edit you make needs to be justified. You're always trying to think about how the audience is going to feel in that moment. And if it's serving the purpose of your project. And then what's great is when someone else reviews your project, they can confirm whether or not your intended tone is getting across. The purpose of your Edit should always be in the forefront of your mind. Think about your own edit and how you've created meaning with each cut or group of cuts, it could mean that you're making cuts so that another cut has meaning. This is also the artistry of editing and it takes time and practice. This is what really gets me excited about editing overall. Have some fun creating purpose with your edit. And remember, you can make meaning with every edit you make. In the next lesson, we will dive into audio mixing.
10. Audio Mixing Guidelines: In this lesson, we're gonna go through some general audio mixing guidelines. Understanding this process will help improve the quality of your soundscape. The goal of a soundscape is to draw the audience into the story and to be successful at this, the soundscape needs to enhance the edit. Get rid of all possible distractions. That mainly means cleaning up all clicks and pops. For me, It's become a habit to add two millisecond audio fades to the ins and outs of every piece of audio. Doing this will quickly create smooth transitions to your audio. I'm gonna go over a few really general guidelines on audio levels here. So take this with a grain of salt. You need to use your ears. And for every project It's going to be different. This project, in my opinion, it's mixed a bit hotter than other ones, which means that I'm throwing my audio up closer to the max peak, which I don't do for every project. One other thing to keep in mind, do not peak past 0 decibels or you will distort your audio because the voice is so integral to our story, It's very important that we hear the voice-over clearly, crisp, not muffled, concise. So no matter what, we're going to ensure that the voice over is clear above the music and the sound effects. Don't judge, each day by the hall fish jewelry, I like to keep my voice over peeking from minus 12 to minus 6. There are times that it can peak even up to minus three, but it's not going beyond that. Quick tip, use the multiband compressor with a broadcast preset. This compresses the audio, giving the voiceover a more even sound, emphasizes particular frequencies in the voice and concentrates the sound of the voice over, making it more punchy and crisp and clear. This also allows you to crank up your music and sound effects a bit more without losing the voice-over clarity within the mix. Also, when you're applying effects of multiple clips of audio, try using the audio track mixer this way, if you make adjustments, you can make them on all your clips at once, rather than having to select each individual audio clip at a time. What I love is that these are guidelines, so you don't necessarily have to stick to this, especially if your story calls for it. I loved the show mind Hunter, and I especially found their choice to keep the voice is lower than the music in these bar scenes captivating, you really have to listen. And if you were at this location in real life with a live band playing, you probably wouldn't be able to hear the other person that well over the music. So I like how they use that to tell the story and to make it feel more real. But what they also did was add subtitles. Having no subtitles enables the audience to be able to read what they're saying. If they don't catch the actual words of what they're saying, is it allows them to keep the mixing choices aimed towards the realism of the story. This is just my opinion, but take a look at these scenes when you have a chance. Unlike those specifically mixed scenes in mind hunter, the complex story and visuals of tenant requires your full attention. It's my understanding that Christopher Nolan wanted to give the audience and immersive experience and he truly believes in cinema. So this movie was intended to be viewed in theaters, and I didn't have a chance to see in theaters, so had to watch on TV. And I found that some of the dialogue was difficult to understand over the booming music and the high dynamic range cause me to turn up the audio during the quiet moments and turn it down during the loud moments. Eventually, I opted in to watch with subtitles, which also competed with the complex visuals. And it became more difficult to follow the story, which ended up taking me out of the experience. Later on I decided to watch them scenes, headphones on and the mix was incredible in my headphones. So what's the moral of the story here? Even though most movies and TV shows keep voices clear above the rest of the audio, you don't always have to follow the rules, but you also need to consider where and how your edit will be viewed. Just make sure that you find that happy medium that suits the story without frustrating your audience. For sound effects, I'll aim to keep the levels are peaking from around minus 20 to minus eight. And some effects can even go to minus three. That's the goal for me with sound, is to complement the edit and to draw the audience deeper into the action and the story. In the next lesson, I'm going to go through some more tips on sound effects, as it is a huge part of a great sounding soundscape. The music like the sound effects, also, you guessed it. It needs to draw the audience into the story. And what music does really well is enhanced the tone of the project. I'll aim skied my music peaking between minus 20 decibels to minus 10 decibels. And in some cases the music and even come up to minus three decibels. If the story calls for, the music will mostly serve to balance out the moments in between our voice-over and will carry our audience through to the end of the piece. When the voiceovers present, I tend to duck or dip the music to keep the voice-over clear. Each day by the hall fish jewelry, depending on the scene, you might have to duck or dip more often than not, when you have moments without voiceover or competing sound effects and music and do a great job to fill the void. If we leave a moment MC or where there's no dialogue or sound effects, it can sound like a mistake was made in the mix. Now this isn't to say that you can't have quiet moments in your music, just aim to be intentional about it. So in this part of the mix, I want it to dip down the music to emphasize the rain, which symbolizes the hope. So in this case, I'll gradually dip the music down to guide the listener from the music to the increasing sound of the rain. So here's a recap. Use audio fades to steer clear of any clicks or pops in your audio. The voice should be clean and clear, understood over other sounds. Aim to keep your dialogue around minus 12 to minus six decibels. Try using the multiband compressor. It's a great way to take your voice over to the next level quickly and easily. Sound effects are generally for me, around minus 20 to minus eight decibels. Again, they complement the edit, draw the audience into the action, emphasize certain story moments. The music around minus 20 decibels to minus 10 decibels. Music and really benefit the tone of your piece. We want each element of audio, dialogue, sound effects, music, all to compliment each other and the edit overall. So in the next lesson, we're going to talk all about sound effects in our soundscape.
11. Create a Captivating Soundscape: Similar to music, sound effects can draw the audience into the action that's happening on the screen. So it's important to know which sound effects to choose and how to alter them to suit your story. The way I like to approach the sound effects selection process. Go through my sequence, identify where sound effects might fit and what kind of sound might work with the action. The way I do this is just lay down markers and write out all the sound effect ideas that I have for any particular point in the timeline. The camera's proximity to a character or object will alter the sound quality, the loudness, and the choice of sound. So in this shot from a distance, we see the head rubbing up against the dirt. And instead of hearing the dirt noises because it's so far away, the ambiance of the scene will overpower that. So you can hear in this example, I've chosen to amplify it, the birds and the ambiance instead of the dirt. In a shot like this, where we're closer to the subject, we have a bit more liberty and cranking up that audio. I even had the idea that I could use something like building rubble sound effects or like a rock slide or something like that. The sounds don't necessarily all need to sound realistic. They just need to sound right for the action, the scene, and the overall story. Using a sound effect that may not be realistic to the scene, will stick out more and can be useful when you're trying to draw attention to certain story moments. These moments will hopefully draw the audience deeper into the story and into its meaning. Use that to figure out which parts of the story you want to emphasize. Take a listen to this soundscape that I've created. I've muted the music and the voice over so you can really hear the sound effects. What role they play in the purpose of the story. I know everyone will have a different idea. What kinda soundscapes sounds good to them and what they prefer. But my intention with the soundscape was to use a variety of sound effects to draw the attention to our hero, which is the seed, I used a variety of hits, wishes, impacts to amplify the movements of the seed. Emphasize the covering of this team with the dirt. Make it sound a bit more terrifying. Boone ring. Bring attention to the nourishment of the water, the rain, and have that transition into the birds chirping again, which is meant to show the life of the seed, the future of it. So it's all about the story of the seed, all about the purpose of that seed. I'm just emphasizing those moments and thinking about how can I draw attention to the purpose of this project? It's very important to get a full sounding soundscape. And really what this comes down to is utilizing a full range of frequencies, low frequency sounds and high-frequency sounds. And you can do this by layering multiple sound effects together that either feature high frequencies are low frequencies, or you can manipulate the frequency using a filter. Doing this by adding multiple layers of sound effects is actually quite simple. I'll look for a sound effect that works and that features high frequencies. And then I'll also look towards lower frequency sound effects that will work for the same action as well. In this segment here, I've used a combination of high-frequency sounds and low frequency sounds. The George sprinkling high-frequency sound. The hands brushing together include a combination of high-frequency and mid-high frequencies. Here's a lower frequency. Lastly, I've added a couple of whoosh sound effects to highlight the cut from black to the hands brushing together, here we have a mid high frequency wish. And this deep wash and push covering our low frequencies. And then again, all of those sound effects mashed together. Let's go back to the dirt falling over this seed portion of the edit so I can show you what this part sounds like without any frequency adjustments. Before I applied any effects, it was a bit of a mess of sounds. And after adjusting the frequencies, this is what it sounds like. I'll use this short segment with two different sound effects to illustrate how to manipulate frequencies. In this case, let's just mute our second track. Let's take a listen to this first track here to keep it simple. Our top track will be high-frequency and our low track will be low-frequency. And we do already have a lot of that high-frequency in this sound effect. So I'm not going to adjust it at all. Let's take a listen to the second audio track now. So you can hear already that it sounds very high frequency. It's a compliment, the high-frequency sound effect on the first layer, we want to pull out a bit more of the low-frequency sounds in this one. So to do that, I'm going to use the parametric equalizer, which is an audio effects filter. Any queue parametric equalizer effects controls edit the effect. And we can read this left to right and the left side we have our low-frequency sounds, and the right side we have high-frequency sounds. When we play it back, you can see all the low-frequency sounds on this side and high-frequency sounds on this side here. There's quite a bit more high-frequency sounds being emphasized here. And what I like about the parametric equalizer is that you can get very specific with different frequencies. And there's a ton of things you can do with this. But because we're just focusing on trying to create low and high frequencies, we can just disable all of these intervals here. Keeping only are high and low frequency notes. If you just click and drag one of these points, you can't go beyond minus 15 dB or pass the low end or the high end on hurt scale. So one way to get beyond that is to use the number sliders. And we're going to turn that high-frequency down completely. And we're going to crank up that low-frequency, nice and high. So we're only capturing this part of the frequencies here. So let's take a listen to this. Already. You can hear, I'm capturing a lot more of the low-frequency sounds. But I think I even want to push this a bit more. And let's adjust that some more. We'll cut off even these frequencies as well and just focus on the low, low ones. Though, you'd get a nice base e field to it. And now when we combine our high-frequency sound effect and our low-frequency sound effect, we get a nice full range of frequencies and our sounds. And that's what I've done with all the sound effects. I've picked out high frequencies and low frequencies. And I've used those frequencies to create a fuller sounding soundscape. So to recap, when searching for sound effects, I consider the proximity of the sound to the camera. When you're further away from the action, perhaps the ambiance might take over. If you're closer to the action, you definitely have more liberty and creating sounds that might not be as realistic to the action, but they will sound right for the scene. And in fact, it's more important to find facts that sound right to the action or the scene in the story rather than sounding accurate. This also applies to the purpose of our story. The rock slide effect might not be accurate to our scene, but it sounds right to me and it works with the story. And lastly, it's so important to aim to create a full sound, create a music bed with low-frequency sound effects and high-frequency sound effects. And make sure you're also using a frequency effect like the parametric equalizer to achieve the sound you want. Take these tips and ideas and have some fun creating your own soundscape. In the next lesson, we will discuss loudness standards.
12. Loudness Standards: After we've achieved a full mix, following our general audio mixing guidelines, it's time to make some final tweaks to ensure that our loudness is that an appropriate level for its intended platform or using the Loudness Radar, we can measure the average loudness of our entire edit. This is important because it gives us the information we need to ensure that the loudness of our edit is where we want it to be when outputting for web broadcast or cinema, sticking to a standard is a great way to develop a system that you could follow every time. So each of your edits remains consistent. To use the Latin surrender her, open up the audio track mixer and we're going to apply the effect to our master track. And of course, the master track is where all are audio is output 2. So anything applied here will be applied to every single audio track. Go to Special click Loudness Radar wrote when we right-click and edit, it'll open up and you see this fancy radar. Right away. You can see here that we have a list of presets, which is a great place to start depending on where your edit is going to eventually live, will be the determining factor of which settings you need to dial in. Different broadcasters have different requirements for loudness and peaks. And when you are delivering assets, a broadcaster will usually have some sort of specification sheet detailing everything you need to provide them with. And this includes loudness requirements as well. The loudness standard is measured in loves I'll UFS, which is loudness units, full-scale or elk AFS loudness K weighted relative to full-scale loves and LCF S are essentially the same thing. They're both measured in absolute scale and are both equal to one. Let's take a look at these presets. We have ATSC, which is commonly used in North America. If we click on Settings here, we'll see the changes being applied along with their presets. And you can also see here that the target loudness is minus 23 ALK AFS. Here we have the European broadcast standards. Target loudness is minus 23 Elliot of S, So a bit louder. And then here we have TRB 32, which is the Japanese broadcast standards. And that's also at minus 24 elk AFS. And then we have Cinema, which is minus 24. Measuring loudness is different than measuring peaks. Your audio meters is what measures peaks, your peak audio. While the loudest radar measures the average levels. For the web, the general guideline is to stick to minus 16 LK IFS will use the ATSC preset for our starting point. And this is for North America broadcast standards. Click and drag the slider down to minus six. And we'll change our radar speed to one minute. And the reason for that is because our project is only around 40 seconds or so. So the radar speed is what determines how much will be displayed on our radar. And also take our peak indicator and drag that down to 0 decibels because for the web, we just don't want it peaking pass 0. There's no general requirement of what the max peak needs to be. Be patient. Don't judge each. Alright, so we are quite loud. We're at minus 14. I also didn't notice any peaks. The peak indicator will light up if the peaks go beyond what you've said, the peak indicator 2. So since it's set to 0, nothing is peaked paths 0, so we won't risk any distortion. What's great about this Loudness Radar is that it gives us a visual representation of the loudness. And we can see that it's pretty consistent. But then around here it gets a bit louder. So I may go back into the mix and try to get more of an even loudness throughout. Now our goal is to give us a minus six OK AFS. And the way to do that is to, well, there's a bunch of different ways we could do this. But I would use the hard limiter. And the reason why is because the hard limiter does two different things. Let's click at it. One, it limits the audio. So you're guaranteeing that the audio is not going to go beyond a certain limit that you set. And you can also change the input boost, which will increase the overall audio or decrease the overall audio using this slider. So if you have audio that's not loud enough, you can boost it by a certain amount of decibels to get to that level that you want to get to. But in our case, we have to lower it by a certain amount of decibels. So if you want to get this to minus 16 decibels, we need to reduce this by 1.4 decibels. So right-click on the hard limiter and will take the input boost down by 1.4 decibels. And we're also going to switch this from peak to peak. And the reason why is because the true peak is where the maximum level of our audio signal will hit. It cannot go past what we indicate on this ladder here. If it says a true peak and the true peak is like a peak, but from my understanding, it's more accurate and I'm not sure exactly why we need true peak and peak and not just have true peak. But that's how it is. Basically if you're gonna use peak, you're still risking the chance that some rogue peaks might go past your set limit. No matter what will block any signal from getting past your set limit. And in our case that's minus 0.1 decibels. I'm going to run the radar one more time, reset this, and we're going to see where we land. Boom, there we go. We're at minus 16 program loudness. Just processing our audio using the hard limiter will get us the rest of the way there. Now let's pretend this was broadcast. What would we do? I've downloaded specifications from CBC. I'm from Canada. So imagining that we deliver something for CBC. And here we got this huge document full of technical specifications that we could follow and included in that is our audio. And look at that, we have audio loudness right here. It says right here minus 20 decibel true peak max. So that means we cannot go past minus2. So let's go back to our settings. We can set this peak indicator now 2 minus 2 ddNTP. So this will show us for Peking past minus2, a program loudness of minus 24 elk AFS and a plus minus 2 ALU means that we could be within two loudness units of minus 24 LK IFS, but it's no problem. We can hit Minus 24. Let's set this back to minus 24. Our radar has changed, so now it's outside the boundaries of what we need for broadcast. Since we've balanced our audio from minus 16, we can just go straight back into our hard limiter. We have true peak selected and we'll set this to minus2 because we don't want it to go past minus 20 dB TP. And we'll take our input boost down another eight decimal points. If we take this down in another eight, we should be down to minus 24. So what's that? That's minus 9.4. Now it's radar this. And there you haven't read minus 24 elk AFS and nothing is peaking past minus2 ddNTP. So to recap, measuring loudness is different than measuring peaks. The audio meters measures peaks, whereas the loudness radar measures the average levels. For the web. You can stick to a minus 16 loudness target, but just make sure you're not peaking past 0 for broadcast. And refer to the technical specification sheet from whatever broadcaster you are delivering your final project 2. And in our example we stuck to minus 24 ALK AFS and minus 20 dB TP. The true peak is the more accurate version of Peek. Use true peak to ensure that you're not going past whatever the limit is. We use the hard limiter because it limits your audio and it also allows you to adjust the overall output gain using the input boosts ladder. So if you're too hot, turned down a bit to get to that target loudness. And if you're too quiet, crank it up so you can get back to that target loudness. If you're seeing a lot of variation in your loudness meter gold back into your mix and make sure everything is sounding okay and is not peaking. And it's within the general audio mixing guidelines from less than 10. Great job. We've completed the audio portion of this class. Next up we're going to talk about color correction or how to achieve accurate brightness and contrast.
13. Adjusting Brightness and Contrast: Before you add a look to your footage, it's important that we obtain proper luminance levels. So in this lesson, we're going to focus on how to achieve accurate brightness and contrast. When beginning primary color correction, we need a few color correction tools, Lumetri Color and our scopes. If you don't have these panels open, go to Window, Lumetri Color and limit your scopes, which is located right here. When Lumetri panel is open, Selection Follows. Play head option will be enabled wherever your play head is, it will automatically select the clip that it is over top of. I'm not a huge fan of this. So I'll go to sequence. De-select Selection Follows play head, and there you have it. Now it's no longer automatically selecting the clip. Now let's take a look at our scopes. So here we have a range of scopes. Scopes are here to help us, uh, measure the values of illuminance, color, and saturation within our image. Now let's not get too overwhelmed here. Just deselect all of these except waveform. And all I'm doing is right-clicking on the Lumetri Scopes window to get this menu. Can also click on this little wrench to get this menu up. So make sure you just have waveform selected. And we're going to change the waveform type to Luma because the first step in the color correction process is to gain accurate luminance levels. And when we select our waveform to be luma, we're just measuring the brightness of the image. There's no color values. All of these little white particles here in the waveform monitor correspond to the luminance values from our image. So this band here is the dirt. The dirt fills most of the frame and that's sitting between ten to 20 IRI. So what do you think this is? Right here, this area? Well, that's this leaf. This leaf is sitting between 20 to 50 IRE. And then you can see this darker foliage, which is in this area here. And what do you think this is? In our hand? And when we play it back, you can see it's kinda like animating these particles as the hand is moving. One really easy way to identify which part of the image corresponds to what part on the waveform is to go to your Effects Controls. Select a Mask. Go back to your Lumetri Scopes, and then you can click and drag the mask over the image are only seeing portions that are masked. So yeah, there's our leaf, there's the darker foliage. And then there's our hand. There's our skin tone going all the way across there. This is going to be very helpful when we're trying to get all the elements with our image to the proper luminance. If you're new to reading waveforms, go through the rest of the clips and try to identify which values correspond to what parts of the image. And then grab your mask and figure out how close you were to be incorrect. What I like to use as a reference for accurate luminance levels is the Zone System. This was created by hansel Adams and Fred Archer to determine the optimal film exposure and development. It's for black and white print photography, but I also use this as a reference for when exposing for video and in postproduction when setting my exposure sliders. So the 0 to ten on the zone system can correspond to 0 to 100 on our IRE scale. Let's take a look at this and match it up roughly to the zone system. And of course you still have the user I stopped the determined under these circumstances, under these lighting conditions with these elements in the frame look like this. So I'm pushing and pulling sliders until things are landing kind of in the right areas. You can see that I'm starting with my contrast and I'm slowly bringing my highlights and my shadows into the right luminance values. So the waveform starts to expand a bit and I'm not trying to crush the detail in the shadows, nor am I trying to clip the highlights. It's all about retaining as much information in the image as you can. You might be tempted to bring the shadows down dirt because it adds more contrast and naturally that adds more punch. And it's kinda satisfying to see a high contrast image, but avoid doing that in this stage. Try to get that dirt at the right level, which means you're not crushing the shadows just because the dirt is dark. It does not mean that it needs to be at 0 IRE. Then I'll throw a mask on here, check the values, check the skin tones. Skin tones look a bit hot, so I'll pull them back a bit to the roughly Landing Zone 6. And the highlights of the skin tones could push possibly in Zone 7. And when they're skin tones in the frame, I'm usually prioritizing the levels of the skin tones first, and that's another way I determine what the level of the sea be, looking at the skin tones within the frame. And sometimes I'll just monitor the levels of the skin tones and let everything else fall where a male around that, the dynamic range of the skin tones in this shot is very broad. It goes from 10 IRI all the way to 70 IRE. So in this case, and in most cases, I'm looking at the highlights of the skin and bringing the levels up to where the highlights should be. As an editor, you're going to be correcting a lot of different types of skin tones. And they come in a broad range of illuminance and different lighting situations. So a lot of times I'm using these guidelines, but I'm also asking myself, does this look natural given the lighting conditions? Does this look realistic to the story and the world that we're living in. Again, in the luminance phase, all we're trying to do is get accurate brightness and contrast in each of our shots so that they look consistent throughout. You can always toggle between each frame to check the adjustments. But using the comparison view is a much easier way to make sure that everything is matching up. To do that, check on the Color Wheels and Match tab. Select our clip. So we want to match this clip to our first one. Click on comparison view. And you'll get both clips right beside each other. Another quick and easy way to get the comparison view is to go to your button editor right here. The comparison view is this icon here, click and drag to your button bar and you're all good to go. Well, I especially love about the comparison view is that you can compare scopes as well. So you get a very clear view of, alright, bolder shadows aren't quite lining up here. So it's easy enough to go in and alter a few things. And then our highlights look just a bit hotter. And this frame compared to our frame on the left, and I kinda prefer the overall skin tone highlights here than I do here. So maybe I'll just bring these ones down just a bit. So I'll take the highlights down. I'll even take the exposure down just, just a bit. And again, I'm just adjusting my sliders until I get a general level that matches our first shot. So it seems we have a more similar comparison of frames. Luminance wise. This is a colder frame than this. The luminance levels almost can look different in each frame. But once you adjust your white balance and hue and saturation in the next lesson, the shots will look a lot more even luminance wise. That's why it's so important to always trust your scopes. Normally I'm correcting luminance and color at the same time. If you wanna go ahead and do that, you can do that after watching the next lesson. But by all means, if you want to go through each clip and adjust the luminance first, it's great practice and it's a great way to focus on one aspect of color correction at a time. So to recap, user waveform monitor to adjust the luminance values to their accurate levels. Use a mask to get a more accurate reading of your luminance levels. The zone system is a great reference when adjusting illuminance levels. But remember, use your best judgment as to what looks good, what looks real, what looks natural, and don't forget about the lighting conditions that changes everything. In some cases, it's more important that each clip is consistent throughout your entire sequence. Having a consistent base will make the color grading process or adding a look much easier. So if you decide that your skin tone highlights are going to be at 70 IRE, make sure that the highlights of the skin tones in every frame end up being around 70 IRE. And also remember that we're just trying to retain the most information as possible. Don't fall into the trap of pulling your shadows all the way down to 0 and your highlights all the way to 100. Unless of course you have pure black or pure white within the frame. If the goal is to maintain as much detail in the shadows and highlights as possible. Let's head to the next lesson where we're going to correct our colors.
14. Adjusting Colour: Now that we've achieved proper illuminance levels, it's time to focus on color accuracy. Getting a color accurate base will give us a good place to start when adding remote. Correcting color is also part of our primary color correction process. And for that, we need to take a look at the vector scope. Since the last lesson we've used the waveform monitor. So just let the vector scope, you can either use the wrench or right-click on the Lumetri window and select Vector Scope YUV. And let's de-select a waveform luma, so we get a bigger view of the vector scope. The vector scope shows us different hues and how saturated those hues are, the colors represented by these boxes and letters connected by this bounding line here. The further out the particles are from the center of the vector scope, the more saturated colors are, the closer they are to the center, the less saturated there. So if I adjust my saturation slider, you can see and take the saturation down to black and white. There is no color recorded on our vector scope. We crank up that saturation. These particles move further away from the center. Bounding line represents broadcast safe for SD video, which is 75 percent color saturation. Now that we work in HD, we can go beyond this line and these boxes on the outside representing 100% saturation to keep your saturation levels legal, you do not want to go beyond these outer boxes, but for web it doesn't really matter. But again, for web you're not going to want to go beyond these colors anyway, because you're not gaining anything by going beyond 100% color saturation when adjusting for accurate color within a shot. The first thing I'll do is adjust white balance. The process of adjusting white balanced removes unrealistic color casts and our image. So anything in the frame that is supposed to be pure white will appear white when viewed under computer monitor. So there's a few ways we can get accurate white balance, fuel white card or 18 percent gray card. You can just grab your white balance selector. Click and voila, you got your white balance. Or if you want to manually do it, you can select a mask. Make sure that just the white portion is showing. Go to your vector scope. And you can see here that this white is actually slightly leaning towards the yellow and red. So if we add a bit more blue in there, we'll bring it down a bit and then maybe a bit too much green in there, that too much blue until you adjust it like so. So now you can see here we have less saturation on our white card, which is supposed to be white, which doesn't have any color value to it. Therefore, it must be in the center of the vector scope before, after. You don't necessarily need a white card either. If you didn't have a white card, Let's reset this. You can select something within the frame that is white. We can even click on the white planner back there, but it does lean a bit more heavily towards blue. So use this technique with caution. If you don't have any white balance card or anything that's white within the frame for reference. Not to worry, you can also look at the skin tones. So we're just going to mask the skin tones. We're going to get some of those highlights as well right here. We're gonna go back to our scopes. Now our white balance is pretty accurate. And the way you can tell is by this line here, it's called the skin tone line. So long as your skin tones here, which we've masked, are moving upward on this line. You're getting accurate skin tones. It doesn't matter what type of skin tone you're dealing with. All accurate skin tones will land on this line. There is a bit more of the skin tones leaning towards green and yellow. So we could adjust our tint towards magenta a bit more. And it does seem even a bit warm. Maybe too much saturation if you like that, that's fine. But if we're trying to get more of an accurate base, we could just take this down just a bit, just a bit. Let's see where that gets us. So let's see a before and after. So it's a bit warm, a bit yellow, you can see a bit of the yellow green. We turn that thing on and now we get a bit more magenta and blue. Maybe you don't like that much of it, so we find something in between. And there you have it. We have a more accurate white balance that using this skin tones in the frame. Let's take a look at a frame within our project. I'm going to add a new Lumetri color effect just so I could demonstrate this a bit better. We've already completed our luminance adjustments. So I'm going to add a new Lumetri color effect and adjust the color. So we can see before and after. Mask. And one thing to note, you don't need to be masking everything perfectly like this. Like all of the hand perfectly. You don't need to do this. Just throw a mask on there and make sure you're grabbing a broad range of skin tones doesn't need to be perfect. So you can see that we're leaning a bit towards the yellow. So we'll just take this tent towards magenta of it. The warmth of the scene seems a bit dull. So it might take that up just a bit and move across a line just a bit more. There we go. Let's de-select this and take a look. So because this shot filmed on the same lens and has a similar setup as this shot. And I have skin tones in this shot. And I was able to correct white balance. I can right-click copy and then right-click on this clip and paste attributes. Select the Lumetri color. Now we have a frame that already looks really good because we're taking all the information from this shot and applying it to this one. Be careful because if the shots have different white balance or films on different cameras and lenses, you're going to really want to be dialing in each of those shots individually. Another extremely helpful tool when adjusting white balance is to use the RGB Parade. The RGB Parade shows the red channel, the green channel, and the blue channel in our image. And you can see right away here, when looking at this image, we have a bit more red overall and the blue channel is a bit toned down. So this shows that it's a bit more of a warm image. And what's great about the RGB Parade is that we can see right away if things are kinda looking even color wise. So if we shot this way to warm the wrong white balance, if it's not obvious already, we can see that it's a warm image, but taking a look at the RGB Parade, you can see right away that it's warmer image. And if we shot it too cold, you can see that there's more blue in the image, then there is red and green. Just by looking at the RGB Parade. Let's reset that. We can use the RGB Parade to balance this image. And since we have a color checker in this frame, we can just throw a mask over top of the color checker. Go back to our Lumetri Scopes. And you can see right away the shadows, the mid tones, and the highlights that correspond to our color checker. If we're just looking at the color, we can adjust the colors accordingly using the shadows, mid tones, and highlights. So let's see here. Let's try to adjust and get more blue. That's looking pretty good. But you can see in this case, adjusting the temperature and the tint is not enough to get that balance throughout our shadows, mid tones and highlights. So you have to go into curves or color wheels to obtain a more balanced image. We got just a bit too much blue in the highlight here, so we'll just take that down just a bit. There we go. Of course. Let's try to match up the shadows a bit more. We've got a bit more red in the shadows there. So click on the red channel, turn that down just a bit. So now we've got our red, green, blue there, even in the shadows, get more even in the mid tones and more even in the highlights. Now, let's take a look at what that looks like when we take off our mask. So we've got our before and after. So it's a bit more balanced overall. It might not be, but we can continue to adjust from there. So after obtaining a general white balance correction, you can stop there or you can go into your RGB Parade. And more specifically dial in the color within the shadows, mid tones and highlights. We can see by opening up the RGB Parade, the red in the shadows is a bit higher than the blue and the green. And actually if you look at it, there is a bit of a red cast in the shadows. And I'm pretty sure that happened because I mask too much of the shadows within my skin tones and there's a lot of dirt on my hands. So the vector scope was displaying more of the tones within the dirt, resulting in more red in the shadows. But we can go to our curves, click on the red and take our shadows down just a bit. And then that gives us a more even balanced image within our shadows, clicking before and after you can definitely see that red cast. Before we made that adjustment. We've taken that cast out of our shadows with the help of the RGB, prayed for secondary color correction. We're dealing with individual color selections. This is where we get to do some fine adjustments. I'm feeling pretty good about it. But I did notice that the foliage in our frame almost looks a bit yellow to me. So if we look at our scope, I mean, it's super subtle, okay? I'm totally being picky here, but if we wanted this to look a bit more green. We can do that. So to fix individual colors, I can go into my hue saturation curves, use the Hue vs Hue color correction and allows you to change any color on the spectrum to any other color you want. So I'll select this eyedropper here. Click on the leaf. These are our anchor is right here. And as you click and drag the middle point, you can see that the colors are changing. We might just eat towards this color becoming bit more green. And I can see, you can see that it's bending a bit more this way. So I might open up these anchors fit. So I'm capturing more of the spectrum of these colors in the leaf. So it's a different blue. Now, let's kinda closer to green. This is very nitpicky, okay, you don't have to do this. Some cameras have different color biases and fix those. You want to go into your secondary color correction for that. So we're getting something a bit closer to green. Let's just take a look at that. So the overall frame, if I de-select it, leaves look a bit more green, almost blew even. Just take that back a bit, just a notch and let's take another look. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's why having a color checker and frame can be beneficial as well. Because in this particular profile that I filmed this on, you can see that the color green is also a bit yellow. You can see here on the scope, and it goes in between yellow and green. It's not aiming completely at the green. So if I wanted to adjust that, I could again use the Hue vs Hue. Select the Eyedropper. Click on the Color, and click and drag until I get closer to that green color. When he deselect that you can really see me before it looks green. But when he corrected it's like, oh, actually that's how it looks closer to green to me now than it did before. So it's very subtle, but you can see the difference. Secondary color correction is a great way to really dial in those colors even more. So to recap, it's great if you have a white balance card, you can use the white balance selector, but I'd suggest even masking the white area and manually adjusting your temperature and tint. And also user vector scope to adjust your skin tones and make sure they're landing on that skin tone line. Open up that RGB Parade so you can get a general sense of the balance of your image. Using the RGB Parade is a great way to troubleshoot color issues within your image. Use the Copy Paste Attributes function to speed up your workflow. And finally, if you're noticing anything strange with any individual colors, you can use a curves Hue vs Hue correction to dial in those colors to something more that is within your liking or more accurate. Take the time to correct your colors. Throw your sequence and make sure that they're consistent throughout all. In the next lesson, we'll discuss the attributes of a look.
15. Attributes of a Look: The look in color grade of your edit can add to the tone of your project and serve as a practical way in creating depth in your image. The color correction process is all about accuracy within the luminance, the contrast, and color. Whereas in color grading, it's about creating an overall look to our footage that might elicit some emotional response. When creating a look we're altering and images luminous contrast, color and texture. Quick disclaimer, we're just touching the surface here. I'm not a pro colorist. The sticks, a lot of practice and skill and there are a ton of ways color can influence audience that I'm still learning. But with that being said, this is how I would determine how to give my footage a look. Does you're seeing call for a bright and cheerful look, or dark and moody one. Ozark. Is it prime example of taking the luminance down to suit the dark tone of the show. Whereas in a lot of comedies, the bump up, the luminance and the saturation to fit the lighter tone of the genre. A low contrast look. Ten, provide a more unified, subtle, even authentic, and more natural feel while preserving details in the highlights and shadows. A high-contrast look can add a punch to your image, draw the eye, and create more separation between the highlights and shadows. It can also be taken to extremes by crushing the details in the shadows or clipping highlights. Now again, in the color correction lessons, I did say maintain detail, maintain detailed, do not crush shadows or clip highlights. Well, now we're in the color grading process where the rules can be broken. You can crush shadows or clip highlights. Make sure it works with your story. The crush shadows in the scene from Kill Bill Volume 2 really adds to the grit and the violence. There's a lot of science and thought behind which colors elicit what type of emotions all are used to communicate different things to an audience. Adding blue hues can create a moody, sad feel. Warmer ones. A more hopeful, optimistic feel. From the movie Rey reign, his wife della get married. The colors lean more toward warmer tones as time passes and we fade to the next scene. You can see that the colors D saturate lean more towards blue hues. Even in the RGB Parade, you can see the shift. And also the overall contrast decreases ever so slightly.
16. Working With a Team: As an editor, there's so much to cover technically that it's easy to overlook the soft skills necessary when working within a team. What strengthening these skills will help you stay level headed, be a better collaborator, and ultimately produce a better edit. After working on a project for endless days, you finally send off an edit for review, or you think how this is perfect, nothing should change. It's easy to get into this mindset. But when you send off an initial edit, do your best to detach yourself of certain positive outcomes. In fact, it would be good. Expect revisions, no matter how good you think the edit is. When you get any kind of critique or feedback, take your time to absorb it. Your initial reaction might be to dismiss it and say, they don't know what they're talking about or maybe you'll take it personally. And the truth is, they might not be right. The feedback might make the project worse. But oftentimes from my own experience when I thought that way and I've been maybe a bit defensive. And then after I've mulled over the critique, I've been able to see past that initial reaction that I had and take the constructive portion of that feedback and make the edit even better. You know what? I don't really like this revision suggestion and I think it's great, but I would say keep it to yourself, create another version, send them two versions. One version with a suggested revisions that they provided and then an additional version with your own ideas that might improve upon that suggested revisions. They might decide that Hey, you're adding works better. Or they might say, Hey, I like what you did there. Maybe you can bring these ideas into the original edit. Think of yourself as a problem-solver. This helps me separate myself from taking revisions personally as the editor who made these decisions to the problem-solver, who gets to fix any issues within the edit. This empowers me to use my creative problem-solving powers to meet a projects. Okay, you've been staring at set it for months while someone reviewing it for the first time has fresh eyes. This is a gift. They get to see the edit and have their own initial emotional responses to your edit. Thank them for this, and then work towards solutions. Remember, the story and its purpose is greater than you and your edit. The more you aim for, the greater good of the edit, the more people whom you've worked with for 1D this and aim for this as well. It's cliche, but taking your ego out of the solution encourages others to do the same coming at it from this point of view, encourages everybody to detach themselves from taking credit for any particular part and focus on the work as a team, to focus on getting the best results possible. This takes years of practice, and this is why it's also important to work on yourself. Don't just read books on editing and filmmaking. Read books on bettering yourself. Read books on how to listen better, how to take feedback, how to improve yourself and communication skills. I'm in the hallways this level headed, but with experience, I've learned to become a better and quicker problem-solver. It's helped people gain more confidence in me and the work I do. And really it's just that cycle to continue offering solutions and any other problems that crop up, just go at it again with a positive problem-solving attitude. And next time you receive feedback on whatever edits, take some of these tips and try them out. The next lesson is time for end of project management.
17. End of Project Management: Now that you've finished your edit is time for end of project management. This includes exploiting different versions of your edit for delivery and storage and following this project management process will save you from future headaches. Let's talk about what type of file exports we need four different situations. The first type of export you want to do is a full quality full resolution version of your video. From there, you can use that master file to export multiple codecs to upload two different platforms. In most cases, a quick time for two to HQ file type will be just fine. For 22 is for tended video and is most common. If you're editing a raw footage that was shot on a camera with ProRes 4, 4, 4, 4 codec. Then choose ProRes 444 as it's designed for 12-bit video. So if you are exporting multiple versions, use this master file to export those versions from. If you're only exporting another version for web, you can just export directly from your sequence. But it's always good to have that master file because you never know in the future you may need a different file type or you may need a clip from that added to use in a trailer or promotional piece, or you may need to create a new edit altogether. So I'd go as far as to say export a master without any of your grading effects for archival purposes and future edits. And then also export and another master file without any graphics or lower thirds, just in case you need to flexibility for additional projects. The most common type of Kodak for web is H.264. In a lot of cases you're uploading to web so that others can give you notes or you're doing it for final delivery. Click on H.264 and you'll see there are a variety of presets that you can use, such as YouTube, Vimeo, and my favorite, which is high-quality. Only thing I did just in these settings is to export as a variable bit rate to pass with a target bit rate of 20 and a maximum bit rate of 24. Exporting with these settings will increase the export time. So if you have longer project and you want them export is quicker, you can use CBR. The only downside of using CBR is that it's less efficient and optimizing the size versus quality. So the overall file size will get larger while the quality will remain constant at the bit rate you choose. Whereas if you choose variable bit rate on the first pass, your computer will be doing calculations to determine what the ideal bit rate is. And on the second pass, we'll adjust the bit rate depending on how much information the computer needs to process on any given frame. In this shot, we just have the foreground of the leaves moving around. So a variable bit rate will adjust according to how much information needs to be processed from frame to frame. This gives us a smaller file size, a more efficient file size, but it takes longer. On smaller projects. You won't notice this as much. But with the larger projects, more complex projects, the export times can make a difference. You don't care about how big the file is going to be used. Constant bit rate, it's faster, but with bigger file sizes because it doesn't take into account where it can save on space. If you do want a more efficient way of encoding, use variable bit rate with to pass selection. This will take more time to export with higher bit rate. So you'll have bigger file sizes with greater diminishing returns on quality. But if you're finding that your image is breaking up in certain frames or certain details are getting lost, increase your bit rate as necessary for a cleaner image. There may be some cases where you're exporting for different broadcasters and in that case, just follow the spec sheet provided it's as simple as plug and play. So the final type of export would be for stems. Stems are separate sub-mixes of our main mix, which include music, sound effects, and dialogue. You can export every single audio track individually, or you can group them according to the category, soloing each track and then exporting a WAV file. This process of exporting stems is totally fine, especially if you prefer to have individual audio files. Just make sure you're exporting as a WAV file as it is an uncompressed audio format. Another way to do this in a more efficient way to do this would be to export your stems along with your master file. So now we have our final video ready for export. Before we do anything, let's clean up the additional audio and video tracks that we don't need. So right-click on the tracks, delete tracks. Check the delete video tracks. Check the delete audio tracks. All empty track selected. Clicking Okay, we'll delete all the audio and video tracks that are unused. Okay, so we want to export our master file, which is a 42 HQ QuickTime file. If we export from the sequence, we only get two channels of audio, which doesn't allow us to divvy up or audio into stems. We can't customize our current sequence to export as a multi-channel master. So in order to do this, we need to create a new sequence that includes a number of channels so we can export stems along with our master file. If this is confusing, don't worry, it's going to make a lot more sense once you get through this lesson. So let's click on the note, create a new sequence. And we'll use the digital SLR 10 ADP preset because it matches the current settings that we have. You can also use the airy 10 ADP preset, how it works. Do even the read 10 ADP sequence works too. If you are editing in 1280 by 720, just make sure you go to your settings, change the frame size accordingly. We're going to rename our sequence to something that has the word master in it so that you know it's your master file and it includes stems. So I'll name mine HD, the gardener master. And just name it something that works for you. So that five years down the road from now, you're going to know exactly what this is and what it's meant for 42 HQ. I can even name acuity for QuickTime. So now I know what the master file is and what codec it will be exported as. So let's go to our Tracks tab. This is where we can change our master output from stereo, which only allows us to channels of audio to a multi-channel export. So we can export 32 channels of audio if we want. So that when you import the exported master file, you'll have 32 channels of audio available. So the way we determine how many channels we need is by how we want to group together our stems. You can group the stems in whatever way you prefer. You can export all eight audio tracks if you want as individual stems. I think that's a bit overkill, but in some cases you might want to do that. Or you can export them grouped in voice-over, sound effects and music. But in my case, I want to export them as voiceover, Foley sound effects, cinematic impact, sound effects, ambient sound effects, and music. That's five separate groupings, five separate stems of audio. So to do this, we need ten audio channels because we have five different groupings and they're all stereo. That's a total of 10 channels because each audio track has a left and a right channel to it. If you'd name the channels already, you can just click on load from sequence, find the sequence that you want to load your tracks from. And it will automatically add the track names. You can also use the plus button to add tracks. And that's fine too. Since I didn't name my audio tracks in the edit, I'll rename these tracks to what they represent on my timeline. We want to change our master output from stereo to multi-channel. So we have the ability to determine which track each of these groupings will be on when we export our master file. And remember, because these are stereo paired, we want to have 10 channels, five stereo paired groupings equals 10 channels. If you click on Output assignments, you can see here that we're assigning each grouping to their corresponding track. So a voiceover on tracks 12. So that's accurate. We'll assign our fully sound effects to 34. So we'll go through each One, assigning it to 34. And then our cinematic impact sound effects will assign two tracks. 56 are ambience will be assigned to 78, and music will be assigned to 9 and 10. 1 and 2, voice over 34, Foley sound effects, 5 and 6, cinematic impacts. 7, 8, ambience, 9 and 10 music. So that's five separate streams of audio. We can also change our video to the amount of tracks that we need. So because we have six tracks of video here, we can change this to six hit, Okay? And it creates a new sequence with all their audio nicely named here. Six video tracks. Go to your final locked to edit, select all copy, and then paste it into your new sequence. So now this sequence allows us to export multiple channels because we've changed it. So now you can see here that it's 10 channels of audio. And in our previous sequence, it's only stereo. And for some reason, you cannot change the channel configuration after you've already created the sequence. That is why we are creating this new sequence. Control M or Command M for export. Select QuickTime format. For our master file 422 HQ. Click on the Audio tab and change the sample size from 16 to 24 because the voice-over, the sound effects and the music we're all recorded in 24-bit audio or higher. And this is a recommended spec for most broadcasters. And down here in the audio channel configuration, if we didn't have the multi-channel sequence, we wouldn't have the ability to add more streams of audio. Now that we have 10 channels, we can add five streams of stereo audio. Change all of these audio outputs to stereo. And remember, each one of these groupings pertains to what we've configured our channels to be. So this will give us five stereo paired tracks on Export. If you're still confused, don't worry, I'm going to show you what it's going to look like after we re-import our final Master. I've already created a master exports folder to hold our master exports. Will import it back into our project. So I can show you what it looks like. When we click and drag this master file to our sequence. Look at that. You can see five individual audio tracks with 10 channels left and right. Whoever is taking over the promotional aspect of the project, they might say, prefer different music. You can just take that out each day by the hall fist you read, or they can say, Hey, these cinematic impacts don't really fit the tone of this promo piece that's maybe too dramatic. So we'll take Mount don't judge, each day by the hall fish to you. Or maybe they might say, Hey, I want to mix this audio in a different way. So let's go in and let's tweak this audio. Let's add some new filters to it. And that's also why it's important to select 24-bit audio because it's a lot more flexible when editing then 16-bit audio. So I'm hoping you can see the advantage of exporting a master file with multiple stems. So to recap, export your master file first, and if necessary, export was stems as well. You can use this master file to export additional versions of your edit to other platforms of your choice, depending on the complexity of your project, who you're working with, the amount of exports can vary. You might have a master file with stems, a non-graded version for archival purposes and future edits. And you might even have an export without any graphics included from your master file you might explore in H.264 for YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, instagram, whatever. So again, this is why it's so important to be organized because you can end up with 20 different versions of your edit, 20 different file formats. And it can get kinda crazy. Go ahead, export and upload your project for review so you can receive feedback. And if you haven't finished it, that's totally fine. You can upload works in progress. Or if you can't upload it for whatever reason, just explain in a few sentences how this course has impacted your process. I've loved to hear that. In the next lesson, we're going to go through the final recap.
18. Final Recap: Yes, great job getting through all the lessons and getting this far. I hope you're inspired to take everything you've learned and applied to your own projects. Okay, now it's time for the final recap. A creative brief guides the edit and helps the team stay on the same page creatively, the purpose of your edit and the tone in which you tell your story are of utmost importance. Makes sure to organize your files, do it how you prefer. If you already have a system that's great. Otherwise, the less clicks, the better. Use numbers to create hierarchy in your folder structure and add the dates your project files, exports, and project sequences for additional organization or choosing clips can be determined by your stories, purpose, intended tone, and it's chronological order. Use these criteria to qualify your clips. Quality, performance, depth, and movement. Started your edit with the element that most clearly tells your story is that the footage, is it the audio from your interviews? Maybe it's the music throughout the entire process. Experimentation is a must. Only hang on a clip for as long as necessary. Use movement and I traced to keep your edit flowing from shot to shot. And remember to use editing continuity to contribute to your edit. Aim to support the purpose of your story with every editing choice you make. In my opinion, this is the most important and fun part of editing and storytelling. Use these criteria when selecting music, variation and instruments, rhythm, tone, intensity, and effects. Not every one of these criteria needs to be present, but makes sure the overall tone of the music supports your edit. A great soundscape draws your audience into the story, aim for clear sounding dialogue and create a full sound through sound effects selection and frequency manipulation. Also remember to use your Loudness Radar to detect any problems and find that loudness sweet spot, corrector brightness and contrast and color using your color scopes. Remember to aim for accuracy within the color correction process, then add a look that benefits your story. Afterward, working with a team will help elevate your edit. Accept criticism with grace. Remember, feedback is a gift. Also keep in mind that handling criticism and feedback takes practice. When you have your final walked edit, export, a high-quality master with stems for final delivery. This will also be used when exporting additional formats and codecs. On top of that export a master without effects for graphics to use in re-edit and for archival purposes. Now it's time to upload your finished project. If you haven't finished your project, that's fine. You can upload a work in progress. If for whatever reason you can't upload your project, that's fine too. You can also just write a few sentences explaining how you've applied what you learned to your own process. How has your process changed? How has it evolved? I'm excited to hear it. Please leave a review and recommend this class to a friend or person you might know from my benefit from it. Also, please follow my profile if you want to see more classes in future. If you're looking to learn more, I've got more classes available on video editing and filmmaking. Thank you again for taking my course on the video editing process. Remember, story is your guide. I'll see you a sample.
Sean Dykink, Story is your guide
