Video Editing Techniques: Create Smooth Edits

1. Class Introduction: [MUSIC] As video editors, we're like magicians. Watch my hands closely. I'll take this ace of hearts, put it in the middle of the deck, and I'll shake it to the top. There it is, not bad. When a magician performs a great trick, you don't notice a sleight of hand. You don't notice any of the smooth transitions employed to make the trick work, but what magicians do best is guide the audience's attention using misdirection. Of course, I don't know how to do any of these fancy card tricks, but I was able to create sleight of hand, misdirection, doing the thing I do know how to do, which is to edit. Hi, I'm Sean Deakin, filmmaker and editor, and I want to teach you the techniques to create a smooth edit. A smooth edit contains a number of video editing techniques. In this class, we're going to focus on how to create smooth visual connections between shots. This includes smooth editing principles, creating smooth edits and transitions, smooth movement, cinematic motion blur, and practical editing techniques that you can apply to your very own project. Our class project is a short and exciting ad for a vodka brand. This is not necessarily a step by step tutorial. You're going to have a lot of freedom to use the learn techniques to create your very own edit and in your own creative way. This course is for intermediate video editors, and it's recommended that you have a basic understanding of how to edit. We will be using Premiere Pro and After Effects for this project. That being said, there's a lot of video editing techniques that any skill level can learn from, and apply to any editing program. If you don't want to use After Effects, you can still complete a project within Premiere. The techniques learned in this class will build upon the foundation of your editing abilities and give you the skills to create smooth edits and transitions. This time, no video editing tricks. Ace of hearts in the middle of the deck, and shake it up. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: Thank you so much for taking this class. I'm super excited about this class project because it's short and snappy and there's tons of room to experiment here and to test out smooth editing techniques. Let's get into it. Our class project is a short ad for a vodka company. The company, however, is not real. I completely made it up, so we have complete creative control over what we can do with this. That also means that if you end up creating your own project, you can post it on your own socials where ever you want, so long as it's just for personal use. I just ask that you'd credit the course and myself so that other people can discover and take the class and create their own project as well. I will be quite specific about how I work with this ad, but feel free to edit it in any way you're inspired to see fit. You can change the colors, you can change the length, you can make five second ad, a one minute ad, you can make whatever you want with this. But I highly encourage you to keep it simple. Don't over complicate it because it can get out of hand. This is not a tutorial where you need to follow along with every step, but the techniques and processes learned will be very applicable to any project you work on. I'm going to do my best to illustrate techniques and the process through my own project without getting too much into details because it's not necessarily a follow along tutorial. Go ahead, download the assets included and load them up in Premiere Pro to get familiar with them. A reminder, this is an intermediate course and the project can range in difficulty depending on what you decide to do with it, from very simple to extremely advanced, you will need some experience with editing and Premiere Pro. Having a basic understanding of how Premiere Pro works and keyframes is a plus. We're also going to jump into After Effects, make adjustments to movements and finish our project. I'll be a bit more specific in guiding through After Effects, but again, some experience there is a plus. If you happen to be somewhat After Effects adverse, like me, there is the option to finish your project in Premiere Pro, but there's just not enough time in this class to go through that process. However, a lot of the things that we'll go through in After Effects will be applicable to Premiere Pro. If you are getting stuck with any of the techniques or ideas, please feel free to ask in the discussion's tab. One final technical thing to know, I use an electronic Lazy Susan that wasn't the most efficient, so be aware that at some point in some of the bottle rotation shots, the Lazy Susan briefly stops for a moment and then speeds up again, so you may want to cut around that. Before we get into the smooth editing techniques, we are going to talk about how to tell the story of the brand. 3. Telling The Story of the Brand: [MUSIC] You can usually save yourself a lot of headaches when beginning a project at it by looking towards the creative brief. A creative brief is basically a list of creative constraints that help guide your creative decision-making in a project and telling the story of a brand. But what happens when you don't have a creative brief? In our case, we do not have a creative brief. That adds an extra level of challenge. Again to be super clear, this is a completely made up brand. Don't be confused, I'm just emailing myself, doing a role-play essentially. It's meant to be fun, informative, and educational. This is the first email we got from the marketing team itself on what kind of ad they're looking for. It looks like they're a brand new brand. They don't have a lot of details, but they do mention that they're looking for an ad between 10-30 seconds. Also, it's an ad for vodka. We know our audience needs to be 18 or over, or 21 and over depending on where you live. The other thing we have available attached is this online ad. We have the bottle here, the name, and the slogan, open your mind, and a short blurb about the drink and company itself. Already with this little amounts of information, we have some idea of what the company is and what they stand for. Now, I've already given this some thought before even filming the short ad, and I created this ad itself too. I already know what I was going for, so I know it's cheating. First, if I don't have enough information and I don't feel confident starting to edit, I will ask questions. I'll ask, what's the purpose of the project? What's the goal of the project? What's the point? What do we want the audience to do after watching it? What kind of tone? What do they want the audience to feel? Is it supposed to be lighthearted, is it supposed to be serious? How long is the edit? This of course helps you save time. Only editing to the length that you need. Where's it going to go? Is it going to go online? Is going to go in the theater? Is it going to go, where's it going to go? Then sometimes I'll ask, who's the target audience. But a lot of the times you can just go with the information they give you and come up with your own conclusions. Let's hit "Send" and great, we got a response. As you can see here, the marketing team doesn't know exactly what they want. That's okay. In cases like this, they just want you to give them something. When you do that, then they realize oh, actually we want this, or they realize that's brilliant. Yes, that's exactly what we wanted and they'll take credit for that. Let's hit "Send." I've gone ahead and I've quickly put together and edit according to the length requirement for this ad. Of course, I'll usually do this after I view all footage and choose my selects. The edit is boring. There's nothing exciting about it really, but it's a good place to start and it gives you an idea of how things are cutting together, but it lacks character. It doesn't fulfill the purpose of the brand. What I mean by this is that the only thing that's recognizable in this product is the logo, then the brand colors really. We need to start layering in some edits, some effect, some ideas to emulate the brand, to illustrate the brand, because the brand itself has its own life and character. We can figure it out by looking at the attributes of the company and mimic those attributes through editing techniques. The first step, naturally, you're going to start to get ideas as a reading email as you're reviewing footage. It's important to take note of these ideas and keep them in mind. Right away the name gave it away for me, Vrtigo, which is what some might experience with imbalance suggests that we can possibly alter the camera angle to illustrate the brand through motion by creating rotations, or probably the most obvious idea would be to create a Vrtigo shot and post to show perspective in a unique way. This also speaks to having conversation. The vertical shot gives you this unique perspective that's constantly changing through out its movement. That contributes to the company's mission about being open and receptive to different ideas and opinions. Then also we have this hint here where it says, conversations both serious and lighthearted, which could contribute to the overall tone of this project. This little bit of information about the company, we can start to shape some ideas of how to edit this. How would you create edits that are serious and playful that is based on conversation? Well, you could think about the pacing of a conversation, how that might include interruptions. Maybe it flows really well. Maybe that's the pacing. Or if we think about conversation as an effect, you might think about a mirroring effect of some sort. Because when two people in a conversation, they're listening and responding, listening and responding. Maybe the mirroring effect can emulate two different people finding common ground. I know this could sound ridiculous, but this is what it's about. You're trying to create meaning from the few details you have. It will help you come up with some ideas right away that you can implement and test out right away. I would even just start throwing these clips in the timeline before you even have a rough edit together and test out some of these ideas. See which ones stick, see which ones feel good, that you're excited about, that feel right for the project, that feel right for the brand, and take note of those things. Eventually you'll find a direction through that. Listen to your first instincts even if it sounds weird. Don't worry about getting it right. We're in the exploration phase. You can get it wrong. Just start with that idea and let it evolve from there and work with it. For instance, my first instinct was to use 80s synth music for this because it felt like I wanted to hit that nostalgia of the product. [MUSIC] The problem ended up being that I chose music with specific lyrics that didn't quite fit the brand. I like the track, I wanted it to work, but I couldn't quite find another track that had that same feel and didn't contain such specific lyrics. I just ditch that idea. I I wanted the Vrtigo effect to work. For a variety of reasons it just didn't quite work the way I wanted to. You could still probably make it work, but I ended up letting go of that idea even though it would have been so perfect because the brand name is Vrtigo and the shot is Vrtigo. Well, you can't win them all. It's not really helpful to commit to every single idea, you'll get a mash of different effects. The edit will become unfocused and the audience will be confused as to what you're trying to do with the edit. If you have star wipes and fades and heck, let's throw some venetian blind transitions in there, and then maybe some colorization effects, and you add those all into the edit, it's going to be a mess. My suggestion, stick to a few different ideas that really work well together and serve the purpose of your edit. For example, in my project edit, I've stuck mostly to digital movements and speed ramps and also through in the odd invisible edit to keep that sense of flow moving throughout the edit. One other important thing to note, the animated rotations are probably some of the most noticeable movements, but I didn't use it on every single edit. I wanted it to maintain its specialness and its importance when it came to the brand itself. I tried to mostly emphasized this movement around the hero or bottle product shots so that it brought more attention to the brand. Using an effect too much can reduce the meaning of the effect and create predictability in your edit. Now, in some cases when it's such a short project, you need to establish the style quickly so then it could be useful to use an effect on every single clip. Now that I have all these ideas, I can start applying them to my rough edit and really create a character to this edit. A reminder, make sure that your sequence is set to 1920 by 1080, so that you can make full use of digital movements without losing detail in the image. Of course, after adjusting your sequence settings, all your 4K clips will exceed the frame size of your sequence settings. To gesture clips to match the frame size, you can manually scale each clip down, or manually scale one clip down to 50 percent and copy paste attributes to the rest of the clips, ensuring that motion is selected. But the fastest way is to simply select all the clips, right-click, and select "Set to Frame Size." Using the Set to Frame Size function will automatically scale down your chosen clips to the sequence frame size, which is exactly half the size of our 4K clips. Recap, we can add life to the edit by looking at the character of the brand itself. These character attributes can then be translated into editing style through different editing techniques. You don't need to use every idea and definitions, otherwise you run the risk of your edit becoming unfocused. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about matching on action. 4. Matching/Cutting on Action: [MUSIC] Cutting on action or matching on action is a practical way to create a smooth cut. Matching on action typically refers to two different shots cut together on the action of a character or an object. You can even cut on camera movement. Basically, so long as you are cutting on the movement or action or motion, you're going to have an easier time hiding that edit from the audience. By matching on action, you are creating a visual bridge between shots. It distracts the viewer from the edit, because they're focused on the movement that connects the two different shots together. As you cut together a rough draft of your story, look for ways to connect the shots through movement. Also try to stick to cutting between clips with similar movement and direction. Otherwise it may be a drying edit. As I was going through my own edit, I found these two shots that I think are going to cut great together. We have the movement of the cap and the movement of the ice attracting our eye, and when we connect them together, match them on action, we're already going to have something super smooth to look at. It's as simple as that. In addition to matching on action or cutting on action, also look for eye trace opportunities. The eye trace technique refers to where the audience is looking within the frame at any given time. Our eyes are most attracted to human features. The eyes bright colors, areas of high contrast, text and movement. Our project edit features mostly movement, contrast, texts and bright colors. Again, because we have 4K footage within the 1080P timeline, we can readjust the position, scale, and rotation of our clips without losing detail. Of course, the purpose for this is so that we can create our own movement within each shot to create smooth cuts and smooth transitions. Keep these things in mind with each edit you make. From this cut, our eye trace point is here, and then in the next cut, our eye trace point is way down here at the bottom of the glass. But because of the moving ice, our brain is tricked into following this movement of the cap and down with this ice cube. We have succeeded in matching on action, but not necessarily on eye trace. We can even extend that edit out a bit as well. I might even have it just about exit the frame. A quick side note, you might have heard that you should wait for the moving object within the shot to leave the shot before making a cut. But you don't always have to do that, because the cap is moving so fast and we're cutting on action, we can get away with cuts that don't necessarily follow the rules of continuity. Now I've scaled up on our frame and adjusted the position. We're working with eye trace a bit better in this way, because the ice cube lands into our eye trace point very quickly. Your eyes don't have to adjust position between these two shots. If you did want to manipulate the frame to adjust for eye trace a bit better, you can do that. In this case, I think the composition of this close shot isn't that great. It's too asymmetrical to me and it's harder to identify that it is a glass when it's so close up, it could even be a vase or some other glass container. I don't like that composition that much. The match on action works so well that eye trace doesn't make as much of a difference in distracting your eye from the cut. But let's go back to that. One myth about using eye trace is that you need to cut from one shot to the next and have whatever your eye is attracted to within the identical position of your next shot. But that's not always the case, because our reaction time isn't that fast. It's not like we see a shot and we immediately know what we're looking at. In this case, the ice is moving so fast and getting to our eye trace point within three or four frames, our eyes are barely adjusting to the next shot before we have a chance to see what's going on. Actually in some cases you want your eye trace point to fall into the next shot and its eye trace point. To recap, matching on action or cutting on action, is when you cut on the movement of one shot to the movement of the next shot. The movements don't necessarily need to be moving in a unilateral way, but if they are moving in the same direction, it's a lot easier for your eye to follow. If you can create more effective eye trace with your cut on action, then in theory, your edits will be even smoother. But don't compromise the composition or the story of your edit or your clip just because you can achieve eye trace by recomposing your shot and post. Sometimes cutting on action is adequate to hide the edits and to create a smooth cut. 5. Creating Smooth Movement: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we will learn how to gain more control and customization over your digital movements using keyframes. One of the biggest mistakes made when keyframing graphics, or animation, or anything moving is to use only linear interpolation. When we are talking about live action or animated graphics, interpolation is what happens between the keyframes. Interpolation is how your software determines the values between these points. For example, let's say we're animating this purple square. We will animate the scale, so we'll create a keyframe at the beginning of our clip and move to the end and create another key, and because I want to animate this from 0-100, let's move to our first keyframe. Set that to zero, and by default we get this linear interpolation between our keyframes, which starts abruptly and ends abruptly. It's a constant speed throughout the entirety of the animation. Now if we want to see what's visually going on here, we can click on this triangle to the left of our scale property, and now it opens up this mess right here. To get a better view of what's going on here, we can click on this thin gray line at the bottom of our velocity graph, and this other thin gray line on our value graph. There are two graphs, two different ways to see what's going on with our animation visually. We have the value graph up here, which measures value over time, and the speed graph down here, which measures speed over time. If we move from left to right, depending on where a playhead is, it's intersecting with our value line right here, and you can see it's moving in a linear fashion from 0-100 at a constant rate. Look down at our speed graph, we can see here our velocity is at zero. But once we get to our first keyframe, bam, we're at a speed that is remaining constant throughout the entirety of the animation. This type of movement doesn't look or feel organic or real really in any way because I don't think there's anything in nature that moves this way. Even mechanical movements have some speed variation and character to them. That doesn't mean you can't use linear interpolation. Just keep in mind the type of look it offers and that it doesn't look the most natural. To create realistic movement, we need to change the interpolation mode. The most obvious place to start, and maybe you're already doing this is to change your interpolation to ease out or ease in. You right-click on the keyframe, click on ''Ease Out'' when an animation begins and ''Ease In'' when an animation ends. Now we've changed our interpolation from linear to having Bezier curves. Any curve you create within the value graph is considered a Bezier curve. The ease in and ease out functions are just very specific types of curves available in the keyframe menu. With this now we've achieved very smooth in and out animations. Our speed graph has also changed. You can see we're starting at zero, ramping up to max speed right here, and then slowing down back to zero. So the value graph is different in that it measures the value over time rather than speed. The steeper the slope, the faster the movement, whereas the shallower slopes, the movement is much slower. It's great because now you have two different ways to look at the information of what's going on between your keyframes. Just using ease out, ease in Bezier curves is the quickest way to get smooth organic movement when keyframing, and sometimes these easy ease presets aren't enough for your animation, and to get more customization and control over what you're doing, you can just simply adjust the handles on your own. Make sure when you're adjusting these handles that you have automatic range re-scaling selected. Otherwise, portions of your graph are going to go out of view. When you're adjusting the handles on your animation, you can see our value graph and our speed graph is changing, and we can get some really interesting looks just by messing around with the curves. You might have had this issue where you set your keyframe at zero and your second keyframe at a 100 and you're thinking, okay, it's going to go from 0-100. But then you play it back, and it's like, "Wow, okay. [LAUGHTER] We scale beyond our second keyframe." When you're not looking at the animation graph, it's very frustrating because you're seeing, wait a second, my first keyframe is set to 100 and my second keyframes at zero. What's going on here? This doesn't make any sense, and it's because you're not looking at what's going on visually when you just see the keyframes. If you want to avoid this kind of behavior, it's simple. Just keep your curves between these two imaginary horizontal lines and you will be fine. The order of operations that make the most sense to me is just to rough out your animation first with linear keyframes, then add your eases, your Bezier curves, and then go into your graph and smooth everything out, get the speed and the timing the way you want it. You get way more customization, and the look is a lot more unique to each and every project you take on. What I would recommend that you do now is to experiment with animation curves and see what kind of unique movements you can come up with. Edit the value graph where it's possible, it's not possible to edit the value graph on position within Premiere Pro, and I'll explain why you can't do that in a later lesson. But don't get too far ahead with your own project before watching the next lessons because they will help you decide the best workflow for your desired outcome. Recap, using Bezier curves eases, gives you a more organic look to your movements. To get even more control and customization over your movements, open up your animation graph and make adjustments from there. Remember, the speed graph and the value graph are two different ways of conveying information with your movements interpolation. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using Bezier curves, ease in, ease out, but it's good to know how to use this function, so when you're in a situation where you need to adjust your eases more specifically, you can. [MUSIC] 6. Motion Blur: [MUSIC] To make your movements look even more realistic and your edits even smoother, we'll need to add motion blur. When watching movies, we expect to see a certain quality of motion blur within camera movements and moving objects. Being able to recreate similar motion blur within our own project will help sell the movements and the edits more effectively. Now typically, you might open up After Effects, slap on some keyframes, then enable motion blur, and this is a fine workflow, especially for projects with more complex movements. But in some cases, you may have a few simple animated movements, you don't necessarily want to move everything over to After Effects. In this case, to keep things simple and mostly easy, more on that later, we can use the Transform effect. It's important for this lesson that your sequence settings match your clip settings. Don't worry, it's going to make sense in the next lesson. But for now, if you want to follow along and test these ideas out, I suggest creating a new sequence that matches your clip settings. Let's add the Transform effect. Click on your layer, navigate to the Effects panel, type in transform, then you'll notice that there's two transform effects. The only difference from what I can tell is that one has the Uniform Scale checkbox unchecked and the other has the Uniform Scale checkbox checked. [LAUGHTER] There's not a huge difference between the two, I don't know why they need to have two, but this effect, I'm going to warn you, is a bit glitchy in some cases. Because we want our scale to stay uniform, we'll delete this first effect and stick to the second Transform effect. You'll notice right away that, the Transform effect has all the same properties as our motion effects. The only difference is that we have the ability to change the skew of our cube and we can adjust the shutter angle. You might have wondered what shutter angle really means. You see it and you think what's this arbitrary number? I have explained this before in my class in film-making techniques, so I'll give you the close notes. The lower or smaller the shutter angle, the less motion blur will be present. The higher or wider the shutter angle, the more motion blur. This is because the longer the light hits the sensor or film on a camera, the longer the exposure will be capturing more movement within an individual frame. The sweet spot for cinematic motion blur is 180 degrees. You don't need to stick to 180 degrees shutter if you prefer more or less blur, but just know that a 180 degrees shutter angle will yield results that look closest to the movies. Now that you understand what a shutter angle is, you can make a much more informed choice when dialing in the type of motion blur you're going for. For us, it makes the most sense to stick to a 180 degrees shutter because the project was shot on a 180 degrees shutter. The motion blur of our movements will be the most realistic and stay the most true to what was shot by sticking to a 180 degrees shutter angle. De-select Use Composition's Shutter Angle because we don't have a composition within Premiere Pro determining what the shutter angle already is. Set our shutter angle to 180. Once we do this, any of the keyframe movements that we apply within our Transform effect will contain motion blur. Let's test this out by adding a keyframe to our position. Let's just move this actually over here, we'll move a bit further, and then move that all the way there. Move the keyframes closer together to increase the speed of movement. Now you can see it. [inaudible] We pause it. You can see the motion blur within our cube. We turn it all the way to 0. No motion blur. Click it all the way to 360, you get an intense amount of motion blur, but remember, you want to stick to a realistic cinematic looking motion blur. Stick to 180 degree shutter, or stick to the shutter that the project was shot on, most likely a 180 degrees shutter. The motion blur now gives us a much more realistic look to our movements and any digital movements we apply within our project will match the motion blur of the movements that were done in camera. For sampling, you could stick to bilinear. All this means is the computer is using less processing, but the quality of the motion blur isn't as smooth. However, when you change it to bicubic, the computer is processing more information which should result in a higher-quality smoother motion blur. But for the most part, I don't notice a difference. You might notice a difference in the project you're working on, and if that's the case and you need the highest-quality, stick to bicubic. I haven't done any tests on this, so I don't know how much more effective it is, but I would say go with the better quality of the two depending on your project. To recap, if you want to sell your digital movements to the audience, you need to add motion blur. The higher your shutter angle is, the more motion blur you'll get, the lower your shutter angle is, you'll get less motion blur. For that filmic look, stick to a 180 degrees shutter angle, or just match your shutter angle to whatever the shutter angle the project was shot with. You can achieve motion blur using the Transform effect within Premiere Pro. Just be careful, because it can be a bit glitchy. For simple movements, projects, text animations, it's great, but for more complex projects and movements, I would suggest finishing your project within After Effects and enabling motion blur there. 7. Premiere Pro VS After Effects: Now that you have a better idea of how to create organic, realistic movement, I want to make sure that you understand the pros and cons of using Adobe Premiere Pro versus After Effects. [MUSIC] I would push to use the Transform effect when you're creating simple animations within Premiere Pro, this might be text effects. For instance, for my classes, I use the Transform effect for my titles because they're simple and to create an After Effects project and then add motion blur to my texts effects and then have to change the text. Then if I have a typo on, I have to change it again that I have to go back into After Effects and it just takes so much more time to do that. For footage that matches your sequence settings, It's a great effect that enables you to quickly achieve After Effects looking animations within Premiere Pro quickly and without having to open up After Effects in the first place. But I'm going to say it does have its drawbacks. The biggest downside to using Adobe Premiere Pro for custom keyframing is that it's not the most user-friendly. You may find yourself adjusting the animation graph window constantly as you make adjustments to movements between two shots. You can't snap these handles in place, and there aren't as many graph viewing options available. Also you can see with the position property, we only have the ability to animate the velocity graph and not the value graph. Whereas in Adobe After Effects, we have this ability. At the moment when you're using 4K clips within a 1080p timeline, it can get very glitchy to work with the problem with Forky clips within a 1080p timeline, using the transform effect is that you get these wonky anchor points when altering the rotation property. Once you do match the 4K clipped to a 1080p anchor point by adjusting the position and the anchor, then great, it spins at the center of the clip. But then eventually they get the strange glitch where when I stopped playing back the footage, the frame will jump and position. The only way to get accurate representation of the effect is to render the clips with the Transform effect, which isn't a very practical solution when adding and adjusting keyframes. If Adobe fixes this effect and maybe makes the animation graphs within Premiere Pro a bit easier to work with I would consider using the transform effect for projects with 1080p sequences containing 4K clips. If you want to stick to using Premiere Pro's transform tool and it not be glitchy, then stick to using your 4K clips within a four-course sequence, or use your 1080p clips within a 1080p sequence. Keep in mind that if you go above 100 percent scale, you will lose quality in your image. If you are doing animated movements, that doesn't mean you can't push past 100 percent. Just keep in mind that when you push past 100 percent, you're losing quality in your image. This doesn't matter as much if you are strictly using scale as part of a transition. For example, in this project that I completed completely using the transform tool in Premiere Pro, I've stuck to using scale only on my transitions. This way, the viewer can see what's happening during shots and can see the full quality of the image. But during the transitions the movements are happening so fast that the quality degradation doesn't matter as much. Considering the turnaround time, the amounts of different cuts I had to make for this project. Considering that the clips were 1920 by 1080, it made the most sense to create these transitions within Premiere Pro. After Effects also has its benefits, less glitchy, easier to work with, and you can also create your 4K sequence within a 1080p timeline, utilizing digital re-framing. When you're creating digital rotations, you'll see less of the crop when you're pushed further in. But of course, After Effects takes time to learn. It's easy for your projects, become very complex and take more time to require more computer power. You'll need to visualize more of the movement within Premiere Pro before moving things over to After Effects, you don't want to work too far ahead and start adding eases to your animation because After Effects doesn't interpret these interpolation changes properly. So you're going to have to tweak it in After Effects anyway, stick to linear interpolation with Premiere Pro, rough out the look and the feel and the movements, so you can adjust your edits with the movements themselves and then adjust the amount of ease within After Effects. Or you can make those easy adjustments within Premiere Pro, then retweek within After Effects. Either way, you're going to have to make those adjustments within After Effects. If you want to take full advantage of your 4k clips within a 1080p timeline. [LAUGHTER] Now that you have all of the options in front of you, you can decide what's the right workflow for your project. To recap, Premiere Pro and the transform effect is great when you're working with simple movements, simple animations, and when you're working with clips that match your sequence settings. If you want to digitally push into the frame without losing detail and not worry as much about the crop on the clips, then you'll want to use your 4K clips within a 1080p sequence. But then it's recommended that you shift things over to After Effects. But of course it adds an extra level of complexity. Unfortunately, when importing your Premiere project, After Effects will not interpret Bezier curves properly. It's recommended to visualize your project within Premiere Pro using linear keyframes, then Create Custom curves and finish your project within After Effects. All right, before we head into After Effects, we're going to explore how to bridge two shots together using composition, action, and keyframe to movement. 8. Creating a Smooth Transition: In a lot of cases, you'll have opportunities to cut on action between two shots. But there are also be times where you want to connect two different shots together that at first glance might not seem to connect very well. I want to connect this lime splash shot with this final product shot and already you can tell that this hero shot has this dolly out move, but our lime shot doesn't have any movement besides the lime falling in and then splashes of vodka everywhere. Already, by looking at this shot, I know I'm going to have to match on action with this glass and utilize a digital zoom-out. I noticed right away that we're already achieving some composition matching as well because we have this cylinder-like shape here with the glass and the reflection and when we hit the next shot, we have this cylinder shape of this bottle. The match cut is where you cut to match the composition or action of two different shots and technically, the match cuts real purpose is to bridge together two separate scenes. If you can find a way to also match the compositional elements from one shot to the next, you'll also be making use of the eye trace technique, which adds an extra element of smooth editing and meaning to your edit. We can do a bit of tweaking to match these two shots together a bit more and obviously, we're already achieving eye trace because the viewer's eye presumably would be in the center of the frame because it's the focal point of this composition from that shot to this one, we're already pretty much on the label and we can move it around a bit to utilize eye trace a bit more effectively. To match these shots a bit better, what I'm going to do is, take our glass shot and move it up to Layer 2 and we'll just open up this layer so we can access our opacity. Before I adjust my opacity, I'm going to extend the clip over our bottle clip and I'm going to take the opacity down so that we can get an onion skin or an overlap look and we can see here that already it's pretty good. But because I'm a perfectionist, I want to make it look even better and what I can see here too is that actually, the bottle shot is a bit crooked. We'll fix that by adjusting our rotation. Then I'm also going to increase the scale of the bottle to match the scale of the class. Now we have something that is matching already a lot better and I'm going to put in on the bottle dolling out at this point right here. Also what I want to do before I move forward with this shot is make sure that the shot is centered and I can tell right now that it's not. I know this is getting very nitpicky, but because it's supposed to be centered shot and it's not quite centered, I don't want to give any opportunity for the audience to be distracted. I want the focus to be on the story of this brand. I'll click on ''My program monitor'', navigate to view. I have show guides enabled, but there are no guides, so I'll show my rulers and then I can click on the ''Rulers'', drag them to the center, which is 960, and what we can do is you can right-click on your ''Guide'', click ''Edit guide'' and if you want to get even more specific, type in 960 for half of our frame. We can also do the same by clicking a ''Horizontal guide'' from the top down to 540. Now we can see the sensor of a frame. We now know the adjustments we need to make to our bottle and our glass to make sure that they're centered. The quick side note about Guides here is that you can also use Guides as a helpful tool to achieve eye trace. Using your Guides, you can find your eye tracepoint from one shot and match it to the next shot. I'm going to turn my opacity back up to 100, and I'm going to make an edit here. That is where the cut happens. I'm already noticing that the vertical vodka label isn't quite centered either and it looks a bit strange to me, so I might just move it down a bit and I could see there's the crop, so I don't want to get that far down. Even there, it looks a lot better. We're matching on composition with these shapes and now we want to match on action. Now, before I just start adding keyframes to this clip, I need to determine where I want the cut to be. Because I do like this movement here and I want to cut on the movement, I don't want to zoom out right here because the excitement of the shot is right around here where all this vodka is just spilling out. If I wait to create the movement after that, vodkas already spilled out, we've missed the high point of that clip. I want this edit to be exciting, I want it to keep moving. What I'll do is I'll make an edit right around here where there's still a lot of movement within the shot. Then I'll connect the two shots together. [MUSIC] Because we have a dolly outshot on our vertical vodka hero shot, but we don't have a dolly here out on our glass shot. Well, you've guessed it. We have to create a digital zoom-out with our glass shot. We can add a few keyframes. One at the end, move a few frames over and add an additional keyframe. Then we'll zoom in on the first keyframe so that we're creating a digital zoom out like this. Play it back and you'll notice that the bottle isn't zooming out at the same speed. We can either match the glass to the bottle speed or to make this edit even more effective. What I'll do is I'll increase the speed of the bottle dolly out by creating a digital zoom out. This is more effective because with a faster speed, the audience needs to have a faster reaction time to catch the cut. At a keyframe at the beginning of the hero shot on scale and I'll also add one on position because we will need to adjust the composition of the bottle shot as we zoom out. We'll add keyframes a few frames later. Zoom out on this shot of it more, adjust the composition so that we have no crop showing and let's play it back. We've enhanced the shot, but then you can see now we have that jarring bump in the bottle shot right here. I think we can smooth that out with some bezier curves on our final tweak and if not, we'll have to make tweaks later on anyway. Because it's harder to track faster movements, increasing the speed of the movement connecting each shot will do a better job hiding the edit. To just the speed of our shots, we can either use our bezier curves or we can change the distance between our keyframes. Ultimately, you'll do a combination of both but because we're not adjusting our bezier curves, I will just reduce the distance of our keyframes. I'll take a look at the cut again. Right now it feels like the bottle is a bit slow, so I'll adjust the keyframes there. It looks a bit better, and I know we don't have that much room to move this keyframe in on this class shot, but I'm going to just move it in just a bit more. Awesome. That's looking a lot better. Recap, we're always looking for these opportunities to connect two shots together through movement and matching composition. While paying attention to eye trace, match the composition or the eye tracepoint by adjusting your opacity to onion skin layers, and of course, there are other ways to do this, such as using your guides or user mouse cursor to get a rough idea of eye trace while toggling back and forth between each shot. Matching both the quality of movement and matching the speed will give you a smoother transition from shot to shot and remember once you add motion blur and do some final tweaking within aftereffects, it's going to look a lot better. [MUSIC] 9. Time Remapping: These two shots both contain camera movement, one being a dolly out and one being a dolly in. With some work, we could connect these two shots using time remapping or speed ramping. [MUSIC] Time remapping or speed ramping is a way to speed up or slow down your clip. This can be used in practical ways or storytelling ways to make an edit work, timing wise to dramatize the shot, to quickly get through a sequence. There's so many different ways to use speed ramps. But in this particular case, I'm going to show you how to use a speed ramp as a tool to transition between two shots. We need to match this dolly out shot to this dolly in shot. To do that, I'm going to right-click on this clip. Select speed/duration or the hotkey control, our command R, select reverse speed. Now I'll play it back and it's very slow, the connecting speed isn't correct, but we can fix that with speed ramps. To access time remapping, you can right-click on this little effects icon down here, navigate down to time remapping, select speed. Now you'll see we have this bar in the middle, which we can click and drag to increase the speed or decrease the speed. Select P for the pen tool and click a point on the graph. I'm going to switch back to my selection tool using hockey V and then click and drag open these handles. Now I have these two handles available, which allows me to create a speed ramp. If I move this side of the clip up, you'll see we're creating a speed ramp. We're going from real-time to 317 percent and we can just increase this just a bit more. Maybe we'll go to like 720 and make sure your handles are affecting the actual dolly movement. You can see the clip is moving all over the place and that's just because we are manipulating the time of the clip. It's going to shorten and lengthen in time depending on how we manipulate these handles. I'll just play this back. You can see we slowly speedup. It's not perfect, but it's something and now we can do the same with this shot here. Right-click on the effects icon. Select time remapping speed, hit P for the Pen tool. Extend the handles open and then create another speed ramp on this side, because I want the speed to match from this shot, which is 721 percent to this shot. I know the dollies aren't exactly matching in speed. But they're close enough that I think if I adjust this to match the outgoing speed of my other speed ramp, we'll get something pretty close. There we go. All right. Let's play it back. All right, so we do have a little bit of a jump here. I'll make a cut there because I think it's just getting up to speed there. Then we also have a little bit of a low on this shot. The name of the game here is to make sure you're cutting at the height of the action. If you don't, then you're going to get that low and it's going to kill the energy between the two shots. We have one shot slowly ramping up to high speed. The faster the speed and the shot, the easier it is to hide the edit. We're also cutting at the height of the speed or the height of the action of the shot and then connecting that to the height of the action of the next shot and the fastest part of the next shot. Boom. In the previous lesson, I talked about cutting on the height of the action. That was an important principle when cutting that vodka splash shot to the hero shot. We want to cut on the height of the action because we don't want the energy or the flow just to be killed in the middle of an edit, you want each edit to add to the next one. Cutting on the height of the action is important in keeping that energy flowing from shot to shot. An additional thing we can do to smooth out these ramps even more is to add Bezier curves to the ramps. Click on the handle, this will reveal additional handles. Click on either handle, you can move your mouse left and right to adjust the amount of curve. We get an ease out and then ramp in the middle and then ease in or a completely crazy jump in the middle. As you adjusted your speed ramp, your clip will move all over the place and rather than pulling the clip out and clicking and dragging the edge of the clip, I would suggest using the slip tool, using hot key, Y, it will just slip the entire clip over. The bit of tweaking, we could actually make the movement even smoother. One final tip about speed ramps and I'm sorry if this is obvious when you're speeding up, it's totally fine to crank up the speed. If you do decide to slow things down, make sure you're not going beneath your clip's frame rate or you may get as stuttered look. So to recap, speed ramping is where you increase or decrease the speed for storytelling purposes, for practical reasons and in this case, and we covered how to use speed ramping to connect two different shots together. The faster the speed on the cut, typically the smoother the edit will be. Make sure you're cutting on the height of the action to maximize the effect of speed ramps. Also think about combining your speed ramps with digital movement and of course, enabling motion blur on your digital movements as well. All these elements combined, you can create some very smooth transitions. All right, so now I want you to take all these different ideas that we've discussed up to this point and try to incorporate them into your edit. Get a rough cut done with your general linear keyframes for movement and then in the next lesson, we're going to take that rough cut and import it into After Effects. 10. Importing Premiere Projects into After Effects: I finished an edit where I've created the basic look of what I'm going for. Take a look. [MUSIC] It's still a bit rough around the edges with the movement, but that's okay. At this stage, all we're doing is roughing out the movement with linear keyframes, because we know that After Effects isn't going to interpret Bezier curves. If you really need to, you can always make some small tweaks to your clips within After Effects. But other than that, this is pretty much the general structure of my story. The final Bezier tweaks will happen in After Effects along with any masking or maybe even motion graphics. One thing which might seem a bit strange to do, but we'll make a lot more sense once you open up your After Effects project is to set all your clips on two separate video layers. [MUSIC] Just move all of this up, that up. Now each piece of video gets its own layer. I would also suggest using keyframes for your fades in your audio rather than default audio dissolves. Again, I'll explain the reason why later in this lesson. We'll save our project and head into After Effects. Because we want to import our Adobe Premiere project, navigate up to File, Import, Import Adobe Premiere Project. Select your Class Project, Open, and then here we have the Premiere Pro importer window. Select Sequences. It'll show all of your working sequences, including your nests, so it can get overwhelming. You don't need to import them all. Just select the sequence that is your working sequence. Make sure to also import your audio. Now you'll see here that it populates our Adobe After Effects project panel with all of our footage, and it keeps all of the folders open, which is not necessary, so I'll close them. [MUSIC] Then we have our project sequence right here. As you can see, it's taken the project sequence and converted it to an After Effects composition. After Effects works with compositions which is the equivalent of sequences in Premiere Pro. After double-clicking to open up the composition, you can see here now why I chose to place all of my clips on separate layers, because that's the way After Effects works. It works in layers. If I had all my Premiere Pro clips the way they were before, it gets a bit messy. For using default audio transitions like this, it'll import into After Effects as its own transition, which will make your After Effects project a lot more confusing to look at. This way, it's easier to take everything in. I can see here that I have all of my audio clips. If I really want to, I can select them, right-click on the label and change them all, and do the same with my video clips, and change them all to something completely different. You can also see that we have these pre-comps, which is the equivalent of a nest in Premiere Pro. I can select all of my pre-comps in After Effects, select the Label and change those to a different color as well. Now I can see even more clearly what's going on in my After Effects comp. To recap, before importing your Premiere project, make sure you set all of your media onto separate layers, so when you import into After Effects, your timeline is a bit easier on the eyes. Use keyframes for your video and audio fades rather than default transitions to cut down on additional unwanted layers in After Effects. Make sure to take advantage of the labels in After Effects, just that much easier to look at because trust me, After Effects can get very complex. [MUSIC] 11. Adjusting Bezier Curves in After Effects: We'll start by animating this movement right here. Navigate to the layer and click on the little triangle to the left. Open up transform. You'll see here that we have these transform properties available, which are very similar to the ones available within Premier Pro under the Effects Controls tab. To zoom in to get a better view of our keyframes, we can click on this little magnifier down here and drag that. You can see these first few keyframes a bit easier. To access the animation graph, click on the graph icon located here. When we select that, we get our graph editor. But we don't see anything right now because we don't have any of our key framed properties highlighted. Once you highlight it, then you'll see, okay, we have our scale property in graph form, and we can also Shift-click on our rotation property to enable the graph view of multiple properties and their keyframes. If you prefer using the speed graph, you can select this list icon down here to reveal your graph viewing options. At this point, I don't want to use the speed graph, so I'll continue using the value graph. If this is too overwhelming to see all of these keyframes all at once, then just work with one property at a time. We can start with scale. Hold Option or Alt as you click this first, this will allow you to drag a handle out of the keyframe. In this case, I want the digital zoom out. Tap it very quickly and then slowly ease in at the end. Remember, because this is the value graph, the steeper the curve the faster the movement. Because we are digitally zooming out, our curve is moving downward, decreasing in scale. I'll have the first keyframe drop very dramatically and then add a handle to the second keyframe to add that very gradual ease in. Option Alt, click and drag. What it can do as well is hold Shift to constrain these handles to this graph line. That's great because we don't want these lines to look like this, because then we run into this problem where the Bezier curve exceeds the value of the second keyframe, giving you that boomerang or bungee jump look. Make sure you're holding Shift so that the Bezier curve doesn't exceed your second keyframe value. You might have noticed that as I'm adjusting the curves, the graph is automatically keeping each keyframe from leaving the top or the bottom of the graph. That's because I have my auto zoom graph height toggled on. If you'd like to see all your keyframes at once within the graph editor, click on the "Fit All Graphs to View icon". I'm happy with this type of ease, but I can tell already that four frames is not going to cut it. I'm going to want to move everything over a bit so the ease is more gradual. I'll move the keyframe over. Now again we run into this problem, so I'll just make some adjustments. Now I have the quality of movement that I'm looking for on our scale property. Now I'll create a very similar curve on my rotation property. In this case, because I want one fluid rotation and zoom out at the same time, it's important that my keyframes are on the exact same frame so that the movement is synchronous. Hold Option Alt and drag a handle. I'll do the same with this point. Hold Shift to constrain the points on the horizontal axis. There now we have a similar looking curve but you can see here our rotation over extends itself just slightly. Again, we know where that strange look is coming from. Selecting only the rotation property, we can see it's coming from the Bezier curve exceeding the value of the second keyframe. Once you have your keyframes on the same frame in your timeline and each property having similar curvature, then it's just about tweaking the duration of the movement itself until you get the look you want. After working through your curves, you may notice that you want to readjust some of your clips. You may notice that they might not have been timed properly. Or as you add curves, you realize that the timing may need to change. Hold Control or Command as you click and drag the play head. [NOISE] Not only will you be scrubbing through the visuals, you'll also get an audio preview, which will allow you to take your music into consideration when re-timing and nudging your clips. As you're working through your animations, you'll probably find yourself moving between two different shots quite frequently to make sure that the animation is matching up. If you want to quickly access your active keyframes, you can click on your "Layer," then hit the U key to reveal the properties with all your active keyframes. You can also access individual properties quickly by typing P for position, S for scale, R for rotation, and A for anchor point. To recap, user your graph editor to adjust your curves. To avoid overwhelm, animate one property at a time. Make sure the keyframes from any of your active properties match up to maintain synchronous movement. I didn't mention this in this lesson, but you could also use your Easy Ease icon button here to create a curve on all your keyframes at once and then adjust from there. [MUSIC] 12. Motion Blur in After Effects: At this point, it's a good idea to enable motion blur. Motion blur will dramatically change the look of your movements and the additional blur allows us to more easily create a smooth transition between two shots containing movement. You can find the motion blur icon to the left of the graph editor icon click on it to enable motion blur. But motion blur won't work unless you toggled the motion blur switch on each layer, Controller and Command aids to select all of your layers at once, and then select the motion blur switch to toggle all of your layers on at once. Shift Command A or Control Command A to deselect all. After enabling motion blur, you can get away with bigger and quicker movements because the fine details of the image are blurred and we only have to focus on this blurr blob rather than the fine details. There's less to interpret visually. To make adjustments to your shutter angle, navigate to your composition Right-click, select Composition Settings and in the composition settings window, click on the "Advanced Tab" and you can see here that we have this motion blur section right here and look at that. Our shutter angle by default is set to 180 and you can even adjust it in after effects to 720 degrees, which creates some wild motion blur. I wouldn't recommend this necessarily because our footage was shot at a 180 degree shutter angle. But the option is here, you can make adjustments, which is very cool. Switch that back to 180. One other thing that I didn't notice until now, our first shot, the scale is increased, which is strange. I'm not sure how that happened, but to fix this, we can Double-Click on our free comp or nest, "Select" our nested shot and tap S for scale to open just the scale property. You can see here that it's at 100 percent we want it to be at 50 percent. Now it looks like what it does within our premier project. After enabling motion blur, I've increased the difference in scale and rotation between my key frames to enhance the intensity in drama of the shot and movement itself. To recap, when enabling motion blur, it's even easier to hide our edits because the increased motion blur makes it more difficult to focus on any given point in the frame between the connecting shots. You may also find that you can dramatize their movements a lot more with the newly added motion blur. 13. Separate Dimensions: [MUSIC] Now, it's time to tackle our next shot. What's different about this shot is that we are now dealing with a new property, the position property. When you click on this and load it up into the graph editor, you can see that we have two separate graphs and that's because position has an x and a y value. When you are dealing with position, you're dealing with both these coordinates. When trying to add a curve on our position graph, it doesn't work. But you can right-click and keyframe, Easy Ease In, Easy Ease, you can add that, but there's no way to customize the curve at all. That's because both the x and y coordinates are connected. We can't adjust them individually when they're connected. To separate the x and y values, you can right-click on your Position property, and right here, select Separate Dimensions. Now we have the ability to customize our x position and y position. Hold the option, click and drag, and create our curve. 14. Smooth Movement Quick Tips: [MUSIC] It's easy to get overwhelmed by the graph editor, especially when you're animating multiple properties simultaneously. This can lead to common mistakes that have somewhat simple solutions. If you're noticing movement continuing through one property but not another, this can mean that you haven't matched up your outgoing and incoming keyframes. In this shot, I was so invested in getting the movement to look right, but I overlooked the outgoing keyframes, and somehow they ended up on separate frames. Make sure your keyframes are on the same frame to ensure synchronous movement. In this combination of shots, I've introduced more complex rotations into the mix, and I'm connecting two similar shots. When connecting two similar shots, it can be helpful to match anchor points from shot to shot. In this shot, from the wide bottle pour shot to the close one, our anchor point is by default in the center of the frame for each shot. We don't necessarily know where this anchor point is in relation to the bottle when comparing these two shots. But if you animate your anchor point to lock onto a specific portion of an object from one shot to the next, you might find it easier when matching rotations. In these two shots, I've matched my anchor point to this little lip in the neck of the bottle. That helped make sure that my rotation was consistent from shot to shot, matching my rotation animations, and then only having to really worry about my position and scale. If you're viewing every animated properties curves at once, not necessarily getting an accurate picture of what is going on with each curve, try to animate one curve at a time. You can also use the scroll wheel on your mouse while holding control to zoom further into the graph editor. This won't be possible unless you have auto zoom graph height disabled. Clicking and holding the middle mouse button will also allow you to quickly access the hand tool to click and drag and adjust your view. If you notice specific movement in your project that doesn't quite look right, another thing you could do is to look at how many keyframes you're using to achieve the movement. More keyframes doesn't necessarily mean better. It can easily over-complicate things and make your movements end up looking worse, especially if you aren't a full-time animator, try simplifying your movements and using less keyframes. To recap, if you're having problems with your movements, make sure your keyframes are matched up. Match those anchor points between similar shots for easier rotation animation. Adjust your graph use so you get an accurate idea of what's going on with each property. Also try using less keyframes. [MUSIC] 15. Invisible Edits: The invisible edit is the one that you don't see, and that's what makes it such a powerful technique when wanting to create seamless transitions. Invisible edits can be used in a number of ways, to get together many shots to appear as one long take. It can also be used to connect two different shots or scenes together seamlessly. The invisible cut is also a practical way to cut together challenging shots that would be very difficult to do in one take. I would highly recommend you check out this editor's work. His name is Eddie Hamilton and he's frequently done movies like this where there's invisible edits, speed ramps and recreates a lot of different types of digital movement either to get a feeling across or to connect two different shots together seamlessly. When creating an invisible edit, a mask is your best friend. All we're doing is adding masks to our various layers to seamlessly splice together the two shots. Let's start with this shot here. Make sure to first click on your layer, click on the "Shape Tool", located in the toolbar. If you click and hold, you can see there's a variety of shapes you can choose from. But I'll choose the Ellipse tool because I want to mask out the bottom of this glass, which has a similar shape. If the layer you're working on is not enabled, all you'll end up doing is creating a shape layer, so make sure that your layer is enabled. There's no need in having the reflection in the shot, so click and drag. While I'm dragging, I can hold the space bar to move the whole shape around, or I can hold Shift to constrain the scale, width and height. Just going to try to get the shape of the bottom of that glass, and I'll let go. Selecting the point, I can use the handles to complete that shape. If I move backward in my timeline, you can see that I'm cropping off the whole shot, so I'll move my mask up. Because I need a better view of my entire mask, I can use the scroll wheel on my mouse to zoom out with my view and adjust my mask from here. Zoom back in, and now I have quite a good cut. The only problem is the cut is very harsh, it's very hard, what we can do is soften that up with some feathering. I'll click on my layer, if you don't see the mask layer, you can hit "M" for mask, that'll bring up the mask layer. I'll just toggle this triangle so I can see the rest of the properties, navigate to Feather and feather it out quite a bit. After adding feathering, I'm noticing that we can see some of the reflection of the glass, so I'll tuck in our mask just a bit. It's okay if the feathering is happening at the bottom of our glass because with the motion blur, it's going to smooth it out even more. Plus you only see the mask during the transition. Now I'll go to this clip and add a mask. Because we have a vignette, we have a darker color purple on the edge of our clip here, and on the edge of our clip right here. What we can do is create a solid for our background so we don't see any transparency in our shot. Before we do that, I'm going to add a mask to our lime drop shot. Click on my lime drop shot, and then again click on the shape layer and add the mask. Now I'm just going to scrub through frame-by-frame, making sure that my clip isn't cropping and it is. I'll switch to my selection tool, select each part of my mask. I don't want to cut out that lime drop, just going to round this out a bit more so that it matches the vignette a bit better. What I also think I will do is add an animation to this mask so that we get a smoother transition. Start my mask here, type M on your layer for mask path, create a keyframe, move forward on your timeline, and then I'll click and drag just this point, increase this a bit as well. Let's take a look. Now let's add the feathering. Since my mask layer is selected, I could type F for feather, maybe up to 400. Don't be afraid to crank that feathering up. Yes, I think this works okay. To deal with the transparency, we'll add a new solid and recreate the purple background. Let's go back up to Layer, New, Solid and then use the eyedropper to select a color close to the edge, because we want the edge of our mask to match the solid color. Our solid is now on top of all of our layers. I'll zoom out of my sequence by holding option and using the scroll wheel, and close this solid layer in to match our glass pour shot. I'll also just move this layer beneath the shots that we don't want to see transparency on. Now let's take a look here. Now you can see what our solid is doing. If I turn it off, turn it back on, I can see that the color is just a bit brighter than the edge of our frame here, which is not something we really want. What I'll do is redrop this color so it more closely matches the background. This just takes a bit of tweaking, until you get something that works. There, that's not bad. If it looks okay without your motion blur, then you know you're in a good place. Because now when we enable our motion blur again, it's going to become even more seamless. [MUSIC] Not bad. To recap, the invisible cut is the unseen cut that connects two different shots, scenes, and can be used to create the appearance of one long take. [BACKGROUND] Of course, it's a great tool for cutting together long sequences that otherwise wouldn't be able to be done within one shot. When creating your own invisible edits, the mask is your best friend. Keyframe your mask path as necessary, and also make sure to provide generous feathering to blend together the shots and the connecting shots. Again, motion blur will help solve the invisible edit as well. [MUSIC] 16. After Effects Project and Export Settings: When you're ready to export your projects from After Effects, there are a few settings you'll want to change to ensure the highest quality output. The first is to switch our After Effects project bit depth. Bit depth refers to the color information that is stored in an image. The lower the bit depth, the more you'll be able to see the steps between the colors or banding, and the higher the bit depth, the smoother the color gradation. An After Effects by default is set to eight bits per channel, and because we're dealing with all these vignettes and intricate gradients, it's important that you set your project's bit depth to something higher than eight bits per channel, preferably 32. Any type of smooth color gradation, like a vignette, can easily cause banding if the bit depth is too low. To change your After Effects project's bit depth, click on this little icon right here, it says 8 BPC, eight bits per channel, which opens up our project settings and our color tab. We'll change this from eight bits per channel to 32 bits per channel. Now, I'll click Okay, and also makes sure that your workspace is where you want it to end. My project wants to end probably more around 13 seconds. You'll notice too that after switching to 32 bits After Effects will run even slower. Working in eight bits per channel is helpful to keep your effects and edits running smoothly. Just make sure to change it back to a higher bit rate upon final export. Now let's move up to File export, add to Render Queue. Then you can click on the Output module here to change some settings. We'll stick to QuickTime format, but we're going to change our format options, and change Apple ProRes 422 to DNxHR. I just prefer this Kodak over quick time specifically because I feel from my tests that the gradients and vignettes ends up having better results and reduces the potential banding in our final export. It's very important to also change this from 8 bit to10 bit because we showed this project in 10 bit and we're not using any graphics or anything like that, 10-bit will give us good results. Click Okay, I'm good with that, and I'll click Okay. Choose your location where you want to output to , and hit Render. To recap, working in 8-bit mode is great when wanting to keep your computer running smoothly while you're working on your project. Just make sure to change it upon final export to a higher bit depth to avoid any banding issues. Of course, this is more of a problem with a project like this where there are heavy vignettes and very fine gradients. When exporting, ensure that you're at a higher bit depth than eight bits. 17. Final Recap & Thank You!: Congratulations on finishing the class. I hope you had a lot of fun creating this project, and I can't wait to see what you've come up with. Of course, there are tons of things that make up a smooth edit. In this class, we've mainly gone over the visual elements, the visual transitions. Of course, before we even went into those smooth edits, we talked about how to tell the story of the brand and this is so important. Story is the foundation for your edit, look for ways to match on action or cut on action between two shots. Make sure you're not just using linear keyframes, try using eases for more natural-looking movement. Don't just rely on those easy ease hotkeys. Make sure you're adjusting your graphs, get that custom look and feel. For an even smoother edit enable motion blur either by using the transform effect or importing your project into After Effects. In addition to these techniques, we can also match composition and try to find ways to match composition and action together while also keeping in mind, iTrace, speed ramps along with invisible edits are also great practical ways to create a smooth edit. If you have a project ready, don't hesitate to upload it, we can't wait to see it and it will help other people post their own projects and be inspired by your work. Thank you so much for taking my class and I'd really appreciate it if you followed my profile for new class releases and giveaways. If you found value out of this class or you have critical feedback to give me, I would love to hear it. Please leave a review, it helps me learn and grow in my own teaching and provide better content for you. Thank you so much for taking this class and remember, story is your guide. Wait, we forgot to send in our project. Let's do that. Here's an edit for review. Looking forward to hear from you. Piece out, send. We got an email back pretty quickly. Touch on the edit looks great. We have a few smaller visions. No, we got a lot of work to do.