Editing Techniques

This post describes a few of the editing techniques I used when editing on Adobe Premiere Pro.

1) This technique is fading in and fading out. You can put this anytime during your music video for example. How this works is your get the pen tool and click where you want to start the fade in your clip and you drag it down to the point where you want the screen to fade to black for example. You then click where you want the screen to start lighting up again (the third point on the screen) and the forth click is where the screen will be restore to where it was before. The sequence will be the screen starts to fade to black and will stay black for a short or long period of time however you like it and the screen will start to light up again and restore to normal. You can change  how long it takes to go to black or come beck to color but as you can see in our our fading in and out lasts around 3 seconds.

2) This is called a multi-cam sequence. You can see that in this screenshot I can pick what shot I want to use and for how long I want to use it for. You can see here that I have 5 potential shots I could use at that moment in the song and I have currently selected the 4th one on the screen. (You can see that there is a black box to the left and to the right, this is current shot angles that I can not use. There is 5 on each row for 4 rows, that's 20 potential angles to use throughout the music video.) If I want to change an angle there is two ways I can do it. I can just use the mouse to click on the shot I want to use or I can use the number pad to click on what shot i want. For example if I wanted to change to the sixth shot I would either click the sixth box or press the number six on the keyboard.

3) This screenshot shows the start of the color grading system. This enables us to change the color and many other things to our videos. You can change for example the saturation of the shot, along with the sharpness, vibrance and the shadow and highlight tint. So lets say that I wanted to change the highlight tint to make the shot a lot more yellow, I would drag the donuts circle towards the bright yellow side of the circle. After this the shot I have selected will almost certainly be a lot more yellow to say the least. Lets say I really liked how my edit turned out and I wanted all of my shots to look the same as the one I've edited I would right click on the clip I've edited and and click command A which would select all of them and click paste attributes and then all off them would be the same as the one I edited.

4) This tool is called the marker tool. I can use this to almost sets out shots I want to use from a certain sequence of videos. What I will do is get the audio version of the song up on the tab bars on the top of the timeline and hit the key M every time their is a beat in the song i'm playing. Then after that I will get a sequence of clips from the video file and get them in the order I want them to be in. After I get them in the order I want them in and then right click and then I press unmark markers to get them on the timeline. This in my opinion is a useful way of editing but not the best. I think it is fairly unreliable because it rely's on the editor getting the beat exactly right to the millisecond throughout the video, and having enough clips to last the whole song.

 5) This technique is there to make the whole editing process easier for the user. What this technique does is it creates the multi-cam sequence that I've spoke about above. It involves selecting all of the clips with the green circle on and right clicking and selecting 'create multi-camera source sequence' and make sure the settings are the same as the ones in the screenshot and click okay. You will then be able to make a multi-cam sequence afterwards.

6) This technique is used to speed up or slow down a clip in your music video. I will do this by right clicking on a clip and clicking 'clip speed/duration'  and you will get the screen you can see in the photo on your right. You will then get the option to put your speed to a percentage of what you want it, so for example if I wanted one shot 50% faster than all of my other I would type in 150% where the 100 is highlighted so my shot would be 50% faster.

7) This is called overlaying. It is very useful when I want to change the clip that i'm using. It's an alternative to just changing the multi-cam sequence like I mentioned above. It is also good because I can get clips that I cant pick from the multi-cam sequence and put them on top making them visible.


8) This is another way you can change shots. You can right click on a clip and go down and hover over multi-camera and you can select what clip you want. The negative about this is that you can't see the preview of the clip until you have selected it.

9) This is called connecting the clips. It is also useful for when you want to get rid of a shot in your music video and just drag the next clip forward by one. You simply select the right one (not the left!) and drag it left until it connects to the clip before. It is useful for unprofessional edits but it can hinder your professional project because it effects the whole music video from after that clip.

10) Transitions is a very good technique for adding different moves between clips, like on power-point between slides. I would go to the yop to animations and it will bring down a menu of loads of different transition effects, I would  then pick one and drag it to the slot I want it in.