The massive video editing extravaganza! – 50 tips! Part 10
Posted: June 17, 2011 Filed under: Editing, Filmmaking, Getting practical | Tags: Adobe Premiere, audio, AVID, balancing audio, diegetic, editing, export, exporting, Final Cut, match cut, parallel editing, reverse, settings, Sony Vegas, sound, video editing Leave a commentAnd the last of the tips, 46-50!
46. Match cuts. Match cuts are great. They’re a visual similarity between the next shot and the previous one. It can be used to create a visual metaphor, to link a theme between shots and are generally an underused resource.
A match cut from 2001: A Space Odysey
47. Parallel editing. This is when a scene is intermixed with another. This gives the idea that two events are happening at the same time in different places. I’ve never done this one personally, but it’s something I’m sure I’ll be attempting in the future. I’d imagine the way to do this is to set down one sequence of events, then marking down where each of the cutaway shots will be. It’s important to get it right, since you’re mostly likely playing around with different speeds of action and pacing. Don’t be afraid to try putting them in different places though – sometimes experimentation provides better results.
48. Balancing audio. Getting the right balance between dialogue, sound effects and music can be difficult. Adjusting sound levels is one this, but actually producing a working soundtrack is another. You should really rank what needs to be heard in each bit, and make sure the top 1 or 2 can be heard above all else. The music can be tricky, depending on whether it’s diegetic (part of the scene/world) or non-diegetic (outside of the world). Non-diegetic usually doesn’t have too much dialogue, but when it does, the dialogue comes first. So non-diegetic sounds need to full on (not necessarily in terms of volume, but in also in terms of panning. The diegetic music however, that will need panning (sound out of mostly one side of the speakers). This gives the idea of a sound source. Other effects may mean limiting some of the frequencies, wet/dryness of the sound and even filters to simulate the type of room the action is in.
49. Reverse footage. Most of the time, you can tell when footage is reversed. If you want to add reversed footage to forward flowing sequences, make sure that the action is natural (unnatural action gives the audience an odd sense) and make sure you only use small snippets. Longer snippets, you generally can’t get away with. Reversing footage can help in a lot of ways though – through accidental means (a persons inflections may have a more accurate intent than the forward motion version), through safety (say for example, when a weapon is meant to stop dead on a point) and even through style (possibly when coupled with the forward motion of footage, to create a “rewind” effect).
50. Exporting. So, you’ve done all the work, and it’s great! Now, before you go any further, note down (or simply know) your project settings. Things like FPS (frames per second), aspect ratio (usually 4:3 for standard definition, 16:9 for high definition), whether it’s for TV or not (TV’s, or at least old ones can’t display the whole image, and instead cut an outside portion of the edge off) and make sure you’re not outputting at too low (or too high if file size is an issue) a data rate. You’ve done all that work, the way to justify it is to make sure it’s presented in as good a quality as you made it.
A handy little button on Sony Vegas - to match the project settings with the export ones. Some of the other video editing programs may have a similar feature - though data rate is not always included in this setting
The massive video editing extravaganza! – 50 tips! Part 9
Posted: June 17, 2011 Filed under: Editing, Filmmaking, Getting practical | Tags: Adobe Premiere, AVID, color, colour, correction, cut, editing, Final Cut, grading, Sony Vegas, sound, sound bridge, take a break, transition, transitions, video editing Leave a commentAlmost there, with tips 41-45!
41. Correction versus grading. Bear in mind that these are two separate concepts that utilise the same tools. Colour correction is about normalising colours, correcting colours and luminance values (light and dark) and matching them up with shots in the same sequence. Colour grading is about providing a mood – an atmosphere to the world. Two different concepts – one tool!
42. Transitions. Most of the time, I find transitions cheesy and annoying. If done well and stylised though, they can be really good. What do I mean by that? Well, if the transition fits in with what’s happening in the story or shot, it can work – having time and energy at the heart of a scene, it’s nice to see fast swipes of the camera of to one side. Also transitioning with camera movements also look effective, when a camera moves sideways to the right, having that wipe transition looks good. The main exception is fades, since those are usually okay for slower scenes. Just don’t overdo it.
Even Windows Movie Maker has an in-built transition palette
43. Take a break! Editing is a very lengthy and engaging process and time is gone before you know it. Don’t forget to take a break once in a while. Getting away from the computer monitor can enable you to think outside of the box in order to get over certain problems.
44. Cut it! If something isn’t working, cut it if possible. If it’s not essential to the story, if it slows down action, if its too fast for this scene it doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s the only way to make something work right. I’ve had this a few times before, trying to put in a snazzy visual effect or even showing off camera angles and such. I had to cut it because it wasn’t fit for purpose – the time constraints with the camera angles, and the lack of repetition of a nifty effect to create style.
A scene from Terminator 2 that was cut because the director felt it didn't work - or to be more precise, that it was overly expositional
45. Sound bridges. Do you know what a sound bridge is? I’m pretty sure you do. But do you know how awesome they are? They’re very. use them whenever possible. Trust me, it’ll make the action flow and link scenes together to create an actual story rather than simply separate scenes. You simply can’t live without them!
The massive video editing extravaganza! – 50 tips! Part 8
Posted: June 16, 2011 Filed under: Editing, Filmmaking, Getting practical | Tags: Adobe Premiere, affect, AVID, crop, cropping, editing, effects, entire tracks, Final Cut, saving, sfx, Sony Vegas, sound, sound effects, title, video editing Leave a commentMoving on to tips 36-40.
36. Title tools. Every editing program has them, but they can work differently. Learn how to use it. Try things out. Some of the more advanced editing programs allow you to create 3d titles. They can easily do scrolling credits as well, simply pasting a credits list from a notepad file can make extremely light work of it. Most of the time you can also do things with the individual letters themselves, spinning them around at different times, etc… You can be very creative with them, but it does have a learning curve. Just stick with it.
Titling with Sony Vegas - Drag onto the timeline and then write what you want seen
37. Affecting entire tracks. You can usually assign effects to entire tracks, allowing you to tint an entire sequence (or scene). This isn’t the only effect you can do this to. Any visual effect can be applied, although you usually want some form of colouring or feathering and such. Quick, easy and effective.
38. Saving effects. If you’re working on a special effects heavy film, you can often find yourself using the same effect over and over again. In virtually every editing program, you can store settings for effects, whether you drag the effect to a bin, or just create a new preset for the effect. You can then simply drag and drop the effect onto clips.
39. The joys of cropping. It can be very useful in picture in picture scenarios. You have a video to put into another one, but there’s a border/sections to cut out, etc.. Cropping in this instance is invaluable. Coupled with keyframes, you can also use it to wipe videos across the screen. In fact, you can have a virtual limitless amount of videos wiping and rewiping and such. Kinda cool huh?
The picture in picture effect. While not being cropping in the usual perpendicular sense, it's still effective for style
40. Using sound effects. Sound effects can be a joy to do. Just make sure that you have the sound effects for either the actions happening on-screen or immediately off screen. Having the sound of footsteps that never get acknowledged by the character and don’t actually show up can be distracting. It also implies happenings outside of the main story, not something you want to do. There’s a lot you can do with sound effects, but in general, you want to limit it, telling only as much as you have to.
The massive video editing extravaganza! – 50 tips! Part 7
Posted: June 16, 2011 Filed under: Editing, Filmmaking, Getting practical | Tags: absolutes, Adobe Premiere, audio, AVID, Blur, colors, colours, de-grain, editing, Final Cut, legal colors, legal colours, multiple, pixelisation, smooth, smoothing, Sony Vegas, sound, sync, syncing, tracks, video, video editing Leave a commentHeading onwards to tips 31 to 35!
31. Using multiple video and audio tracks. Tracks stack. Simple. Adding tracks is usually simple, and you can have a lot of them. With video tracks, the top one is the one that is seen. If it has an alpha channel or a chromakey effect, then you can see some bits below. Also using picture-in-picture effect allows the tracks underneath to be visible. Audio tracks act differently though. All audio tracks play at the same time, although they can be muted or turned on to solo allowing easy manipulation between tracks.
The Final Cut Pro timeline, one of many NLE programs that can do multiple video tracks
32. Syncing up video and audio. Most of the time audio and video will already be in sync. If you’re capturing the audio separately though, you will need to sync them up in post. Depending on how you filmed this depends on how difficult this would be. What do I mean? Well, it is possible to hook up an audio recording device up to a camera to sync up time codes. Syncing up timecodes means it’s fairly easy to sync it in post production, simply match the timecodes of the video and audio. If the timecodes don’t match, you can still match up the sound and audio using the clapperboard, combining the two the first frame the clapperboard closes with the sound.
33. Smoothing. Any form of smoothing destroys information. In essence, you’ll lose detail. Whether it’s a blur, pixelisation, de-grain smoothing, etc… If you need to do it, just be careful not to destroy too much detail, lest you make the picture more cartoon like.
34. Legal Colours. Monitors and TVs display things differently. Though it’s not always a problem with modern TVs, certainly older monitors will display colours differently. It’s why some suites have proper monitors, to allow us to see what the footage would be like viewing it on a regular television. Most of the time there’s some setting on editing suites to limit the colours to those that are legal on TV’s thus taking out potential problems later on. Nice!
AVID's safe colour limiter effect
35. Absolutes. When adjusting colour, be aware of the absolutes. Adjusting the colours can sometimes mean crushing the range a bit. What does this do? Well, instead of having smooth tones, you get patches of the same tones. This can happen with all colours as well as black and white. The least you have to adjust the colours, the better.
The massive video editing extravaganza! – 50 tips! Part 6
Posted: June 15, 2011 Filed under: Editing, Filmmaking, Getting practical | Tags: ACID, Adobe Premiere, audio, audio level, AVID, editing, effects, Final Cut, keyframe, motion, motion control, Pro Tools, Sony Vegas, sound, sound gate, standard, video editing Leave a commentTips 26-30!
26. Motion control – basics. There’s lot of things you can do with clips. You can slow them down, you can have them run in reverse and you can adjust the speed within the clip itself. This is the kind of effect you can see in most (if not all) Zack Snyder films where a character does something and the footage slows down for a brief moment. Slowing down means some processing though – the computer has to duplicate frames in order to do some slow motion. However you can also interpolate. What is this? Well, interpolation is when the computer takes two frames, scans the difference between them and creates a new frame to go in between. This means you can have smooth motion even when playing in slow motion.
27. Utilise keyframes. There’s often times when you want an effect to come in mid shot, or you want to adjust the effect mid way through. With the help of keyframes, you can. Creating keyframes is easy, and you can adjust values of the effects using them – in fact every variable can have a keyframe. What happens between keyframes can also be controlled, having them static until the next keyframe, having values increase or decrease until it comes to the next keyframe, etc… Some NLE programs will even let you inverse the ordering of the keyframes.
Keyframes in AVID
28. Audio – dedicated programs will always win. No matter how good a video editing programs’ sound manipulation, there’s always going to be dedicated audio programs that do more. Even AVID has Pro Tools to import to. Sony Vegas also has the likes of Sony ACID and Sony Sound Forge. Why is this? Well, to be quite frank, it’d push the memory needed to run the program up considerably. But import of sound into another program is fairly easy, even AVID allows you to transfer markers and even the video footage itself into Pro Tools to allow you perfect the sound.
29. Set a standard audio level. Audio can be rocky if you don’t do it right. The levels can go up and down, being too quiet to understand or being so loud it becomes distorted. There’s usually the green, yellow and red in the audio. You don’t want to go too much into the red. You also don’t want to remain in the green. To help you, on some NLE programs there are tone generators. These help you set a recording level. Try to match the volume of the tone with your audio clips. This bypasses the problem of trying to adjust volume of both the clip and your speakers.
the volume monitor on Sony Vegas - with any editing software, aim the top end of green/yellow
30. Sound gates and effects. There’s always going to be some background hiss, no matter what you do. It’s fine, but if there’s too much hiss, you could try using a sound gate. What’s that? It’s an effect that cuts certain frequencies out of the clip. This often needs tinkering with, and it’s always best to put a reduced level of hiss behind the clean dialogue to blend the audio better. Just make sure you’ve got all the dialogue. And other effects that can be placed upon sound include ones which adjusts echoes and distortions, replicating the effects of different room sizes as well as cutting frequencies to replicate telephone exchanges and such. The best thing for you to do with these is to play around with them. You’ll soon begin to get a feel for them.
The massive video editing extravaganza! – 50 tips! Part 5
Posted: June 15, 2011 Filed under: Editing, Filmmaking, Getting practical | Tags: Adobe Premiere, AVID, editing, effects, explanation, Final Cut, motion tracking, save, Sony Vegas, sound, stack, stacking effects, use, video editing, zoom Leave a commentAnd now onto tips 21-25!
21. Sometimes you can save it, sometimes you can’t. Not all footage you receive will be optimum quality. By all means, minimise the damage – add de-noise effects, adjust the luminance values, etc… But remember, you can only do so much. If it’s really that bad, then there needs to be a re-shoot for it. If that’s impossible, just live with it and move on.
Zooming in will usually result in the outline of a box outside of the viewable area.
22. Don’t be afraid to zoom in a bit. While the greatest pixel resolution is desired, sometimes there’s things around the edges of the screen that is simply going to ruin things. Don’t be afraid to zoom in a little. The loss of pixel resolution can be worth the price of cropping something out. Especially boom mics coming into the perfect shot and even accidental shadows and such.
23. Motion tracking – when to use it. Motion tracking can be used in a lot of different circumstances. It can be to stabilise handheld shake, to block, blur and pixelate logos on moving objects in the shot. It can also be used in the inverse, putting logos, writing, etc… onto moving objects within the shot. Basically, whenever you need to stabilise something in the foreground or background, it’s good.
24. Motion tracking – a brief explanation. Okay, and here’s how it works. Motion tracking tracks the location of user defined pixels across the screen. It’s like the eye test where you follow the pen from left to right, down to up, etc… It can be assigned to a number of different attributes including rotation, scale, position and sometimes effects. So, you’re tracking a vehicle that’s driving away from you, you can apply the tracking data to the license plate and have it pixelated, and only where needed. The pixelation would then follow the license plate, getting smaller as it goes away.
AVID's motion tracking tool
25. Maintain order when stacking effects. There’s going to be times when you’ll need multiple effects on a single clip. In many NLE systems it a simple case of dragging ontop of the existing clip. With AVID, it overwrites the previous effect unless you hold the alt key while dragging. Most systems will allow you to re-arrange the order of the effects also. What does this mean? Well, ordinarily the computer will process each effect in turn, effect 2 goes on top of effect 1, effect 3 goes on top of effect 4, etc… Sometimes you want one effect done first though. Reordering effects can greatly affect the clip.
The massive video editing extravaganza! – 50 tips! Part 4
Posted: June 14, 2011 Filed under: Editing, Filmmaking, Getting practical | Tags: Adobe Premiere, alpha channel, AVID, create, editing, effects, Final Cut, plan, Sony Vegas, sound, split frames, stuck, use, video editing Leave a commentAnd swiftly moving on to tips 16-20:
16. Stuck? Leave it until later. You can’t seem to get a piece of footage right, no matter how it looks? Skip it for now! There’s no point in obsessing over one bit if you’re leaving less time to work on other bits. Remember: done is better than perfect! Come back to it at the end, you may even have a few new ideas on how to tackle the problem!
Thick blue line to the left for marking in, thin blue line on the right for the mark out
17. Know how to split frames properly. We’ve all done it. You’re on a frame and you cut it. You stick something in between only to find that there’s now a single frame of something you don’t want pasted onto the beginning of something you do want. Are you cutting before the frame shown or between this one and the next? It depends on the editing program used, but AVID actually has 2 lines rather than 1 for this very reason. Marking in and out points, you should understand that marking in means the left line, marking out means the right. Learning this will stop you cutting a frame off from time to time.
18. The alpha channel – how to create one. First, the alpha channel is a transparent layer. You can doodle on the alpha channel and have it so that you can see video underneath it. Handy! But how to create one? There’s a few methods based upon what you want to do with it. Titles are easy, the title tools usually have it so that the background is alpha. With importing graphics, you can use their alpha channel – although make sure the codec supports it. Something like .gif or .png does. .jpeg and .bnp don’t. In terms of video, .flv files seem to be able to accommodate alpha channels.
19. The alpha channel – how to use one. As mentioned above, the alpha channel is a transparent layer. So, you keep it on top of everything else and have the background playing underneath. As far as I’m aware, the standard way of doing this is to put the alpha-channel media onto the highest video track. Pretty simple.
The alpha channel will often have a checkered background
20. Plan your effects. If you’re going to do a special effect in post-production, make sure that you’ve done some tests to make sure that you get the results that you are expecting. It also makes it quicker when it comes to the actual editing of the film as there’s less need to experiment to get the desired effect as you know exactly what you need to do and how to achieve it. All you then need to do is tinker with the settings to get the best out of the shot.
Habitual Films 