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Novice editing tips Adobe Premiere - Things I should have known

Hi all,

I would like to share with you the few things I learnt during my first "serious" edition using Adobe Premiere.
I'm pretty novice, so I just thought that it would be nice to summarize what I have learnt, and maybe someone can give more tips or learn from my mistakes.

Background: Film was shot with a Digital HD camera, the footage wasn't all usable, the sound had to be fully re-worked, and lighting was a mess.

1. Adobe premiere is unstable
+ I used adobe premiere pro cs4 with some additional plugin for colour correction. Still the tool was crashing without notice. Most cases was due to memory (using windows 7 32bit, with 4Gb of RAM). So use CTRL+S on EVERY step of the way if you want to avoid surprises.
+ Also when rendering the final cut adobe encoder would crash. What is worse, some child process would crash and encoder would still be waiting for the next frame to be encoded. I had to kill the hanging process and start again.
+ I had to render sequence by sequence. And finally I would glue it all together in one as a separate step

2. Frames and formats.
+ Edit in the format of your footage. Why nobody told me that (I checked many forums). I initially wanted to work with 720p because that was enough for my film, the footage was 1080. All the scenes were cropped and zoomed. Why? I don't know, it just did.
+ Once I set it to 1080, then I finished editing the first cut, exported it to 25 fps... it was quite crap, nothing of a smooth video... exported 30fps... still bad... After many tests I realised that my video footage was recorded at 60i. Once I created my project in 60i (copy and pasted everything into the new project) then the output was smooth at 30p.
+ Was this the way to go? I don't know, but it worked and the exported files looked good again.

3. Sound sync.
+ I rendered the whole film for preview so I could play it on the small screen in premiere. Then I started adding background noise (exterior and interior) and then one by one the noises. I had to re do the whole audio.
+ I should have ensured that everyone was quite during filming, I would have saved hours of work.
+ Having the film rendered it's easier to adjust the noises to the right place. I used the audio transitions to fake getting closer or going away effects.
+ Lots of sounds can be found on the net for free. These ones I used
http://www.freesound.org/
http://www.soundjay.com
+ Also music is available all over the net:
http://incompetech.com/

4. Colour correction
+ The 3 way colour correction is a nice tool, also adjusting the whites makes it possible to get the right tones.
+ I tried to get similar colours between scenes, mainly I focused on the colour that stands out (red) of my scenes. At least I would get 1 colour right, and the sky, as there were quite some blues.
+ Also this experience taught me that I need to learn more about lighting.

5. Film look
+ I tried many different things for Film look. Even gave a try to Magic bullet Looks, still the video footage wasn't very good, so when one scene looked ok other looked far too dark.
+ I tried the 25p frame rate export... nothing worth using

6. Transitions
+ Without knowledge of transition usage I had some dip from one scene to the next... even some dip to white... I removed most of them and used dip to black as I learnt is how to indicate pass of time! And I thought I was clever...
+ Most transitions are just cuts from one scene to the next. In my opinion, any other fancy transition need to be too well thought to be used

7. Speed up and reverse
+ This more than editing is acting tip. When I did the action I didn't think well when to actually stop. So in one of the scenes I seem to anticipate the surprise act from my killer
+ Also too much speed makes the fast action not clear. I didn't find a way to improve that. Any tips?


8. End credits
+ I read once that people don't really spend much time on their intro credits, so I tried to do something a bit interesting there. Maybe a bit tacky, but I liked it.
+ I checked any tips to get credits done with adobe premiere, nothing good. I was tired, so I did a very simple set of two slides for my end credits
+ I saw a couple of tools that create film end credits but I had to pay for them... so it wasn't worth the trouble.

10. Copy and paste
+ It's a nightmare to just paste something, why ctrl+c, ctrl+v, don't work?! I don't know... there are so many things that you can copy and paste that makes it hard to control.
+ Paste insert is not a good idea to be used when you have lots of audio pieces that are synchronized to a give time stamp.



Overall I learnt a lot, and I mainly raised my respect for all the editors, and specifically for the ones that have edited our films in the past.

You can see the end result on this other thread:
http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?t=21380

Please give me some tips for the next time! :yes:
 
I don't think the problem is Adobe Premiere, but some of the choices made within Premiere.

I do not get the crashes, I do not experience any of the difficulties you describe and I've been using this software for 11 years. In almost every case, it's user error, not programming or use of the program.

I'll ask this important question - do you use the same computer for editing that you use for Internet, games, email, and other uses? That will have a huge impact on how well the computer edits video if it is not a dedicated Video Editing computer.

The single biggest mistake I can see from your posting is that you need to edit the footage in the native format that it was shot/imported as (IE 1080 to 1080, or 720 to 720) because everything you do will need to be rendered and resized. This is an enormous taxation on the computer system and that's just to look at the footage, nonetheless edit with it.

Editing natively is almost always the best, easiest way to deal with footage, unless you export all the footage to the other format and THEN create a new project/timeline with those matching settings.

Inside of PREMIERE there is a ROLLING CREDITS setting that even automates "Start off screen/End off screen" option and it's simple to use and looks elegant, just like any rolling credit.

There are several free tutorials on YouTube and the web on beginners usage of Adobe Premiere, plus the ADOBE CLASSROOM IN A BOOK series, and the tutorials that you can buy from Adobe are invaluable. Try those out before blaming the software... I use this software 7 days a week and have none of the problems you describe, and I make a living using it.
 
Thanks Sonnyboo for the tips. As I said, I'm a novice, so I blame me first :)

I don't use my PC to play games and download stuff I don't trust... My PC live long enough to be called dynosaurs before they actually die.

I know that adobe used to develop on Mac, and then port it to Microsoft. The problem is that there are too many flavours of hardware and OS to make sure that it's 100% robust. This is the only tool I use that crashed often... but also it was crashing much more when using the wrong sequence settings (doh!).

Still, the CTRL+S doesn't take long to be pressed, and executes fast. Having worked with computers for some time now I learnt to save every single step of the way, even with simple and robust software. I even have 3-5 backups of what I do in a day or 2 of work :)

I used adobe quite happily now, but I learnt the hard way, and even I saw some tutorials, I have to say I'm too impatient to stop myself from "learning as I move along".

You are fully right on the biggest mistake, it took me ages to find the right setting for the project resolution and frames per sec. Somehow it wasn't specified on any tutorials I checked (or I didn't listen to that part).

I will try the rolling credits. I have to say that what I found on the net about it was pretty discouraging, so I didn't even really try.
 
Sonyboo - its a good point about using a computor that is dedicated to editing. I think I may have a bit too much junk on my computor and will need to dump a lot of it. I guess I can get something at Staples or Best Buy for that.

I have Sony Vegas.
 
Sonyboo - its a good point about using a computor that is dedicated to editing. I think I may have a bit too much junk on my computor and will need to dump a lot of it. I guess I can get something at Staples or Best Buy for that.

I have Sony Vegas.


That is the single most common misconception about Video Editing Software is that it can play nice with all the other junk on a computer, especially Windows. Final Cut pro and Mac don't have nearly as big a problem because there are only HUNDREDS of programs written for Mac OS. There are literally MILLIONS of programs written for Windows, so Microsoft gets a bad rap for how millions of other companies make software that conflict and then don't run right.

The basics of a computer program are in the DLL files (Dynamic Link Libraries). Sometimes these cross wires, borrow resources from one program to another. Having ONLY editing and editing related software installed on a single machine will guarantee that it will run smoother.
 
I'm also thinking of getting a separate computer (Mac or PC still undecided) for editing purposes only. What I like of the Mac is exactly what you indicate Sonyboo, the fact that there are less programs and a Mac platform is more contained makes the overall system more robust.

I have to say that our latest video was edited on a Mac with FCP and it seems that it crashed a few times due to the heavy memory usage of HD. And that's a Mac reserved only for editing.

I still like Adobe Premiere, I just wanted to see if people had good tips and avoid Dynosaur eggs like me to avoid the same mistakes. As I titled the thread, these are things I should have known :)

Also I was told the other day that my video card is probably quite good for playing games (which I don't like to do) but not so good for editing. So that's something I might look into.
 
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