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!
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!
