Morty's Bunker

The Final Countdown.

After all this hard work and studying the final week for the semester closes in. It was a nice run and I learned a lot along the way from my classes. While life may go on it shall do so with us more wiser than before.

Anyways, for this particular class I decided to try and make a music video of sorts, but I’ll issue a caution now and say the final product may change. I’m also a fan of epic-looking trailers, so I might also try doing something like that instead. I want to keep my choice open-ended because there are so many things I could possibly do.

For this final project, I’ll implement as many techniques as I can from what I’ve learned throughout the semester. I do hope to also learn other techniques aside from what I’ve posted to add extra flare, since obviously skimping over this project wouldn’t help anyone and might even make the final product seem less stellar than it could have been.

What I do know for sure is that I’ll be using gaming footage, whether of my own or cut from other videos found across the Internet. I enjoy orchestrated music so I’ll be sure to pick out a very epic tune for my trailer/music video. Hopefully Premiere Pro won’t crap out on me as I work on the project, and I hope to present everyone with something awesome and spectacular not only here but in class as well.

Time Remapping.

I gotta say, working with Premiere Pro CS5 really makes me grateful that there are other brands of video editing software out there. I’ve been tinkering with slow motion effects and it’s somewhat of a hassle, but I’ve managed to get to a point where I’m satisfied with what I’ve got. Before you start this, be sure to check on Frame Blend, which is found by selecting your clips and then going to Clip > Video Options > Frame Blend from the top menu; you can also right-click your clip and select the option from there. For the sake of this effect, frame blend basically smoothes your frame rate regardless of how slow (or even fast) you adjust your motion.

With that out of the way, head to the drop-down menu from the clip on your timeline and select Time Remapping > Speed. You should get a yellow line going through the middle of your clip, or some line at least; the tutorial I looked at when I needed help said the line would be white or silver, but mine was yellow. Find a good place on your timeline and then, while holding CTRL down, left-click the area you want to key frame your motion. The key frame on the time line should look yellow, and after it appears you can adjust the video’s motion after the frame without hampering the overall speed of the clip.

But say you want to adjust more than two sides of a clip. Take a look at this:

As you can see from my timeline I’ve made two separate key frames and adjusted them so that the yellow time line in between them plays at a slower rate than the rest of the clip. To get this effect simply follow the same instructions above except at another point in your clip’s time. Then, drag the line between the key frames up or down and you’ll acquire more or less the same amount of motion I’ve acquired. If you want to fine-tune the motion you can adjust the time line or the adjusters found by clicking the key frames, which will reveal the blue bars. I decided I wanted an immediate stop rather than a gradual slow-down and twisted the blue adjusters accordingly.

I had to fight with the blue adjusters and the key frames to time the motion right, and you may need to as well for whatever you desire to implement this effect in. It takes a little patience, but what I did while adjusting the motion was work from right to left so I could time the ending before I edited the beginning key frame of the slow-motion. I don’t really believe it matters and I never tried editing the pieces chronologically, but hopefully there won’t be a drastic difference.

As usual, this is just a simple tutorial to get your feet on the ground. I could’ve really gone mental with the key frame adjustments and add plenty more to see if I could reach a smoother effect than the one I acquired with simply two. However, I thought I was spending too much time on this effect, but I hope I’ve at least given you an understanding of this tool. Final projects are coming up soon, so I hope you look forward to what I have in store for you!

Items: Titles, Bars and Tones, and Universal Counting Leaders.

Last week I noticed that there were other items located in the “New Item” sub-menu when right-clicking on the file list panel. This week I managed to check some of them out but the rest on the list still elude me. I’ll be giving a small, bare bones explanation of the ones I’ve covered, which are Title, Bars and Tone, and Universal Counting Leader.

To get to the New Item list I was talking about, first right-click on your file list panel like above, then open its context menu. As you can see the three items I listed in the first paragraph are only part of many, but as of right now I’m not really sure how I could use them in my final project so I’m skipping them.

Title is more or less self-explanatory. If you didn’t want to fiddle with the key frames and just wanted a simple, static image with some text that’s the item to do so. Though, when you use this you’re prompted with another window and have a lot of choices at your disposal, so you could make it a lot more complicated if you wish.

See? If you decide to put text in your title then things get even more open-ended. For the Fill Type I chose Radial Gradient, and the image above is the outcome of when I tinkered with the settings a bit. The Shadow and Fill options are causing the text to look like that; I put the outline color as red under Color in the Shadow drop-down menu. There’s really a lot to experiment and explore, too much for an amateur like myself to explain, but don’t let such options bog you down. Editing is art in a way, and sometimes exploring what you can do might yield results fruitful for you even if you weren’t looking for them.

The Bars and Tone item is simply a static image with a tone. There isn’t anything you can do with this other than place it wisely in your video, so keep that in mind should you use it. You can make a very compelling scene with such a minor item, for example, when the news casters are attacked by zombies and then the bars and tone show up. Even though there are other examples I could cite the zombie one is very recognizable to me. Aside from serious situations you could also make some comedy out of the bars and tone, but everything is up in the air in how you use it.

Last but not least there’s the Universal Counting Leader. I’ll admit, I haven’t really seen this effect much in anything other than old-school things so I don’t believe there’s much to apply this to. If you use the counter you can also edit it by double-clicking on its icon in the file list.

As short as this blog post was that’s it for now. I’m still working on my final project so balancing things around is a bit difficult, but I’m still able to answer any questions anyone may have. In the meantime, good health to you all.

Basic Intro Video.

I decided to practice a bit more and do a basic video intro. It’s not much but if you’re just starting out with Adobe Premiere Pro and want something simple for beginning your videos you can follow this tutorial.

The first think you may notice is that there’s not really much in the Sequence Track. One layer is occupied with black video and the other layer has some crude text I made from Microsoft Paint. Like I said, it’s pretty simple, but I’m personally a fan of minimalistic introductions so my final project will probably have something like this. You don’t have to be a whizz at photo manipulation or drawing to create the text I made, so just hop into Paint and type whatever you’d like with the Text tool, save it with the extension to your choosing (.jpeg, .png, etc.) and then import the image by dragging and dropping it into the file list to the left.

The black video is way more simpler (if this tutorial could be any simpler!). In the file list, right-click on a blank spot, select “New Item” and then “Black Video.” This will create a new file that, as the name implies, will produce an image file that has only black video in it. You can manipulate this image in different ways, such as producing an ending scene transition from an active scene to an end, or even use it as some instantaneous transition for when a guy gets knocked out. Let your imagination do the work and even a simple image like that can come in handy in a variety of ways.

Once you’ve created the black video, simple drag and drop it into a video layer. You’ll notice it starts out small by default, so if you wish to expand it simply click on its edge and drag it away. The same applies with the text if there’s any reason you wish to expand it. Now, with all the simple things set up, we’ll get into key framing the text so it fades in and out like my basic intro does.

Click your text from the Sequence Track and then head to the Effect Controls tab at the top. Start out at the beginning and then slide the Opacity percentage to 0 and it should automatically create a key frame. At the bottom left of the window there are numbers colored in yellow if you want to fine-tune timing; click on it and type in “1” in the seconds box (which is the second box from the right). When you’ve done that change the Opacity to 100, and once you play the video the text should fade into view.

Obviously there is way more you can experiment with just from this basic intro screen. If you don’t want any fading in or out then you could simply leave your text alone and let it play as is. Don’t let your worry of messing things up get into the way of taking a risk when it comes to editing, because there’s always the “Save As” option to make multiple copies of your file, or the Undo feature for when you want to save disk space. The last part of my text introduction is a reverse of the paragraph above save for the time. I wanted to keep that text up for a second, so I sped to 2 seconds and 23 milliseconds and kept the Opacity to 100, then I went to 3 seconds and 23 milliseconds and turned the Opacity to 0. Now I have a smooth fade in, fade out for my text that’s paced to my liking.

That’s all for today. The final product of this tutorial can be found in the next post, and as usual if you have any questions or comments I would be glad to respond. It’s been a while but this class is quickly coming to an end, and once that happens this blog probably won’t see any updates. But even then I’m glad to have helped out any of you who’ve followed or liked my posts and hope the best for your endeavors.

Take care!

Exporting Files

I’m not exactly sure how I skipped this but today is going to be a small update as I research on other techniques. So far I’ve explained how to set up files and adjust key settings, and went through various parts of the editing screen so beginners don’t get lost. I’ve also overviewed the effect controls and their various features. One key piece of information I believe I completely missed was saving your file, because, after all, all that work has to go somewhere!

To save your file, first ensure you’ve selected your Sequence Track and then head to File > Export > Media. Likewise, you can click on the Sequence Track and press the shortcut key CTRL+M to get to the screen below.

This is the save window for media files. If you notice the yellow bar at the bottom of the video you may or may not see that the entire bar isn’t filled. Sometimes Adobe Premiere doesn’t register that there is more to the video and only highlights a specific part of it. Since I wanted to export the entire sequence of my video I clicked on the drop-down box where “Entire Sequence” is and chose the respective option. You also have the option to select “Work Area” and “Custom,” where, respectively, if you only want to export the area you’ve been working on or you have something else in mind you can choose those other options.

I’ll admit, I’m unsure what the difference is between the Entire Sequence and Work Area options, but I can only assume that Entire Sequence exports the whole video no matter what gaps or holes are present in the Sequence Tracker, whereas Work Area is more careful of what you’ve been focusing on during your editing. Regardless, once you’ve finished with that you can prepare to finalize and adjust the settings of your video.

Under Export Settings you can select what quality setting you’d like your video to be in. Windows Media is the default, and should fit into any minor task such as recording a baby’s antics or tourist sightings. However, if you’d like to export your video in high-quality there are also other options for such; simply click on the drop-down box beside Format to view them.

Output Name decides on what your video’s filename will be. Click on the yellow text to rename it and also choose where to save the file if you wish to save it elsewhere. The Export Video and Export Audio options speak for themselves; if you don’t wish to export the video then uncheck the option, and if you don’t want audio in your video then uncheck the respective option. The information below, depending on what Format you’ve chosen, may differ. I’ll try to explain the static settings that don’t change, but apologies in advance if I mention something that does.

Under the Video tab is the settings dedicated to video. Underneath Basic Video Settings you’ll find various options to further adjust your video, its quality and more advanced options for veteran users (something I won’t tinker with because I too am an amateur). Frame Width and Frame Height alter your video’s overall dimensions, and if you wish to fine-tune these options uncheck the chain link located to the right. This will unlink the dimensions so you can alter the video if there is any reason you wish to modify its size. Frame Rate decides how choppy or smooth your video will play. The lower the frame rate the choppier the video is, and the higher it is the smoother it will be. Take note, according to what I understand the human eye can only see up to 60 frames per second (FPS), so if you set this setting too high you may not see a difference and you could also possibly cause your video’s size to increase. For some reason my Adobe Premier sets its default to 29.97, so be sure to glance over to this option if you want your video to run more smoothly.

If you wish to tune your video’s audio settings click the Audio tab. As I mentioned, depending on what Format you’ve chosen the settings here may change. This may be an extremely crude way of explaining it, but I assume the higher the Frequency and Bitrate options are the smoother the audio will be. Some codecs come with a setting that allows you to pick what quality you want your video’s audio to be. If there is an option like that for your chosen Format I highly recommend you use that.

Lastly, if there is a reason you want Gaussian Blur in your video head to the Filters tab and check Gaussian Blur. You can also adjust the blurriness and the motion of the blur. I find it strange there’s only one filter for a tab that says Filters but I suppose plug-ins have a hand in that tab. I believe this filter’s useful for editing beginning and introductory openings to the main part of a video, but otherwise I wouldn’t have a clue what else to use the blur for. Though, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m only an amateur with this editing software, so its uses are only as broad as my understanding of the program. Once you’re done with everything click Export at the bottom right and a processing window will pop up. Now all there is to do is wait for it to finish!

Anyways, that’s all for today. If you wish to ask me a question or go over something then feel free to reply to this post or however Tumblr works. See you next week!

Week 6 - Another Video Editing Technique

I was wondering what I should do next since I believe I covered most of the basics, but I remembered there was something that I’ve constantly seen in music videos and thought if I could do this sort of technique in Premiere Pro. Fortunately I can, and while it doesn’t seem like a lot of trouble, applying such a technique to background and editing work will probably play a troublesome part on its own.

As you can see here, what I’ve done is resize the videos so they’re now side to side. From what I’ve seen on YouTube, this technique is combined with the annotation option to create little indexes at the end of videos. In music videos, you can play around with playing multiple videos at once to create a nice flow that coincides with visual effects. You could probably chop up some videos to make a neat intro video with this technique as well.

To get this done, simply click on a video in the Program Sequence at the top-right window and then move the anchor points (those square dots) around to your choosing. You can resize and rotate, but there are some restrictions disallowing you from doing some further adjustments. Also, don’t worry about running out of layers in the Sequence Track editor; a new layer popped up as I added more videos. Now, going back to the adjustment issue, this problem is easily resolved, thankfully!

Notice that these videos have been adjusted to various sizes. Since I’ve only begun to experiment with this particular part of editing I’m uncertain whether you can also shear and or crop particular parts of videos. When I first started resizing videos I could only uniformly resize them, meaning that no matter what the proportions would always be linked with each other. In order to remove this restriction, click on a video, go to Effect Controls, then Video Effects and then click on the drop-down menu for Motion. When you uncheck Uniform Scale you should be able to adjust the video like the video at the top right in the image above.

When you uncheck the uniform scale option you’ll have to do it for the other videos too – that is, unless you have something else entirely planned for them. Note that if you don’t want the audio tracks connected with the video tracks then you’ll have to unlink them in the Sequence Track editor. Left-click on an audio track, then right-click and select Unlink. This also helps if you want the reverse, to unlink videos from their audio.

That’s all I have for today. If you have any questions or comments, or even any challenges you’d like to pose to me then please, I’m willing to listen! This blog should be updated every Friday, so if you want to ask my anything then do it before Thursdays. See you then!

Effect Controls

Today I’m going to be talking about Effect Controls. You can edit your video in a variety of different ways using these controls, but I’ve yet to experiment on them because I never really needed or wanted to use them for anything I’ve edited. However, it wouldn’t hurt to see what they offered, so I’ll start from the top.

This is the Effect Controls panel. As you can see, there are plenty of options to your disposal. I’ve only used two, and those are the Opacity and AudioEffects tools. Since I’m explaining the options from top to bottom I’ll get to those two later.

When I open all the drop down sections of the Motion effects you’ll see a lot of tools to further adjust your video. All of these are fairly simple to understand if you’ve worked with any sort of editing software. Position moves your video depending on the listed coordinates. Scale can either increase or decrease your video to make it smaller or larger. The checkbox, Uniform Scale, allows the scaling to adjust according to one side so it adjusts to a 1:1 ratio; unchecking the box allows you to freely reform the video if that’s what you need.

And here are examples of the effects when used. As you can see, using the Positionmotion effect caused the video to shift to the right. Scale allowed me to make the video smaller, and unchecking the UniformScale option caused the width of the video to reset and stretch to its default scale.

Rotation, as you may have guessed, will cause the selected video to rotate depending on the degree you want.

And there’s Rotation in action, whee! Now, Anchor Point is a little bit different in its use. Compared to the Position effect they are both similar, but one important difference is that the Anchor Point effect spans to all of your videos on the time line. If you want ALL of your videos to shift a little bit to the right, then Anchor Point will do that for you. The Position effect only works on the currently selected video, so if you have plans for your other videos be sure to be careful!

Now, the Anti-Flicker Filter is a strange one to me. I read a few threads about it, and it seems to help mostly with slideshows because they flicker a bit when edited. I’ve never made a slideshow in Premiere Pro and I don’t see myself doing such in the future, so its importance will evade me, at least for now.

Opacity works as it normally does with other editing software, but for video editing there’s a slight difference in putting it into effect. Down in the time line you may have noticed the yellow lines and the white dots going across the videos. Those white dots are Keyframes, and allow the software to know when something is about to occur (in this case for the video to be completely visible or, depending on what the user wishes, to slowly or quickly go from visible to invisible).

You can easily place keyframes while you’re editing by selecting the specific point of your video and setting the Opacity to whatever you want. Afterwards, move to another point and adjust the opacity accordingly and you’ll have a video that can fade in or fade out however you desire. Likewise with other editing software, Blend Mode practically does similar effects but I haven’t had any luck in implementing them in my videos, so perhaps it only works with static images or I require more practice and understanding.

Time Remapping continues to elude me. I’ve checked several tutorials and read through various threads and most of them have to do with using Premiere Pro CS5.5, which I do not have. I haven’t been able to use it but I understand that it allows me to increase or decrease the video’s speed with keyframes. But as I’ve said, I haven’t been able to make this effect work for me and I can only assume it’s much more easier to use with CS5.5.

I’ve only played around with Audio Effects in regards to fading sound in and out. I’ve mentioned this before in a previous tutorial so I believe I won’t have to repeat old information, but for the rest in the Audio Effects control panel I’m not quite sure I can explain. My searches have been fruitless and tinkering with the effects yields no obvious difference, so my only advice is to practice with them and see what happens, or look around Google and see if you can find anything of value with the effects.

And with that concludes everything listed in the Effect Controls panel. Hopefully someone out there will find something valuable in regards to what I couldn’t cover and posts it here. For everything else though I hope this tutorial helps!

Week 4 - Splitting Video and Sound, Linking/Unlinking, Scaling Video to Size

You may or may not have viewed the video from last week and thought, “Hey, why didn’t he cut that whole block of footage at the beginning if he just wanted to show how fading in and out would look like?” Well, to be honest I didn’t know how to, and I was trying to figure it out but I was getting kind of close to time blog posts are due. HOWEVER, this week I decided to dedicate a section to splitting video and sound because I think it deserves its own post.

Splitting Video and Sound with the Razor Tool

It’s actually very simple to split video and sound but Adobe Premiere Pro works differently compared to Windows Movie Maker. In WMM, to split footage into different segments you right-click on the location you want to split the footage and then there’s a command there to do so. In Adobe Premiere there’s a specific tool to split footage and audio, and it’s called the Razor Tool.

The tool’s pretty cut and dry. You select it, locate the section of footage you wish to cut, and then left-click. To split only a segment of video or audio hold Alt while left-clicking on the section.

Linking and Unlinking Video and Audio

While I was editing footage I wanted to get rid of the audio that came with my footage. Unfortunately the razor tool is only meant for splitting, and the problem here is that the footage and audio are linked together. To remove this link, right click on a segment of footage and click Unlink; doing this will make the audio and footage of a segment separate, and you can do as you please with either without having any interference from the other half. To remove the links of multiple clips simply highlight the clips you want to unlink and do the same. You can also use Clip > Unlink from the menu bar up top to acquire the same results.

(3:42PM - Just found out that unlinking multiple files only works in CS5.5. Apologies for any inconveniences)

However, if you want a segment of sound and video to link then it works the same way, except you have to highlight the footage and audio that you want to link together. And I advise some caution when doing this, as if you’re not paying attention you may end up linking something together without realizing where they are on the time line and causing footage or audio to overlap.

Scaling Video to Size

While I was reviewing my past recorded gaming footage I realized Adobe Premiere did something weird and placed open space around my video. I searched around and found a way to resolve this problem but I have to constantly apply the fix every time I place a new file onto the time line.

As you can see from the top right window there is open space all around the video. To fix this right-click on a video segment and check Scale to Frame Size.

And that’s the outcome. If, like me, you simply hate having to do this every time you place a new file onto the time line then there’s a permanent solution. From the menu bar go to Edit > Preferences > General and then you should find this screen:

Check Default scale to frame size and from there on out any footage placed onto your time line should default to scale to frame size.

And that’s all for today’s tutorials! Later on I’ll upload a video of car stunts from a video game called APB: Reloaded along with techniques I’ve acquired from my time with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Week 3 - Fading In and Out

I wanted to try out some actual video editing this week, and I was going to come up with a video tutorial but it turned out a lot more difficult than I thought, so what I’ve decided to do is provide the outcome of this tutorial into a movie. Today we’re going to work on a basic video effect: fading in and out.

Fade Out

At the top there’s a little tab called Effects Controls. Select the video you want to edit and then head to that tab to see the available choices. There’s a set number of effects you can currently use but you can find more from Adobe’s website via the plug-ins section.

Implementing the fade in and out effects are simple. Select the part of the video you wish to fade in or out via the number line to the right of the Video Effects section. Then, in the Video Effects section itself, open the drop-down section where it says Opacity and there should be an input box with yellow numbers in it. That input box is where the work is done for this effect, so once you’ve selected the place for the effect click on that diamond to the right of the input box to set a key frame.

If you want to quickly jump from key frame to key frame click on the arrows in between the key frame placer. When you’ve set your starting key frame select another part of the video you wish to complete the effect. You can set another key frame and modify the opacity from there through the input box, or you could first find the position for the key frame and the immediately modify and place a key frame by adjusting the opacity. I’ve set the opacity all the way to 0.0% for a classic fade out, and you can see it in action at 1:20 in the video at the end of this tutorial.

Fade In

Fading in is essentially the same way as fading out except the opacity starts off at 0.0% instead of 100%. Likewise, if you noticed below the video key frames there are also audio key frames in place to fade the volume in and out. Doing this effect with audio is also the same way you would do with the video.

Now with that said, check below for the conclusion of this tutorial.

NOTE: The game play is from Rage, a mature title situated in a post-apocalyptic environment. If you are squeamish, have trouble coping with violence or gore or do not wish to watch violent footage please disregard it and try this tutorial on something more preferable to you. Likewise, you could immediately head to 1:20 to see the effects in action without catching sight of any violence or gore.

Week 2 - Inserting Files, Exporting Stillshots, and the Speed/Duration Tool.

Now that you know how to more or less set up a basic file to get working, I’ll explain how to insert files into the editing screen. Technically it’s simple as dragging and dropping files into the editing screen so you won’t have to worry so much about any specifics when doing this.

Browse to the folder where you want to place files into your editing screen and drag and drop it into the window where Sequence 01 is at the top left. The file will process and afterwards you’ll see your file in the list so you can organize your work more efficiently. Alternatively you can use the Media Browser at the bottom left and from there search folders for files.

Once you’ve put your file into the editing station you can drag and drop it into the timeline, where it will show up in the video player as seen above. You can play your video and ensure it’s the correct file, pause, rewind, fast-forward and etcetera. You can also take shots of specific frames with the little camera button at the bottom right of the media player window.

If you decide to export a frame this prompt will appear. You can import more than just video files into your editing screen, so I’ll import this bitmap image into there as well.

Now the image is organized in my file window. I’ve also placed it in the timeline, but as you can see it’s a bit small compared to the video file. Fortunately you can also enlarge and shrink the files in the timeline.

And now the image file is a bit bigger in the timeline! Now, this isn’t just for convenience, the image will take up a bit more time before the next frame is played. If you try to enlarge the video file it won’t work, but you can shrink it so it takes less time and space. However, doing so will cause the video to shrink and cut off whatever else was in it. If you want to slow or quicken the video, right click on it and select Speed/Duration and type how fast or slow you want the file to play.

I decided to slow the video file down by 50%. The file also took up a lot more space. In fact, if I didn’t move the image while editing the video file it would’ve clipped with the image and not render some of the video content. To alleviate this problem there is a checkbox in the Speed/Duration prompt called Ripple Edit, Shifting Trailing Clips.

Filling this checkbox out will cause any files in front of the edited file to shift. This handy option will alleviate any further problems in regards to clipping, so be sure to remember it!

That’s it for today. Tune in next week for more Adobe Premiere stuff!