Editing - planning/evaluation

Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0

Adobe Premiere is a video editing software package suitable for both amateur enthusiasts and professionals. It can be purchased and used alone, or alongside other applications such as Adobe Photoshop & After Effects. Premiere has been around for a long time and enjoys a very stable user base. It is a solid, professional-level application which will be more than adequate for most editing situations.

Logging and Capturing the Video

Before being able to start the editing you must first batch capture the video footage, to do this you first need to place the mini-DV tape in the camera and connect it up to the camera before turning on premiere pro. There are a few settings which you need to change before starting the capturing for instance the files locations, the reason for doing this is the fact that you want all your files to be appropriately placed.To begin playing your tape, you can use the Play, Stop, Pause, Fast Forward and Rewind buttons below the Viewer window.

To capture the footage it is a simple process of setting in and outputs on the tape, which is done by is to first go through your tape and log the clips you want to capture by creating in and out points.Then when you're done selecting all the clips you want, you can do a Batch capture to capture them all at once. On the keyboard there are a selcetion of shortcuts to help create the project easier. Such as the i key which will create an in point to begin logging the clip,when the clip has reached the point where you want to stop capturing it, on your keyboard click on the o key, which will create an out point to stop logging the clip.Then click on the button for Log In/Out and then create a name for the file. Once this is completed throughout the video click the bacth capture record button and all the clips will be put in order and downloaded from the tape to the computer.

Types of editing:

Video Transitions

A transition is the way one shot changes to the next. By default, if two clips are placed next to each other in the timeline, the transition is a cut.To make more interesting transitions such as dissolves, wipes and effects, use the transitions available in the Effects window.

Pictured to the left is the effects menu that is on Adobe Premiere Pro for when you decide to make a video transition. With the menu you click on an effect you wish to utilise and simply drag it on-top of the video cut in the timeline which you wish to use.

The effects that we mainly used when creating video transitions are dip-to-black and the utilisation of the cross dissolve effect.

The effect which is shown above is the fade to black video transition. From the two images, left to right is where the dip-to-black occurs and then moves onto the next scene in the timeline. The whole process of dip-to-black occurs in a matter of 1-2 second from the first shot to the next shot whilst fading out.

The other video transition which we also exercised was a cross dissolve, the "Cross Dissolve" transition fades out clip A while fading in clip B.To make sure that the overlapped clips match the duration of the transition, make sure the clip in Video 1A ends at the end of the Cross Dissolve, and that the clip in Video 1B starts at the beginning of the Cross Dissolve.

The image to the left is how we utilised the cross dissolve effect, the effect of overlapping two images at once. What we had done was overlap a long shot with a close-up but at different angles. This helps to give the viewer a good idea of what is going, what we found good about the effect was that it was not only a second long whereas it last about three seconds so giving the viewer enough time to consume the images placed on the screen




With the programme you can also make straight cuts, for that fast and sharp effect which we were looking for, for instance creating cuts between the music. The best way for fast cuts was to pause as the beat was about to change and use the razor tool to chop the clip in two too make that fast cut.

Whilst editing we decided to experiment on certain shots, it was simple to experiment as every effect which was placed onto a clip can easily be removed. The reason for experimenting was that we wanted too see a lot of different effects and see which ones suited our video best. Some of the effects that we played around with were ghosting, Motion blur which creates action lines of image, leaving a blurry image which changes from brightness and then contrasts and we played around with the Speed and duration of the video clip which increases as well as decreases the speed of the shot.


Creating Titles in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0

There are two ways in which to create titles in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 :

Premiere's built-in title designer . This the simplest method — the title designer is quick and easy to access, and has helpful features like the ability to see video frames underneath the title as you create it. The disadvantage is that the title designer is relatively limited — it's perfect for most common requirements but in some situations you'll need to use the second option.

The second option is that ou can create titles in another program such as Photoshop and import them into Premiere. The advantage of using this rather than the Title Designer on Adobe Premiere is that you have a wider range of abilites to create different titles and fonts to choose from.