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As mentioned previously, I'm volunteering at the local history center, and now I've been asked to try my hand at editing and publishing the "history chats" where a local expert talks about some part of local history.
Knowing almost nothing about this sort of thing, I've tried Windows Movie Maker, but it is almost comically limited in its capabilities. It can't even put an image over the main video. What do you non-pro hobbyists use?
I use Adobe Premiere Pro (used to use Final Cut Pro) for all my editing.
Lightworks is a pro NLE that has a free version that might be worth checking out and there's also Da Vinci Resolve Lite.
Oh, those look terrific. Very powerful. I'll just... um... start using one of them.
I also use Premiere Pro, but might recommend Premiere Elements as a sticker-shock-less happy medium between WMM and "jesus christ really?".
Premier Elements seems more my speed. But at the same time I often feel limited by Photoshop Elements. I use it and an old copy of Dreamweaver a lot. I'm actually kind of tempted to go the full Adobe Creative Cloud "all apps" route, but I'd rather not have to tell people I have a hobby where i pay for software like it's medicine.
Last edited by Zarban (2015-09-10 00:46:37)
If you'd benefit from a "Teague slowly explains all the major stuff one needs to know to begin editing in Premiere Pro" YouTube thing, I'd be happy to do that. Just fwiw.
+3
Even though I consider myself to be very adept with Premiere, I'd still love to watch that.
I have to reteach myself the basics of Ppro once a year, every year.
Teague, save me from my future self!
Well, Davinci Resolve was a bust. Just kept crashing, even after uninstall/reinstall.
I bought Adobe Premiere Elements and am finding it a bit unintuitive (not unlike Photoshop Elements).
Anybody who wants to give me a quick Skype tutorial on how keyframes work would have my gratitude. Also, everything is blurry even after rendering, whatever that is.
Mmm. Well, the thing about Premiere Elements is that you've used it more than we have.
Anyway, the quickest way to understand keyframes is to forget that word for a minute. Zap it back out of existence in your brain.
So, in creative software, you adjust the properties of things — like what color your text is — until you've made it the way you want it. In static graphics, the story ends there. "I want red text." Photoshop is like "like this?," and you're like "yeah, that's super red, thanks." End of story. But, in graphics where time is a component, sometimes you want the color of the text to change over the course of your shot. Maybe you want it to start red, and end blue. You tell the computer "hey, red at the beginning is fine, but make it blue by the end," and the computer interpolates the necessary color changery to animate the text from red to blue over the course of your shot.
We call those directions that you gave the computer "keyframes." In this example, you set two of 'em: a keyframe at the beginning of the shot, which says "make the text color all the way red," and a keyframe at the end of the shot, which says "make the text color all the way blue," and over the course of the shot, that property (text color) goes from one to the other. At the halfway point, the text would be half-red half-blue, and so on.
It's just a little point of value data on a timeline, so you can change the value over time. You say "at Time A, I want Property B to be Value C", and so it is. If you didn't have another keyframe for that property, it'd just stay Value C forever. (And in that case, you wouldn't even need to "activate" keyframing anyway, because you could just... set it at Value C like you would in Photoshop and move on with your miserable afternoon.)
Anyway, eventually we all die in the end, but you knew that already. Questions? I can do this schpiel on video with a whiteboard if ya want.
As for the preview coming up blurry - the preview settings for your Sequence may be set to a lower resolution, OR it's playing back in half (or lower) resolution - though if you stop playback it should go back to full res. The latter is easy to fix - below your main video in the Program Monitor, there's a dropdown that says "Full", "1/2" or "1/4". This is the playback resolution, and it allows you to play stuff in real time if your computer couldn't handle it in full resolution.
If your Preview resolution is too small, go into Sequence Settings (under the Sequence drop down menu, right at the top). At the bottom of that window you'll see a box for Video Previews. I always have mine set to "I-Frame Only MPEG" at the resolution of my sequence (1920x1080). It might be defaulting to something like Microsoft AVI at 720x480.
Again, that's with Premiere Pro; I don't know how different Elements may be to handle those same things. (Also I use CS6 which is a few years out of date at this point but the concepts are the same.)
Last edited by Boter (2015-09-11 21:23:38)
After searching around for a pan-and-zoom tutorial, I found one that mentions that the default for images is for APE to down-res them to fit in the frame. The only real problem image was a scrolling list of local Civil War vets, so I deselected "Scale to frame size" and redid the image scroll, and it looks great.
Still figuring out the keyframes thing. (And thanks, Teague.) I get that the yellow lines in the clip show in and out points for fades, but I seem to keep accidentally putting a keyframe in the middle of a clip and not being able to see it and deleting them and starting over.
The appallingly unintuitive copy-and-paste for titles also took a while to get (don't copy! "duplicate"!).
Last edited by Zarban (2015-09-12 00:55:28)
The offer to teach you how to use Premiere stands, fwiw.
Okay, half-way thru this Civil War lecture, and it's going well except for when half my lecture clip got corrupted and APE crashed repeatedly. (Deleted the bad clip and reinserted.) I'm dropping in maps and pictures of generals as they get mentioned, even doing pan-and-zooms to follow armies moving across the map.
Even so, I'm fighting a pitched battle against the cameraman. He's as unskilled as I am. There's only so much jerky panning and zooming that I can cover by going to a map.
I'll post a rough version tomorrow morning for those who are curious. I appreciate the advice.
Last edited by Zarban (2015-09-12 05:58:40)
This took forever to output and all afternoon to upload. And it's just a rough cut. I've done a bunch of more work on the second half of the video today, finding regimental rosters that show local soldiers and whatnot.
There's no aliasing on your scrolling text!
(you have no idea how high this praise is)
What's the "real" way to do credits? The advice I took was to create the list as a long image in Photoshop, then animate the list to scroll up. Clumsy, for something that every movie needs.
I don't know if it's standard practise, but it's what I do.
I downloaded a credits template from somewhere a while back, so whenever I need some standard rolling credits I just switch out the names and pick a relevant font.
At the level you're working at Zarban, Premiere Elements should have a few templates that you can use like Thongmeister was saying, they should be in the titles menu.
As far as what the /actual/ actual way to do it? I know there are companies out there that specifically make entire software packages to just do end credits. Otherwise probably a lot of after effects or something similar I'd imagine.
There is a scrolling title template, but it doesn't allow you to paste in a whole spreadsheet of names. You have to type or paste them individually, like the cave men did back in the 1700s.
I've posted a new version, fully edited and with the lighting improved, but missing a photo that the host talks about near the end. I've since added a factoid about each of the battles as he talks about them. Other than that, this is about as good as I can figure out how to make it, I think. I welcome feedback on sucking less. I have 8 or 10 of these to do, and I doubt the camera work is any better on the others.
Last edited by Zarban (2015-09-14 19:29:23)
Nice work. *thumbs*
As for the name list jam-up you're dealing with, the easiest thing to do would be to make the thing in Photoshop (or similar, something that allows you to create images and save them with a transparent background) and use that instead of the title tool. For one thing, the title tool sucks in a profound way. For another thing, more importantly: doing that kind of thing with the title tool is hard on the software and really hard on you.
The second best thing would be to use After Effects or summat for creating the name lists separately. This would be very easy for someone to set up for ya and you just swap in the text as you need it. The result would probably be that you'd render out a pre-made name crawl movie on a transparent background, and bring that pre-made asset into APE as just another piece of footage. This approach does ostensibly require adding a step, as well as bringing another program into the mix, but the upside is that you will not feel homicidal after doing word processing tasks in After Effects or Photoshop as you feel doing them in editing software.
(An additional upgrade would be that someone could fiddle with expressions a bit and make it so the crawl is never pixel-jittery. This is probably a minor consideration in this case, but, it is a thing worth attempting where available.)
Also, I know you're fairly comfortable with web programming — one thing you could also try is making the "credits" as a big-ass webpage. Format it however you want, keep it on a black background. Then use any of the thousand "whole-page" browser print-screen tools available to make your image for you. Then just import that shit and position-keyframe it for the rolling animation.
+1
Oh, yeah, that last bit is good advice. That's probably easier than what I assumed would be the "right" way.
The only real problem now is glitches showing up in the final output. I don't continue to work while APE is creating the output, so maybe I've got something running in the background that hogs clock cycles for a moment, creating a glitch? Is this a known thing?
Edit: On the other hand, APE crashes *frequently* in Windows 7, so... maybe it just sucks.
Last edited by Zarban (2015-09-14 16:46:28)
Hm. Define "glitches"?
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