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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Off Topic → My first foray into video editing
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 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.
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.
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.)
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"!).
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.
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.
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.
Hm. Define "glitches"?
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Off Topic → My first foray into video editing
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