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Saturday, 10 November 2012

Post-Production Considerations for Unit 62


As soon as the Pre-Production stage of a video project has come to an end, you have to immediately start considering the post-production stage. Similarly to the post-production stage, there are many factors and elements to consider. Some elements are more important to others, however it is still important to consider them, no matter there importance.

Below, I will list the key factors to consider at this stage, and explain the importance and relevance they have with the GigaX team in this project.

Workspace

The workspace is technically the space you have to work. This is the what allows you have to some sort of freedom when editing and piecing your footage together. The workspace allows you to organise yourself and your files into different sections. For example, you are able to move the task bar into a different positions. In addition to this, software like Adobe Premiere allows you to move different task panes and windows into different areas of the screen. This allows you to edit your video in your own way, style and freedom.

Adobe Premiere provides a number of windows and tabs which takes you to a different area of editing. These windows will take you from colouring of the video to the audio mixer. This allows you to switch from area to another. other similar softwares such as iMovie provides a much less accessible workspace, and the option of switching from different sections is very limited, compared to Adobe.




The above images shows a screen shot that is similar to what you will see when you start Adobe Premiere, and what will appear when you simply select a different window at the top of the screen. You are able to jump around from mixing the audio, to changing the picture contrast. Overall, providing a unique, helpful and particle workspace for video editing. 

Myself and Sam will be using Adobe Premiere as the workspace provided and with other factors considered, will allow us to create a successful video, which will be created with more comfort compared to using similar softwares.

Timeline Window

The timeline window, is one of the most understandable elements within this project. When you think of the word "timeline" you think of some kind of time scale, right? Well you are correct. A timeline window is very similar to a time scale. This is where all the footage and audio you have selected to be in your video is placed. The first video file you insert into the video will be shown on the timescale window, and will be always in front of the rest of the other footage files. 

You have a visual outlook on what you have previously inserted, and are able to mix the footage in the order you wish by simply selecting the file and moving it from right to left. Of course, sometime there will be an overlap when you move the videos. Fortunately there are different tools to help you correct this.         

This is an example of a timescale with a project in progress. This shows clearly what order you have the footage and audio. The red line, will allow you to move into different sections of the video. You can easily move from scene to scene. This is a great technique because if you come across a section of some of the footage, where for example the speech is to fast, you can simply go back to this area, and edit the audio to suite the video much better.

It is important that me and Sam use this timescale window as this is an essential area which shows you what footage you we have used. Of course we need to know what audio and footage we have used and where they are positioned. In addition to this, this area will allow us to edit the audio and footage as well as move them to different areas. Without this tool, we will struggle to make small yet vital changes to our video.   

Toolbox Window



A tool box window simply contains buttons and similar aspects, which provides a basic accessibility of simple editing tools for a video. This may not be the most complicated tools/ window to get around, however the impotence of is is huge. Without this window, it would be very difficult to do the most simple editing techniques. Techniques such as changing the speed play of the footage and splitting the footage would be come practically impossible if this window was not included in the programme or used by a production company.

This is an example of a toolbox. As you can see the tools look fairly simple, but I cannot express the importance of the tools. For this software this toolbox is taken from, without the text editing tools, you will struggle with that type of project.

This is very similar to what you will expect from the toolbar on Adobe. 

It is important that we use this toolbar, to not only show we are capable of basic editing techniques, but the basics are sometimes the most powerful techniques. Myself and Sam will struggle without the splitting tool for example, as some of our footage will be too long, and we will need some way of cutting, deleting and moving different areas of one piece of footage. We will be using this throughout this post-production.






Effects Tab

No video in today's media industry would look any where near professional standard without any form of effects. Effects can consist of a number of different elements; from loud bangs to quite squeeks. Including different transitions you can include between each scene. There all additional effects, which can be found in the effects tab. 

The effects tab is really important. Not only to make your video look professional, but it also helps you with any problems. For example there might be a scene change in our promotional video, however, when we look back at this change, we think it is too much of a harsh cut. There might be a big jump in scene change. One minute you will see our character playing badminton, the next he is having an interview on what he has achieved during that lesson. Of course this will be a big scene cut. To solve this we will look into the effect tab and select a transition. This will then add a nice and calm transition between each scene, and will show a change in time in our video. With this in mind, it is important that we look deeply into using these effects in this tab. This will help our video have more fluidity throughout and give it a nice smooth finishing. Whilst this is important, me and Sam will have to be careful that we don't use this tab too much. Havin effects are good for videos, but too much will just cover our footage and our video will look more like a PowerPoint presentation rather than a promotional video! 

This is an example of a effects tab. This is some-what similar to the one you can find in Adobe Premiere. As you can see there are many different effect within this tab. Because of this, you may need to look through each one to find the ones which suite both your audience and the purpose of the video. For example, If your audience is watching a calming and relaxing video, they would not want to see big blocks dissolving the scenes.They would want to see a smooth and gentle transition. 
   

Audio Mixer Tab

Similarly to the effects tab, there is also a tab which allows you to edit the audio of your video. With this tab you are able to change the volume of the different audio tracks you have. You can make some louder than others, whilst having them playing at the same time, to give of a certain effect.
You may reconise this exemplar of an audio mixer tab? Earlier I presented a similar image of an audio mixer under "Workspace". Well this is because the audio mixer tab can be found in the wrokspace section on Adobe Premiere. 

There are different settings within this tab for audio. In the Audio Mixer, you can adjust the settings whilst listening to audio tracks and viewing video tracks.


Audio mixer playback controls
A. Go To In Point B. Go To Out Point C. Play/Stop Toggle D. Play In To Out E. Loop F. Record

 - Here you can see the playback controls on the audio mixer. These options allow you to go throught the audio to make sure you find the smallest of faults, which could have a big impact on your final video. Source: http://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/overview-audio-audio-mixer.html#audio_mixer_overview

Each Audio Mixer track matches to a track on the timeline. You can rename a track by double-clicking its name. You can also use the Audio Mixer to record audio directly into a sequence.

This tab is important for me and Sam as we have alot of footage with natural noise. There is alot of shouting and loud noises which will not be welcomed by our viewers. We want to keep the noise at a natural affect, as we want the audience to get the best possible feel for the kind of environment produced within Bluecoat Acadmey's PE department,. The problems we may face however, is that it is too much noise. To solve this we will use the audio mixer tab, which will allow us to change the volume of each individual track, and to change the pitch and the sound type of the audio.

New Project

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/switching-to-adobe-premiere-pro-cs5/setting-up-a-new-project-/

This link will take you the home of Adobe. This video shows you exactly how to set up a new project. There are different settings to sort our before you start editing, so it is important that you know exactly what settings you need for your project.

With it being my first time with this programme, I will need to watch many more videos and Sam to get a better understanding.

When starting a project here, you will get two options- 1). start a new one or 2). open an existing file. When you start a new project you will then advance onto the next screen, The "New Project Window" will appear. This is the first step of many for a great video made on Adobe Premiere. There are two tabs in this window and they are called "general" and "Scratch Disk." settings The general settings include; the display format of the video, the display format of the audio, the capture format of your video, and the name of your project. The scratch disk settings is all about when you start to include effects. This setting will allow you to see the transitions and effects as smoothly as possible.

From then on, you will start to build you video, bit-by-bit. There will be a numerous amount of settings to tweak and change before you start importing footage and audio. It is important that me and Sam discuss what settings to use before we go ahead and change anything. We may need to change things such as the "Sequence Settings" and the timeline window format.





Importing

Importing videos into Adobe Premier is one of the most simplest things you can do. It is easy and quick. To import all you need to do is to go into the media library at the bottom left hand corner and you will be able to browse through you hard drive, files and computer to import you footage.

To transport the footage into Adobe, simply drag them in to the media library window, and they will appear. Depending on the file size, depends how long they take to import. If they are taking considerable amount of time then usually there will be a loading orange bar on the opposite side of the screen which tells you it's importing still.

When doing this it is important that me and Sam are patient. If the programme is still importing, then it's probably best to let it finish. The last thing we would want is the programme crashing due to too many jobs being done at once, with unsaved work being lost. In addition to this, we may need to rename the files. For example if you have a file called "vid0001" then you will struggle to figure out what footage/scene it is. This could take more time to select the footage, which looses time for editing when you have a deadline day like me and Sam.

Editing

With a programme like Adobe Premiere, there are plenty of editing tools and techniques. Like mentioned there is the toolbox, and within this toolbox window there are some icons. If you hover over them they will tell you what each one is.

With a programme like Adobe Premiere, the most important editing tools are; the trimming tool, the 3 way tool and the ripple effect tool. The trimming tool does exactly what the name says, it trims the footage. If you have some footage which is simply too long, you are able to trim the beginning and/or the ending to suite you needs.  
The image above show an icon that is very similar to the trimming tool icon on Adobe. When you select the trimming tool in the toolbox window, you can go the ends of the footage and an icon with two red arrows will appear. They will be facing either inwards or outwards. This means you are able to trim
the footage, or you are able to re-expand the footage you have trimmed, to get it trimmed to the exact length you wish. This is an important tool as like I said, we do have long footage which will need trimming down.

When you finally have your video to the right length, you then realise that the coloring of the footage is wrong and is not to a near professional standard. Well Adobe has this covered too. To do this Adobe have included the 3-way colour corrector tool. The 3-way colour corrector, is a tool that allows you to change the coloring of the footage. 
 

 































Each circle represents different sections of the footage; shadows, midtones and highlights. With this, you canchnage the shadow colours whilst keeping the rest of the footage at the the deafult colur. In addition to this, you are able to select them all (by ticking the master box) which will allow you to move all three in the same direction at the same time.


The above shows the same image I edited using this tool. The bottom one showing the editing I have done- a blue tinted style. Of course this looks strange however, I have only made it this blue for example purposes only. Thus, you can change you own shots to suite your video. Concluding, this tool can give of a great professional look. 


Myself and Sam will need to be careful when using this tool as like you can see, too much colour change just makes it look all unnatural and strange. We will have to work out what kind of coluring will help and how much of it we need.

Another great editing tool is the 3 point editor. This tool has a similar name to the 3 way colour corrector, and so it is important not to mix the names up when researching upon these two tools. The search engine will find information on both tools as they both contain "3", so me and Sam will be sure not to click on a link, and receive information about a different tool.

In terms of what the tool does, well, once you brows into your media library on Adobe Premeiere, you can double click the video, and this will appear in the preview window at the top left hand corner. When this stage is complete, you are then able to insert the in-points and out points of the video. This is basically where you want the footage to start and where you want it to end. Once you have inserted the in and out points on the video, you can now refer back to your timeline and insert the in and out points here too.

To insert in and out points, you simply press "I" on the keyboard for the in-points and "O" for the out points. To insure you place them in the right place you simply drag the cursor across the timeline and the video length bar and hit the buttons to insert.

The next step is to insert the selected video into the timeline space provided. The most useful options provided, is to put the video into the timeline, but with the in and out points selected on the timeline, the video will fit only in between these points.

   






This example shows you where the in and out points have been positioned on the timeline. The green highlight where the time bar is placed, is were the points have been placed. This will be a similar view within the bar in the preview window where your video is first shown.

The three points that are existing here are the in and out points of the video, and the points positioned on the timeline. Technically there are four points to place.

Me and Sam may use this tool, as a promotional video has to be concise. There may be some footage we want to use, but can only have a certain amount of time. By using this tool, we are able to select the amount of time we want to show this footage in a just three stages.

It may seem complicated, but once you get a hands on experience using this tool, it will seem very easy, simple but piratical.

The final two editing techniques that stand out are the rolling and ripple effects tool. There are variations of simple trimming. These are the ripple and rolling edit tools. These tools will allow adjustments in a single action that would otherwise require multiple steps to accomplish. When you perform ripple and rolling edits with trim tools, the affected frames appear in the Programe Monitor side by side like so;

The rolling edit tool, allows you to shorten one clip and lengthen another at the same time, whilst maintaining the same length of footage overall. If for example there is mistake in some of the footage, someone was smiling in the background in a serious scene, but this was only noticed at the end of editing . You would have to go back and change it, which will result in the length of the video being changed. This will be costly in terms of time, so by using the rolling tool, this situation can be dealt with much more sufficiently.


The ripple edit tool allows you to trim a clip. Shortening a clip by ripple editing, shifts all clips after the cut. This will extend a clip shifts and the clips that follow the cut forward in time. When you’re making a ripple edit, empty space on one side of the cut is treated as a clip and shifts in time just as a clip would be.

This is very confusing at first, but with parctice before going into our project, me and Sam will learn and get around this tool.

It is important that editing techniuques are used and considered throughout any project. Most times when a video is being produced, natural footage is not enougth to make it stand out from others. However, it is not much good having creative editing techniuques and effects if the video doesn't make sense. In this case I am talking about the narrative flow of a video.

The narrative flow is basically the fluidity and structure of a video. A strong and great narrrative flow would mean that the video clearley shows a story and can be easily understood by the audience. A bad naararive flow/ no narrative flow at all would mean the video simply does not mkae any sense, and could through the audience away from the purpose of the video. For example, if there is a show with someone on screen, it would confuse the audience if the video jumps to a different shot in the same scene, but the chracter has dissapereared.

Me and Sam will certainly need to keep a narrative flow as our video will have a ot of diffferent scenes involving the same character. Our chracter Gerald, will be visitng different PE lessons. If we just keep jumping from one lesson to another, the audience will eventually get confused as to where Gerald is visting next. This will alos make our video jumpy, and harsh in terms of switching to different scenes. Thus, our video may look unprofessional.

To insurre we keep a narrative flow, we will stick to our storyboard as a guidence, we will make sure our scenes change smoothly and we will also make sure that the characters are in the right place, and will not dissapera for 5 seconds during a scene.

Once you have got most of the footage in the right place, you may start to notice that the sound effects is way too loud for the speech to be heard. Fortuntely this can be easily adjusted. You are able to change the volume of the audio at different stages, so the volume can be on full at one point of the audio, but when the speech starts to come in, you can change the sound effects to be quieter during this time.

This is very similar to the gain and fade option for the footgage. You are able to dim out the footgage at any moment. This is best used when the scene is about to end and move onto a different scene. By fading out, this will make the video run alot more smoother. This helps with the narrative flow. This can be done using the "keyframe tool", which can be found in the handy toolbox window.

I will use this tool when creating my video as our footage wil be of noisy PE Lessons. We have speech throughout our video, and whilst we would want some background noise, we don't wan't our speech to be drowned out.

Transitions

Transitions helps a video run that little smoother. If a scene change looks too clumsy or too sudden and agressive, introducing transitions will take away that look. They are quite similar tpo the transitions you can add on Microsoft PowerPoint, only some are more complex and animated.

There are many transitions that can be found in the effects window on Adobe Premeire. You can chooose from rotating 3D boxes to a simple screen spin. They vary in terms of complexity, whilst some look creative, others will look unporfessional. Sometimes it is est to go with the simple trasntions as these are more likely to be used in the porfessional industry. They can easily make the video look worse if used in the wrong place or don't match the genre or style of the video.Thus it is important that palnning is considered before choosing any random transition.

In addition to this, you are able to change the settings of the chose transtions selected. For example, there are setttings which allow you to change the length or the speed of the transition. If you have a fast-paced video/ scene, it would be best to make the transition fast, to cotinu the fast pace and fluidity. To insert a trasntion after editing, simply drag int the transition onto the footgae in the timeline.

Me and Sam ay use transitions, although we don't beleive that this will suite our documentary style if we have rotating shapes. If any, we may use the more simpler and easy-on-the-eye transitions, which don't look too over dramatic.

Titles

So now, the footgae has been inserted, the editing has been done and the transitions have been placed. You have now created a brilliant and porfessional video, surley you want credit for this? Well of course, me and Sam will also want to take credit for our video too.

A easy and simple technique is to insert titles and credits. Within the workspace, there will be an option which will allow you to insert a title, by clicking on the "new title" option. This will then open a new window, where you are able to insert your text, change the font, colour, size and much more! It is as simple as that.

Once you have creted your title, close the window, and the title will appear in your media liabary to be inserted like a piece of footage. Like footgae, you can fade in or out the title using the key frame tool. In addition to this, you are also able to change the length and speed of the title, to suite your needs.

Me and Sam may use credits, to not only to show who creted the video, but also to give thanks to the people who helped (such as people who answered our questions). I have decided that I may also include titles throughout the video. For example, if one of my scenes is Gerald (our character) tlaking about his overall experinces, I may include a title saying "Gerald's conclusion" at the start of this scene. This will aloow me to create a narrative flow and will allow my audience to keep up with the plot.

An important factor to consider, is the settings chosen for a title. The title has to fit with the video. For example if a horror movie is being created, a font whioch gives of a spooky feel will be best. A font which looks playfull will not suite this style and will look out of place. Also it is important that you are consitant with your titles. Every tile shgould have the smae fonts and colour ect. Not doing so will make every title look out of place and unporfessional, which could damage the viewing experince on a whole.

The main things to consider, is to be creative, plan as a team before going a head with a decison, be consitant with you editing, consider your narrative flow throughout editing and include fading and gaining effects to keep a nice fluent flow.

       

















       

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