We’ll be looking at Motion graphics next week, and it’s what the first assignment is about – so let’s keep this motion graphics explainer in mind, while we explore video editing.
EDITING A VIDEO
- 3 Videos (phone recorded is fine) – 1 featuring onscreen movement, 1 featuring high contrast, and 1 featuring a range of colours. Minimum length 10 second each.
- 3 x Photos (including one of a black and white illustration)
TASK FOR WEEK TWO:
Using the above clips and photos, EDIT A 1 MINUTE VIDEO, including:
– sections with several layers are composited together using rescaling and positioning
– sections with video and photo layers are composited together using blending modes
– separate edits that demonstrate relationships between movement, framing, colour, light and concept.
Because of time constraints, we will focus on the minimum needed to complete your video:
– Storyboarding and planning
– Logging and capturing your footage
– How to import video and set-up projects
( What is a video file? What settings do you need to know?)
– Understanding the Premiere interface
– Basic editing with the razor tool, and moving clips on the timeline. (For more advanced editing tool tips, see Lynda.com )
– How to resize video or images.
– Using multiple layers, and blend modes.
– How to adjust, edit or overlap audio and video separately.
– How to apply transitions between layers
– How to adjust keyframes in Premiere, for fade-outs etc.
– Basic Colour grading in Premiere.
– How to apply effects in Premiere.
– How to create titles in Premiere.
– Exporting.
What is Editing?
Alfred Hitchcock’s 7 minute editing master class
The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing (Abridged Version) Part 1
Vimeo Video School – features a well organised collection of video-making categories – including editing, lighting, shooting, software and sound.
Vimeo’s guide to Editing ( Capture / organising clips / backup / editing software overview / trimming / transitions / adding text or sound / exporting and compression guidelines ).
Vimeo: Storyboarding basics / Making A Shot List / Varying Your Shot Composition / Shooting Basics /Setting Your Editing Pace / Compression basics
Guide to Open Source Video Editing (an introduction to the key ideas, using free software. These techniques and ideas are easily transferable to other software.)
From ‘In the Blink of an Eye’ by Walter Murch ( editor of Godfather, Apocalypse Now etc ):
“An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once:
1) it is true to the emotion of the moment
2) it advances the story
3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and “right”
4) it acknowledges what you might call “eye-trace”-the concern with the location and move- ment of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame
5) it respects “planarity”-the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the questions of stage-line, etc.)
6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another).
- 1) Emotion 51%
- 2) Story 23%
- 3) Rhythm 10%
- 4) Eye-trace 7%
- 5) Two-dimensional plane of screen 5%
- 6) Three-dimensional space of action 4%
Emotion, at the top of the list, is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. “
“>From ‘Cinematography, Theory and Practice: Imagemaking for Cinematographers and Directors’ by Blain Brown
Six types of cuts:
- The content cut
- The action cut
- The POV cut
- The match cut
- The conceptual cut
- The zero cut
Exploring the Premiere interface
Getting started with Keyboard shortcuts in Premiere Pro
another list of Premiere keyboard shortcuts
Adobe’s comprehensive list of Keyboard shortcuts for Premiere CS6
Example clip for editing.
Download from:
http://archive.org/details/OurPeopleAtPlay
( right click on the h.264 link in the left column, to download )
We will use this to edit a 30 second video clip, using music of our own choice.
What are the parameters of this clip we need to be aware of?
(eg 640×480 pixel dimensions / frame size )
Breaking down the technical aspects of video.
A good understanding of technical video parameters will help understand the delivery format needs of a client or project, and help debug any problems with software or hardware while exporting / rendering / delivering.
From The Programmer’s Guide To Video Systems :
“We programmers also like to think of video exclusively as data in our computer memory or hard disks.
We often try to ignore the fact that video is also transmitted as an electrical (analog or digital) signal over wires, and stored on (gasp) videotape.
It turns out that if we take a moment to understand the bigger picture of video —how it is transmitted electrically, how it is displayed by TVs and monitors, and how video geeks think of it—then suddenly it becomes tremendously easier to understand where these videosyncracies come from, and to predict and handle them correctly in our video software.”
What is Video?
Video can refer to many different formats – from clips played inside web browsers to tape based recording on video cameras, from movies at the cinema to clips and recordings on smartphones. That it can account for so many different types of display and recording and across analog and digital / electrical / tape and disk based formats, helps explain why there are so many ‘videosyncracies’.
Breaking down the technical aspects of video.
>A good understanding of technical video parameters will help understand the delivery format needs of a client or project, and help debug any problems with software or hardware while exporting / rendering / delivering.
Technical Parameters to consider:
- Frame size: This is the pixel dimension of the frame
- The Aspect Ratio: This is the ratio of width to height
- Frame rate: This is the speed at which the frames are captured and intended for playback.
- Bitrate: The bitrate or data rate is the amount of data used to describe the audio or video portion of the file. It is typically measured in per second units and can be in kilobytes, megabytes or gigabytes per second. In general, the higher the bitrate, the better the quality.
- The audio sample rate: This is how often the audio is sampled when converted from an analog source to a digital file.
2. What Is A Codec? What is a Container?
Co-mpression + Dec-ompression.
1 minute of uncompressed wav audio file = 10 MB
1 minute of mp3 ( @ 320kbps) compressed audio = 2.2MB
1 minute of uncompressed 1080p (1920×1080), 10-bit HD video = 10.86GB
1 minute of Pro Res 1080P HD PAL video = 1.34GB
1 minute of PhotoJPEG 1080P = 1.6GB
1 minute of 1080P H.264 video = 617.22 MB
1 minute of 1080P H.264 video (from Canon 7D, more heavily compressed) = 375MB
1 minute of 720P (1280×720) H.264 video = 369 MB
1 minute of 720×576 PAL H.264 video = 217.56 MB
(From the Video Space Calculator, which gives an indication of the amount of space a given video format will take up.)
How to choose the right codec for the job?
Compression basics ( from vimeo )
Explanation of what a container is within video formats. ( containers – contain codecs… you need to know the difference between them, when clients specify video formats. )
3. Software for Formatting Video
Premiere / Final Cut
Compressor
Quicktime ( version 7, located in utilities folder of OS X )
MPEG Streamclip ( mac/PC ) ( free)
Handbrake ( mac / PC ) ( free)
FROM Cinematography Theory And Practice – Blain Brown, Focal Press. 2012
THE FRAME
“Setting the frame is a series of choices that decide what the viewer will see and not see. The first of these decisions is where to place the camera in relation to the scene. After that, there are choices concern- ing the field of vision and movement, all of which work together to influence how the audience will perceive the shot: both in outright content and in emotional undercurrent and subtext to the action and the dialog.”
MORE THAN JUST A PICTURE
“Let’s think of the frame as more than just a picture — it is informa- tion. Clearly some parts of the information are more important than others, and we want this information to be perceived by the viewer in a certain order — we want the information organized in a particu- lar way. Composition (and lighting, which can be part of composi- tion) is how this is accomplished. Through composition we are tell- ing the audience where to look, what to look at and in what order to look at it. The frame is fundamentally two-dimensional design. 2-D design is about guiding the eye and directing the attention of the viewer in an organized manner that conveys the meaning that you wish to impart. It is how we impose a point of view on the material that may be different from how others see it.”
Visual Design Principles
Certain basic principles pertain to all types of visual design, whether in film, photography, painting, or drawing. These principles work interactively in various combinations to add depth, movement, and visual force to the elements of the frame.
Unity • Balance • Visual tension • Rhythm • Proportion • Contrast • Texture • Directionality
“The End of Cinema and the Future of Cinema Studies” conference, 4/12/2013
“From Kino-Eye* to Kino-Brush”
“In retrospect, we can see that twentieth century cinema’s regime of visual realism, the result of automatically recording visual reality, was only an exception, an isolated accident in the history of visual representation which has always involved, and now again involves the manual construction of images. Cinema becomes a particular branch of painting — painting in time. No longer a kino-eye, but a kino-brush.” – Lev Manovich, from the essay, WHAT IS DIGITAL CINEMA?
((*”It was Dziga Vertov who coined the term “kino-eye” in the 1920s to describe the cinematic apparatus’s ability “to record and organize the individual characteristics of life’s phenomena into a whole, an essence, a conclusion.” For Vertov, it was the presentation of film “facts,” based as they were on materialist evidence, that defined the very nature of the cinema.”
– Manovich. ))