Have you ever color graded your videos in Photoshop? Although Adobe’s video editing software or Final Cut X is mostly preferred by video editors, some good results can still be achieved by using Photoshop’s video editing feature. Aaron Nace of Phlearn explains these techniques in this 14-minute video.
Instead of fearing the future where AI takes over and leaves us with nothing else to do other than oiling their machines, Nigel Standford made a music video and used this "man against machine" concept. It's a DJ, who also plays guitar. The machines take over. Who's making the music? If I had to take it one step further, was the camera filming on an electronic camera rig or was it held and controlled by a DOP?
Coming this fall you’ll be able to create and collaborate faster than ever with Adobe’s latest version of Premiere Pro CC. New updates to the program will allow you to open multiple projects at the same time, collaborate with multiple editors on the same project, and work with new graphics tools in the Essential Graphics panel. Let's have a closer look.
Since I discovered movies made by Edgar Wright and movies such as Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope," Alejandro Iñárritu's "Birdman" and "The Watchtower of Turkey" by Leonardo Dalessandri, I've always been fascinated by the way the footage just seems to flow into one another, and no usual cuts are visible. It has a way of keeping the viewer's full attention and keeps them intrigued as to what might happen next. It's a great way of keeping a good pace in your production, whether it be a full feature film or a music video.
Many photographers I know have started making videos as well. It's a skill many clients and brands are looking for. Social networks have been developing the easiest way to watch a video on their platforms and if you look at the amount of time you spend browsing online, video takes a large percentage of that media you consume. If you want to start with video and don't want to make mistakes that can waste time or have you look like someone starting out, here is a video that lists the mistakes and how to prevent them so you are off to a good start.
When shooting fast-paced action or a scene with tons of movements, it can be interesting to add more drama by using speed ramping. The technique consists in having a scene that’s played at different speeds depending on what’s happening. It may not make sense for now, but if you want to make your videos more attractive or just add a new tool to your belt, be sure to watch this tutorial.
Working as a video editor can be a hectic and tedious experience. Spending some time to think about organizational tools and methods can help you out significantly when working with a lot of files, or in a large group of colleagues. Renaming files, creating proper folder structure, logging metadata, backing up files, and developing a workflow can make your life much, much easier. While some of the advice listed below is geared for Premiere Pro users, any video editor can take advantage of these tips.
For video editors and filmmakers alike, understanding the power of the cut is important for telling the most compelling, informative, and/or emotional story. In this video excerpt from MZed, professional editor Adam Epstein (known for SNL and Killing Gunther among other things) provides some thoughtful insight on six rules for cinematic editing, as referenced from award-winning film editor Walter Murch.
In many artistic disciplines and sports, people are told they should concentrate on one thing and one thing only. Being specialized seems to be the trend and what most industry leaders appear to believe in. However, there are exceptions to this. First, those industry leaders themselves that are more often than not great educators as well. But then, there are those people that truly shine in different domains such as Micayla Gatto. Watching her recent video where she rides her bike on mountains and her drawings is just an amazing experience, one you should see with your own eyes to believe it.
If you shoot photos on a professional level, there’s a chance you also shoot video. If you shoot video, there’s a chance you edit. And if you edit, there’s a good chance you have to work with audio at some point. But, it may not be something you know a lot about, especially if you are just getting started with editing video.
A great way to hone your videography skills is to get frustrated while editing video. As you may know, there are plenty of ways to get frustrated while editing. For example, let’s say you want to include a particular clip in your sequence. When you try to use the shot you realize that the videographer didn’t hold the shot for long enough, and now the clip is too short to use. Or maybe you want to use a shot that was completely ruined because a bug landed on the lens. These frustrations make you think about the shooting process. Below are a few of my favorite editor-friendly tips to consider while shooting.
The "Orange and Teal" look is immensely popular for videos of all shapes and sizes, from YouTube travel videos to Hollywood blockbusters. It not only adds depth and color contrast to a shot but also gives footage a pleasing, warm golden hour look and feel. In this video, PremiereGal demonstrates how you can easily add this color grade to your video in Adobe Premiere Pro without plugins or look up tables (LUTs).
It's all in the fine details. As you gradually learn tricks and tips as you grow as a video editor, you will or have eventually come across value and speed graphs. Now, what are value graphs? And how are they useful?
Modern wedding clients expect a lot out of the videographers they hire. No more can you simply be a person with a camera. As professional equipment gets more affordable, the quality standards that people expect have increased as well. This is especially true when you’re editing. To help you capitalize on this new reality, the folks over at Rocketstock have put together Unity Lite, a free pack of five wedding titles and sixteen bonus light leaks.
Dynamic range tends to be an important feature for any camera and something many photographers either boast or complain about. Canon cameras aren't really known for their dynamic range performance, but in this "two-minute video," Peter McKinnon explains how you can use the built in Canon picture profiles, to improve performance for video.
DaVinci Resolve is a fantastic tool and has everything most videographers need to create perfect looking videos. However, the playback can be a bit slow and thus make the whole workflow a pain. But there is a one-click solution that will make your life much better. When I found out about it, my editing process became much faster.
London-based Director Oscar Hudson recently released a mind-boggling music video for Bonobo’s “No Reason,” and it's incredible. The music video, which is an homage to Hikikomori, a growing problem in Japan of adolescents and adults who withdraw from society and become increasingly isolated, was filmed using one continuous shot and only in-camera effects and no CGI.
In a world full of copycats and sequelitis, it isn’t always easy to be inspired. But every once in a while, mixed in among the sea of sameness, you will discover a true original. I am not the only person to be fascinated by the work of Russian Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. His brief but spectacular canon of films, including the likes of “Ivan’s Childhood” (1962), “Andrei Rublev” (1966), “Solaris” (1972), “The Mirror” (1975) and “Stalker” (1979), stands among the most innovative cinematic careers in world history.
Here we have food tutorial videos inspired by Wes Anderson of "The Grand Budapest Hotel", Quentin Tarantino of "Kill Bill", Alfonso Cuarón of "Children of Men" and "Gravity", and Michael Bay who gave us "Transformers" and "Armageddon". Take yourself out of your regular industry and client mindset and envision yourself in another niche, shooting something you wouldn't normally do. How would you make a food tutorial? How can you use your influences and own unique style to make a video about something different to your usual niche?
The DJI Spark is one of the most attractive options out there for people who want to get into aerial photography and videography. However, when getting into this whole new world, it may be overwhelming to learn everything about the genre. Casey Faris created a short five minute long tutorial to help you out making your Spark’s footage look better.
Recording in 4K is the rage these days. However, most of us and most of our clients will not be using a TV or monitor capable of displaying 4K resolution, so why bother? Peter McKinnon explains how you can use the large video size creatively and gives some tips, like how 4K footage down-sampled to 1080p looks much better that shooting 1080p.
ACDSee Video Studio 2 is a software specially designed for those looking either for a simple video editing tool or a way to record their screen and create content out of it. In my recent review, I mentioned a couple of times how effortless the process is. However, I thought it only be wise to show you through an example how it works and how simple the app truly is. People just getting started in the video world or those of you looking for a way to record and edit educational content, be sure to read the full article.
When working with a ton of footage, culling them down and selecting just the part of them that you need can take quite a while. There a few methods to make it faster and easier, and one of them is called Pancake timelines. In this video, Justin Odisho explains to us how it works. If you are video editor with working tight deadlines or one looking for a way to speed things up, this tutorial is definitely made for you.
Adobe Premiere Pro’s keyboard shortcuts panel is a drastic improvement when compared with the previous version. Once just a simple list of commands and shortcuts with a keyword search function, now Premiere Pro is providing users with a detailed visual reference of commands via a keyboard “map.”
White balancing video footage is crucial to make it consistent between sequences of edits you are putting together. However, adjusting it by hand using color wheels can be quite cumbersome especially for those who don’t see colors all that well. Using DaVinci Resolve 14 beta you can, however, make this adjustment incredibly fast and easily. Let’s see how with Dave Andrade from The Post Color Blog.
When I first started in filmmaking, I didn't want anyone in the world to know how I made my first video because I knew filmmakers usually have expensive tools and expensive software. At that time I didn't have either but I made that video anyway. Today I'm going to share the details with you.
It’s always good to know several different editing techniques to add visual effects to your project, as you will never know when you'll need them. Adding visual effects to your videos can make your amateurish video look more professional, just as long as you don’t go overboard with them. One effect you may have seen before is the glitch effect, in which you purposely cause your frames to mess up to give the look of a technical issue in the film.
Many Windows users have been looking for an alternative to ScreenFlow and there might well be one available on the market. It’s called Video Studio 2 and it’s designed by ACDSee. Whether you are an online educator, a workshop teacher, or you’re simply looking for a way to record your screen and quickly edit your videos, this solution is without a doubt one you should be looking at.
Lightroom is widely used for cataloging and editing photos. But did you know that you can use it to quickly and easily edit video as well? Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe offers five quick tips on color grading and editing videos in Lightroom.
As drones and action cameras continue to permeate, well, everything, an interesting problem has become more prominent: these cameras are fundamentally different from the DSLRs and mirrorless cameras filmmakers have been using, and creating a consistent look across all that footage takes some tweaking. This helpful video will show you just how to ensure that consistency.
Transitions can be very useful in your video to move between scenes instead of just having the end and inserting the new one. There are several different transitions to use, some are very creative and some involve some great skills behind the computer. There’s a few transitions that can be done all in camera and can help you change them up.
Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve is widely known for its color grading tools. It’s what many would call an industry standard thanks to its powerful features. With the Beta 4 of Resolve 14 that was released a little while ago, the software saw its editing and audio capabilities improving quite a bit as well. However, many forget or don't know about them and stick to working with Premiere or Final Cut Pro. Discover in this video how Resolve editing and audio features work. Perhaps you’ll see they are exactly what you needed.
I watched this video this morning thinking it was going to be something weird, and surely enough, it was just weird enough to catch my attention. Day after day, we all live in this crazy world where everything eventually just becomes so common — our commutes to work, our daily routines, the things we see and so much more. Watching this video made me smile and think, "What if we saw things differently for a day?" "Perspective" is a video that, in less than two minutes, really entertains the mind. While we already know none of this is possible, this video still allows us to envision the strange, false reality it creates.
When editing videos, especially if you are vlogging, finding creative ways to make your content entertaining isn’t always easy. Quality content is king, but a solid edit goes a long way as well. Implementing new transitions on a regular basis or finding a unique one that can become your signature style could definitely help making your footage more attractive. In this 15-minute long tutorial, Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid shows us how to create a drone-like transition between two shots!
The ability to produce a simple animation is a useful but often ignored feature in Photoshop. In this tutorial, Aaron Nace of Phlearn takes you through the process of producing a basic video in Photoshop by having text fade in on an image.
After Google, Youtube is the second largest search engine, and thus having a video-portfolio of one's photography can be a great addition in so far as getting one's work seen. Any time we get to offer our work in a different format, it allows us to both see and showcase different angles which otherwise may remain hidden or less apparent. Give a client the option to watch your video or scroll through your portfolio, and they might well take you up on the video, which, in being rarer, can also be more memorable.
A huge part of shooting video is audio. No one wants to look at footage with poor sound with distracting background noise. But thanks to Steven Oakley from MiesnerMedia, if you are reading this article, poor audio will be a story of the past in your videos. Oakley gives us a handy trick to eliminate almost any background noise using only Adobe Audition and Premiere Pro.
Finding the perfect soundtrack for a video project or short film can be a laborious and painful process for budget filmmakers, yet it’s a task that requires plenty of care and attention. Music Vine claims to have filled this gap in between by providing affordable, high quality, curated music licensing. We sat down with Co-founder Lewis Foster to speak all things music licensing for video projects.
You’ve bought a brand new 4K video camera with all the bells and whistles and shot your first piece of work. You can’t wait to get home and edit the footage for your client imagining how incredible and crisp the video will be. You open Premiere Pro, import the files, and within seconds your computer takes a crap as it struggles to render the data intensive footage.
Colorists and video production folks are already familiar with LUTs (Lookup Table) and likely already use them for color grading videos. This is the next level for working with LUTs.
If you've got scattered clips of your videos hiding in disparate corners of your hard drive, it might be time to bring them together and create a demo reel to show off all your best work. This helpful tutorial will show you how to do just that.
I'm a sucker for simple videos like this and can really appreciate what goes into making them. As I strive to jump more into video, it is interesting to stay tuned and watch what other people create to help give me ideas for future work. The coolest thing to me about a video or even a photo is the mood or feel it can convey. A lot of the video work I do, I focus on sharp focus, straight lines, clean shots, accurate color, cutting to music and a few other little things. I mainly shoot real estate videos, but it is nice to have the freedom to shoot whatever I want, however I want rather than following my standard rules for shooting real estate. I have been messing around more with video and hope to come out with something to show from it soon enough!
Adobe and Panasonic are quickly gaining a reputation as the Simon and Garfunkel of the video industry. They need each other, but they just don’t get on. The latest release of Premiere Pro 2017.1.2 was announced with much fanfare of file handling for the problematic Panasonic GH5 10-bit 4:2:2 video files. Good news right? Think again.
When I first watched "Past" part one in a three part art film series, I got goosebumps. Actor and movement-specialist Anthony Nikolchev and co-choreographer Gema Galiana directed and performed in these beautiful and moving short films. The films are very evocative, and made me see a clear connection and bridge between conceptual photography and video.
Trends come and go; some become mainstays, some become clichés. Video is certainly no stranger to trendy effects that become overused or outstay their welcome. Here are five such effects to consider before you drop them in your next video.
I recently wrote about how photographers should be seriously looking at the medium of video as a skill that should be in their repertoire. Hopefully, some of you were inspired enough to start capturing your own moving images and now you're ready to edit the footage. VSDC Free Video Editor could be just the piece of software you've been looking for.
You can have the most visually stunning videos, but if you sound like you're talking to your audience from two rooms over, they won't be engaged by your work. Here's how to get better-sounding speech in Premiere Pro.
If you're a Hitchcock fan, you're no doubt aware of the dolly zoom, also known as the "Vertigo effect." It's dazzlingly disorienting, but it also requires a zoom lens and the physical ability to move the lens in space, things that aren't always simultaneously possible, such as if you're shooting with a drone. Here's how to fake the effect in Premiere Pro.
So many photographers have recently been dipping their toes in the world of video. You can edit photos like a pro, but maybe you just can't seem to figure out video editing; it's very complex – like an onion, so many layers – and now you have to deal with sound design! If you've used presets for your photo editing, then you should definitely consider plugins for your video editing. Red Giant sent us a copy of their recently updated Universe 2.1. Jump on in and see what it's all about.
Ah, the 90s, when if you wanted to jump a bus across a freeway in your movie, you didn't use CGI; you jumped an actual bus. Go behind the scenes of one the most famous stunts in action movie history and learn why we it keeps us on the edge of our seats despite its absurdity.
