Correcting Edits

I hate video taking, and the reason for that is simple: I look terrible in front of a camera.

What goes on after that, however, is something I find very fun and probably the most interesting bit of any videomaking process.

Adobe Premiere is my preferred video editing program. Not only does is it incredibly powerful, it has similar functionality to Sony Vegas but is fully compatible with Adobe’s file systems.

I learnt the different panels and layouts on the main Editing workspace, which is the most powerful and least restrictive out of all the various template workspaces Adobe packages into the software. It is, as shown, obvious and logically separated, making for easy use after a bit of testing and trying.

One of the major new things I learn was colour correction. White balance changes from shot to shot, and this happens with all cameras, whether it’s photography or video taking. The colourful shapes is an RGB parade — a graphical illustration of colours in the rough placement of the frame. I learnt about how to understand RGB parables from a pretty interesting tutorial guide I found off, yes, Google. The tutorial is for a completely different program, but I found that RGB parades are pretty much universal.

I failed to notice that Premiere came with workspace presets until a pretty late period in the editing process, but still used it for colour correction anyway.

This layout has the same components as the default, just that a couple of things have been moved around. The effects panel has been expanded for easier access, and a new monitor, the Reference monitor, has been added in the bottom right corner. I discovered after some fiddling that the Reference monitor works exactly like the Program Monitor except that it’s not live-viewing, and it properly provides a reference to look at when editing the clip. When the video is paused and changes are made, the changes are reflected in the Reference and Program Monitors, meaning I can see both the final image and the scopes at the same time.

An unnoticed problem solved. Win-win.

 

Related articles

• Alex: Linear and Non-Linear Video Editing Systems (rememberdesign.wordpress.com)
• Colour Correcting Warriors (timothy3dsfx.wordpress.com)
• 10 quick hits to make your videos better right now (adamwestbrook.wordpress.com)