Lessons

Lesson Info

Finishing: Prepping for Output

In this lesson, we're gonna do something called finishing or prepping for output. Now, this can be really complex or really useful. You like how I defined that? Useful or complex? As I've indicated throughout the course so far, Premiere Pro can cut everything from your sizzle reels and your promo reels all the way up through feature films and commercials and whatnot. So, if you're finishing or prepping for output for a feature film, you're gonna do a lot more stuff. There's a lot more things to do to make sure everything's perfect. But the reality is, most of us just want to get our shows ready so we can export them to put on the web or to show people or to deliver to clients. And mostly what we're gonna cover is making sure you don't have those gotchas that you send to show out that has mistakes in it. So, we're gonna look at prepping for that. Not a big, frame by frame look. As a matter of fact, we are gonna do frame by frame. Let's take a look at some of the things that we're going ...

to explore. And I definitely want you all to, again, as you've been doing interact and ask me the questions. Because, once again, sometimes I forget what people need to know because this is all new to you. So, we're gonna look at checking for gaps and flash frames. And I'll explain what those are in context. If you have marker notes ... And we're gonna make some marker notes just so you can see, especially if folks haven't really missed some of the marker discussions earlier. Quality control, QC-ing, for filters and transitions. Things that you would do, matching color, matching audio volume, balancing audio. And then I'll explain what taking a break is all about. So, we're looking at some of the footage that we actually used back in lesson two of the art print event. And I did wanna keep a relatively simple timeline because I wanna focus more on the message as opposed to complicating it with too much media. So, let me go ahead and make this so we can see this full frame. And one of the first things I talked about was something called gaps and flash frames but when you're preparing, or finishing preparing to export, you're looking for anything that's an uh-oh or a gotcha. It's a challenge. And I'm going to end with this, which was called taking a break, but I'm also gonna start with that is that a lot of times we're racing to the bar as the expression goes. We're running against the clock. We're tired. We have to deliver. And that's really when the mistakes happen. You know, for a lot of you who are photographers, you're working with an image. You've been working on it awhile, the odds are that if you forget something it's gonna be something in the image, a part of the image, maybe a spot you didn't remove or whatnot. The video you're dealing with 24, 30 of those every second and you wanna make sure that you don't have an apparent problem. So, I always try to recommend, and we always can't do this is, when you think you're done step away and catch your breath. Because you're gonna miss things. You're eyes are gonna be tired. You're gonna assume things. You're gonna say, "Okay, I'm done." And this is what you don't wanna do. You work, work, work, work, work. You get to the very last frame, you do your fade out, you say, "Great, I'm done," and you immediately export it out without ever watching it again. You're gonna wanna watch it several times between the time you think you're finished and the moment that you that you export it. And then you'll watch it again when your friend calls you and says, "Hey, did you notice that your thumb is in front of the lens?" No, well, bigger than that. So, what you should do is you should catch your breath, and then watch the show from beginning to end to see if anything big jumps out at you. And make notes. And make notes about what things need to be fixed. Now, there's a couple of ways that you should and could do this. I'm gonna reset this to the default editing layout cause we've moved it around over the lesson. So, Revert to Saved Layout just so it all looks familiar. I usually watch it a couple of ways. Sometimes I watch it when I can actually see the sequence or the timeline so I can see what's happening above and below. As a matter of fact, a lot of times when I'm editing I never even look here cause this is my guide. So, I watch it that way. And other times, I bring it full screen. Now, to bring it full screen you can hit the tilde key, and it brings it full screen with your edit controls. As a matter of fact, you can even see the markers that I used in the last class to cut the music too. And you can watch it this way. I'm gonna hit Play. And I can still put markers in. Everybody talks about print your work. While I'm going but this time I'm watching it I really wanna just focus on the story. I don't even wanna be distracted by my interface. So, if you hit Control tilde, you'll notice that it's full screen a little bit different. Now, it's full screen without any of the Premiere interface. You can really focus on your story full screen. If you're reviewing it with a client, if somebody else is in the room and you don't want them to "What are those numbers? What are those numbers?" You just use the keyboard shortcut, Control tilde, Control Graph, and it's full screen. And now you can really focus you energies on watching it like your viewer will watch it. And listening to it like your audience will hear it. And it goes back to what I talked about in the audio section, that you should try to listen to it in an environment or on speakers that are similar to what your audience is gonna be listening to. So, in my studio, and a studio could be me in a hotel room with this ... You don't need really big, great speakers if you know people are gonna watch it on a computer. As a matter-of-fact, in my quote studio I have multiple speakers and sometimes I play it out through the big ones cause it might be something I know is gonna play in an auditorium. And other times, I just have a cheap pair of speakers, $30 speakers that I have plugged in because it sounds different on those smaller speakers. And I just wanna make sure that at this point is the music appropriate at the right level? Can I really hear the voiceover, whether it's a narrator or whether it's somebody on camera? It let's me experience it as my viewer. And I'll even put on headphones. And I'll tell you, headphones are a very different experience than speakers and you need to take this into account because I know some folks that edit with headphones only and their hearing, and they might be expensive headphones, and they're hearing detail and nuance that you would never, never hear when you're listening to it either with earbuds or just through your phone or whatnot. So, it's important to know that because you could end up doing a lot more work or you could think things are perfect and then the frequency response of a phone is very different. So, that's part of what you're doing in your last viewing before you export it. And it's a humorous story ... See, if I preface it, it better be humorous otherwise it's like, "Well, that was crash and burn." So, all the mistakes I'm talking about I can speak of them because I've done them. I make mistake all the time. So, I'm editing a show, and it was a big lecture event with an audience and we recorded it. And I'm doing my final review. And there's this hum, the bass. It's just like, (hums) and I'm going, "I don't get where this happened." It wasn't in the original recording. You know, sometimes you do get a hum in a room. And just as an FYI, if you are getting hum from a microphone, it's probably because if you have a cable it might be running over a power line. You know, if you run a power line next to your audio cable, this is an nice production technique, you'll pick up 60 hertz or 50 hertz hum depending on where you are, and that's a problem. Or sometimes if you plug into a PA system, you know, you got a wedding or something, "Oh, I need a good sound. I'll plug into the board." Sometimes if the board isn't grounded, you'll get a hum. And you need to fix that. And that's what I thought it was. And I couldn't figure it out cause the whole edit process... I mean, I had been working on this for days. And I'm ready to go and it's like, I don't know where this came from and I'm searching and I'm looking at the files. And literally, I was in tears, like, take a break, right? And I put it on the headphones, I didn't hear it. I played it in the room, I heard it. Well, this was 15 years ago. Or actually, a little longer. And I had a speaker set up with a subwoofer. And my son was probably three at the time and had crawled underneath the desk, and turned the volume up on the subwoofer. So, I was amplifying something that a human should not be able to hear. So, the problem wasn't there, and I was trying to fix an imaginary problem and it just wouldn't go away. So, the moral to the story or the point of the story is make sure that you're environment is tuned right and that you're not trying to fix something that's not there. And that goes back to, ah, if I just listen to it on the right speakers it would have sounded right and I wouldn't have banged my head against the wall. So, keep that in context when you're doing this final step, this finishing step. So, that's an important thing. That's one of the things that you should do is just kind of watch the show and make notes on paper. But you can also make notes using the idea of markers. We've introduced markers in a couple of lessons I'm gonna bring them about here but the technique I'm teaching you you can actually use earlier on in the process to make notes. We talked about making notes for yourself but I wanna show you how you can leverage those notes. The first thing I wanna do is I do have a lot of markers already here that could confuse me because these were the beat markers way back when we actually cut to music. So, if you have markers at this stage and you wanna get rid of them, you can go to the Marker dropdown and there's simply and option to Clear All Markers. And that will clear all the markers in my sequence. Now, you'll notice, I might still have some markers here in a clip. You actually have to select a clip to clear those markers. I'm not worrying about that because I'm putting notes on my show. So, I'm gonna go through and maybe this second time watching it, I'll watch it and as I'm watching it I might say, "Oh, I need to fix something." Like I'll see this scene, I'll say, "I like the shot but it's too dark. I wanna look at the color correction again." So, as long as the clip isn't selected I can simply hit M and M, it opens up the Marker panel. And I can write myself a note that says, "Check for color." In this case, probably, it's luminates. Okay? That's the big thing. This could be more detailed notes, if I wanted to. This won't necessarily pop up. And a marker will usually be a single dot. And a single dot will work in the example I'm showing you or a single point. But sometimes I wanna give it a duration just so it's more visible when I'm skimming through it. So, I may say make this three seconds long, three, zero, zero. And there it appears that I have this, I'm watching the show, and I have this note. And I put it kind of in the wrong place. The nice thing about markers is I can grab it and move it a little bit. So, that's one that has duration. And by the way, if it overlaps another clip I really don't care. But if I'm a little ... Some people try to be a little more retentive than others, and you can change the duration if you want it specifically over a clip. I'm also gonna do this with just a single marker because it's very useful. So, I'm gonna go over here, and I'm gonna make a note. To check to make sure that this is scaled right. Again, hit the M key. I'm not gonna give it a duration. I'm gonna say check scale. So, I make these notes either while editing or while I'm doing that review process for finishing. And I can either see them here but there's a great little feature if we go back over to our project pane, there's a tab called markers. And guess what? When I click on that, as long as I have my sequence selected, I should see my markers. But I don't see my markers. Mysterious. Definitely. I may just stand back. If you don't make mistakes, you don't learn anything. I'm gonna go step out of this, step back into this. Oh, you know what? No, do I not have ... There we go. I have a clip selected or a dead space. See? So, if you don't see your markers, you're just like me, you probably have something selected. With nothing selected, I actually see the markers here. And if I wrote notes in it, I would actually see those notes. So, for instance, let me go back here, open that up and say, "You would see notes." And one note would be how to properly spell the word see. And notes. Obviously, my steno career failed which is why I had to become an editor. Okay. And you can see that right here. So, as you go through, you can make lots of notes to yourself. And this is great from the editing process. I wanna look at this shot. Is this sound bite? Maybe find an alternative sound bite. You can use markers to your advantage throughout the entire editing process. And the nice thing is, as you're doing that last review, if you've missed something, the notes are there. Now, the great thing is I don't necessarily ... If I have a big show, this is only 40 seconds, these can be pretty small. And I need to see them all. If I got to this marker panel, and I click on the marker on the icon it will jump me to that location. So, I can look at this list and I can very quickly step through and see all my notes. You can also export this marker information if you wanted paper notes. You can say Export, Markers. And that would export your notes. Maybe you need to hand it off to somebody or maybe somebody else is watching it and putting notes in and you wanna paper copy. But it's a very useful tool. A lot of times folks who are new to Premiere or self-taught don't use markers because they're not exposed to it. But this I find is very valuable. And you have the choice of once you've made the change, you can go ahead and delete them. Markers can also be color-coded. So, once you make the change, you can go ahead and change the color of the marker so you still have the notes that's there. And this is all very useful stuff. As a matter of fact, you can see now that this is red and the other one is green. So, markers are great. I use them all the time.