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Understanding Editing: Overview

I'm really, you know, thank you for coming. I like interaction, so do not hesitate to raise your hand, do not hesitate to type in, or chat in a question. Because I've always found that a person will quietly raise their hand then go, I have a question, I really don't think it's that good, they'll ask the question then half the people in the room are going, yeah, I was curious about that too. So we can learn from each other, I can learn from you guys, a lot of times people ask me a question that I've never been asked before. Usually I prefer it to be about Premiere. But it makes me think and I actually learn new ways to do things. So I'm really want that interaction over the next 20 classes and I'm looking forward to it. And what I want to get is a sense of where your background is, both the folks here, and the folks watching live. You know, are you photographers, are you a hobbyist, are you an editor trying to come from something new? Let me hear from anybody in the audience, but please...

, I'm curious what your backgrounds and what's your, we're gonna kinda talk a little bit. Get a sense of what we need to cover. Hi, I'm Leigh Olson, I'm a food photographer, and my husband and I run a company that focuses on cookbook photography, and one of the things that we would really like to do is incorporate video, so that we can help the authors create sizzles. And, yeah, so I'm very excited to be here. The biggest fear, is making sure that these videos look very professional and are put together well. That's great, and I'm glad you brought that up. Because that's part of the class, it's not just the cut, as I said, it's the aesthetics, like how long should a shot last, when you should make the cut, at what point is your viewer getting boring, bored, I should say. Your viewer may be boring, who knows that? We never get to meet the viewer. I'm a little bit random. I'll make some random movie references throughout the thing, hopefully that will be entertaining, or annoying, depending on if you like that or not. But yes, a lot of people are really afraid of video, especially if you come from a still photography background. You're so focused on what you know, and then all of a sudden you have to move. You have to move the camera or you have to move people within the camera. And you're not used to that, you're used to that one instant in time telling the story, as opposed to telling that story at 30 frames a second over many minutes, perhaps, or even an hour. So it's frightening. And then working with the camera, you know, again, you have to deal with lights that might be different, you're not working with strobes, you're working with constant lights, you're working in an environment where you need sound. So I know how intimidating that is. And I'm really glad that we have a group here, a diverse group, that is going to be able to ask me the questions, because I sometimes forget, you know, how basic it is, 'cause I've been doin' this for 30 years. And as I said, I may use some term and you guys are like, please raise your hand, please type in, it's like, what is he talking about? And that's my goal really for today, is just to get your heads really wrapped around video. And talk about some of those strange things that you heard, it's like, 24 frames a second, 30 frames a second, 1080P, 720P, it's like it's another language. That they only talk at electronic stores and video places. So that's great, yes! We'll have people tuning in from around the world, and they're also sharing why they're here, or what they want to learn, what they're afraid of. So Indigo was talking about multi-camera editing, as well as audio sweetening. We have Jay who's talking about, and Patty, who both wanna learn about work flow, as well as getting more efficient, working better and faster. We have Patty, is a family photographer. And different sorts of people at different levels, so we're glad you are all here. Well, that's great, thanks for typing in where you come from. These are great things, multi-camera is something that I think is really valuable. A lot of folks are like, well I'm not gonna do it, I have my camera, I'm gonna go to an event. But you don't realize how many cameras you probably have that can shoot video. I've done multi-camera editing where I've shot some of it with an iPhone, and an iPad, and a pocket camera, you know, a little point and shoot, as well as a high end DSL-R, and merged those altogether as a multi-camera shoot that's very efficient. And we're gonna look at that. We're gonna actually spend an entire lesson looking at how you can do that. And it's great if you have something that records video, you can do multiple camera shoots. And the beautiful thing with the technology now, it's much much easier to do, to sync those images together, to sync those videos together, and have the versatility, to tell a much better story then just a single static shot. So I'm very excited about that, and the work flow we are going to go through very basic stuff, I don't wanna say basic in a negative way, that oh my god we're gonna be bored. But it's overwhelming, so literally from the beginning, we're gonna take you step by step, so it's not overwhelming. A lot of folks when they first open Premiere, they open it up, they shriek, and then they close it, and then they run away, hoping to come back and have it be a lot safer the next time. It looks exactly the same. So you're not gonna have that fear. If you have a photography background, and you're used to using Photoshop, a lot of that knowledge will translate the way you work with things such as layers and the way you work with effects and filters. You're just doing that at 30 frames a second. And we'll explore that. So any other comments or questions as we go through from the audience? Well, don't hesitate to ask questions. Okay, so somethings I like to find out from folks, is what kinda gear they're shooting with, and a lot of people are, again, they're shy about this. They're like, well I'm just shooting with a Canon 6D, or oh, I'm just shooting with, you know, this pocket cyber shot. And it's like, I don't care what you're shooting with, you're creating something, and this software can handle it. The technology is so amazing these days, that even your phone can shoot ultra high definition video. And the camera's we have that can shoot video at 1080P, a jargon that we're gonna talk about today, full high definition, beautiful stuff that, you know, a 15-20 thousand dollar camera five years ago, would be hard to compete with something that you pay a few hundred dollars for now. So we have beautiful stuff to work with, and it's important that you don't worry that you're gear's not good enough, okay? It goes back to, you know, I'm gonna throw this example out for the photographers out there, people come up to you and they go, that's an amazing picture, what camera do you have? (laughing) And I go back to them, I said, that's an amazing meal, tell me about your oven. (laughing) It's the guy behind the camera. It's the person, the girl behind, the woman behind the camera, you know, how you can create. And that's why it's important to understand that, and as we talk about things like ingesting, importing the media, depending on how you shoot it, what type of camera, you might have different challenges. The media may look different, and we're gonna actually spend some time looking at the variety of things that you might see on your CF card or your SD card, or even on your phone, as you try to transfer that on to your hard drive so you can add it with it. I'm curious, what types of videos, now we have the complimentary cooking video, and that's very popular. In my house food moves pretty quick, so you know, we need to shoot at a high frame rate. But, I'm curious what other folks are interested in doing, if anybody wants to grab the mic, or if we have anybody calling in. I shoot with an XA 25, Canon XZ 25 video camera, I picked that up because my wife is a professional photographer, and in my position in our business I've been the one who runs the business, and I've been focusing on that, but now I wanna focus on something that appeals to me, which is the art of videography. And documenting what my wife is doing as a photographer. So my particular bent in this class is to learn video editing from a documentary standpoint. Excellent! And I think that that is a very, it's a great need now. Because a lot of times we're shooting so much stuff and then we have to figure out what's the story we're going to tell? And you know, it's like starting with a blank page. A writer's biggest fear is that blank page that they're looking at every day. And I know some of you have a writing background. I have a writing background, it was always scary. A video editors biggest fear, if they're cutting a documentary, is the blank page. What is the story I'm going to tell? And I have hundreds of hours of footage. That's the challenge we have now. We have so much media because it's so easy to capture. You're not limited to like, oh I can only fit it onto one VHS tape. (laughing) VHS that's a history thing. But, we do have a lot of media. And we're gonna look at that, we're gonna look at the work flow, because I think it's very important to think about your editing from when you start production. And a lot of the folks I know who are watching and are here, you are the videographer, you're the director, and the editor. So the work really starts when you're taking your shots, and we're gonna look at that all the way through organizing it and cutting it together. And some folks at home, we've got Margie, who is a children's choir director. Wants to tell the story of rehearsal, concerts, fun times, and makes music videos, and music art. And Sue T. Wants to tell more client stories. And then I also saw promo videos, and making marketing videos for clients. So, across the board. Yeah, there's so much you can do with this, and you know, a lot of people are scared when they launch Premiere because it is such a deep program. They're making feature films in Premiere, you know? So it has that power. But you don't need to be afraid of it, you don't need to use every button and every filter in there. You can do very basic stuff, and by basic I don't mean boring, I mean it's simple to execute, and it can still look good. And the great thing about some of the examples that you brought up, is they're really interesting stories. I mean, being able to like record the choir, and maybe interview people, so now you have music that you're gonna be mixing together, and you're gonna be doing interviews, and then you're behind the scenes, and create the stories. And a matter of fact, one of the things that we'll be working with, it's not with a choir, because during the interview, both myself and Mike Hagen tried to sing, and then the hooks came in. So we decided we would just talk, so we're gonna look at cutting an interview, because that's one of the base of things, whether you're maybe you're at a wedding, and maybe you need to interview people at the wedding, or you're doing a corporate piece and you have to interview the CEO, and then you need to cut it together, we're gonna look at how you would cut together an interview and as I said earlier, not just the mechanics of it but aesthetically, what you might wanna take out. Where you might wanna make a cut. How you can hide an edit with B roll. Another jargon term, which is basically the cut aways. It's the B camera from the old film days. So we'll be working with an interview, and some music underneath, and we'll be cutting some pictures. So we'll cover a variety of things, and I think it's going to address what a lot of the folks out there are looking to create, whether it's a sizzle real, or whether it's a documentary. There's maybe one more. Hello, I'd like to create videos that tell travel stories. I have a travel story telling website, and historically I've been using photos and text to tell those stories, and I'd like to add video, because I think it adds whole different dimension to those stories. So that's my goal, that's why I'm here. That's awesome, I mean I would say, that I love travel too. But I think we all love travel. And especially anybody who's a photographer or videographer, it's like you wanna be able to capture that excitement. And I think that's the track is like, oh it's an event, it's a place, how can I capture the flavor, there we have a food reference. How can I capture the flavor of that travel footage? How do I shoot it? How do I bring it together? What's good, what's not good? What will be boring? I mean, this is the other thing, is that the challenge with editing a show is, you love everything, and you make this two hour travel log, and people like, wouldn't five minutes have been great? It's like, you know, you see those classic stories of, come, I took my trip, I have 4,000 slides, we're gonna, you know, and you're sitting there going. (snoring) Now you just show people your phone, and you go click, click, click, click, look! I have 4,000 pictures on my phone! (laughing) Well, that's great. We're gonna cover that variety of stuff. Biggest fear, and we're gonna actually expand on this, because one of the biggest fears that people have is just understanding the world of video. And that's one of the things I want to explore today. Is just even some of the video basics. Not even Premiere, but global video basics, that folks are afraid of or don't understand, or need clarification on. Let's actually switch over it, and look at Premiere a little bit, I wanna show you a couple of the kind of things that we're gonna learn to cut. I'll play that back off of my laptop, I actually put it together in Premiere, so it works. So it works with the class so you see you can cut in Premiere, hopefully the computer works and I work. But, after we look at that, we'll start a dialogue. And I wanna hear your questions about, okay, I hear this term, 1080P, 720P, 24 frames a second. What is this all mean, because if you've never done anything with photos or video, this is all new, and if you just have come from a photography background, it's very frightening. I've worked with a lot of photographers and it doesn't need to be, it's just something that's new. So let's go ahead and take a look at some elements here. We'll switch over to my laptop. So this is the Premiere Pro interface, it's the first time we're seeing it. We're gonna see it a lot over the next 20 lessons. I wanted to show you this just to kind of give you an idea. Not scary to me, 'cause I know what I'm looking at. Maybe a little bit scary to you, we'll actually explore in detail. Tomorrow we'll actually definitely go over the interface. And over the next 18 lessons after that, you'll know everything. But just to give you an idea what we're looking at, you know, this is a timeline, this is your show from beginning to end, left to right, in a graphical view. And over here in this right window, this upper window, that's your final show, what the viewer sees. For those folks who have worked in Photoshop, you see we have layers, we call them tracks. And you stack things on top of each other maybe instead of seeing the interview, you see B roll, or you see a title above it. So that's just an idea of what we're looking at, I'll probably bring this full screen, so you can see the imagery. So the first thing I wanna show is just an example of what you can do with some still images, putting some motion to 'em. And again, I've tried to keep this short, because short is always more interesting. So I would hit play and hit the space bar, but let me make this full screen. And one of the things we'll be working on, animating still pictures, animating photography. And the beautiful thing about this, is that photos of such high resolution, you can zoom and pan and you still have all that detail, all that resolution. So this is really nice stuff. You can really show off your work. There's a lot of photographers out there, it's like, I just want people to look at my stuff, but I wanna bring it to life, and you see you can animate that fairly easily. So that's one of the things that we'll be covering. We'll be covering working with stills, it's very popular. And not just flying through them, maybe flying things around. I like flying things, it's very Harry Potter of me. Time lapse, time lapse that's like the number one thing where people go, are you gonna see time lapse, are you gonna see time lapse? And I'm like, yes I love time lapse. I eat up all this hard drive space using thousands of images that look almost the same. So, we'll be looking at time lapses and titles and there's some night stuff. This was actually during the Pleiades meteor shower. So occasionally you can see one zip by this way, the stars are that way. But one thing I love about both photography and video, and when you're dealing with speed changes, is that it allows us to look at the world in a whole different way, which is a great thing when you're telling a story. You're saying, I'm telling a story, but why am I telling this story? Because I want people to look at what I'm showing them in a new light. Whether it's looking at the way food is being prepared, or whether it's going to another country and saying, oh, I'm doing street photography, and I'm showing a different side of this location. You know, the big place everybody wants to go now is Cuba. I was talking about that with a special person this morning. She laughs in the corner, but Kenna travels to Cuba a lot, and that's like a photographer and a videographers dream, because you wanna capture something that's probably gonna be disappearing in a couple years. But I do love the fact that, did I, I probably left this playing, and probably went off. But I do love the fact that video as well as photography allow you to look at things sped up or time lapsed, which is why I love time lapse. Freezing motion, but still keeping it fluid, we'll look at speed changes so that, you know, you may have a dancer and as they reach the apex of their leap, maybe you wanna slow it down. It's a whole different way of looking at it, then just either playing it at normal speed or grabbing a photograph. Because you can see and feel the motion. So those are a couple of the things that we'll be working with. We're gonna work with interviews, I talked about. This is Mike Hagen, Mike has done many classes at Creative Live. He's known for his panorama shooting, he's known for his do-it-yourself course. He also does travel photography with people. And so we sat down to an interview, and this is gonna be a nice example of working with multiple cameras, cutting away to some both still photo B roll, as well as some video that he shot and golip-- See, some words I can't say, and that's why I need people in the audience to say that. Everybody, really loud. [Audience In Unison] Galapagos. Galapagos, Galapagos. See, thank you, I need you. You need me, I need you. Some great under water footage that we're gonna cut together. So that's gonna be one of the other things. I'll hit play, you'll see this actually play out. I'm gonna play the small, 'cause it's just people talking, but I want you to see-- This digital came, I remember the day, I got a Nikon, it was a Nikon digital camera, and I started taking my photos with that camera. And I thought, oh my gosh, I'm never going back to film. And that was the early days of you know, photo-- You know, I wouldn't cut him off in real life, you know, you're done! You're off the air now! But, you can see kind of what we'll be doing in Premiere, that this played, you saw the play head move. And the image changed, and so it kinda gives you a feel of what we're gonna be covering. So those are three of the big areas that we'll be working with over the next 20 lessons. But let's actually start digging in a little deeper into some of the questions you might have, some of the concerns, some of the confusion. And I wanna, we'll talk a little bit about how video differs from photography. I know a lot of people out there, and a lot of people here, work in the photography space. So it's a good touch stone for us to leap forward from, because a lot of people have that reference. But before I go into that, are there any questions, either from the audience here or people have typed in that they wanna throw out at this point? I know we get this often, but if people are using an older version of Premiere, will this class apply to them as well? I think that's a great point to bring up, and thank you for bringing that up. We're gonna focus on using the current release of Premiere, which is part of the Creative Cloud, which is a suite that many of you may be familiar with, and it's regularly updated. So, many of the features, if you have an older version, you may not see. Aesthetically, a lot of what we do can be used in older versions. But you will discover, I may use an effect or I may use a specific editing technique that might not be available in an older version, but that's only half of the class. The other half of the class is that aesthetics of editing, so even if you have an older version and you can't follow along with every click that I do, you can still get some of the techniques of when to cut, how to cut, why we cut. That's a very important thing, you know, why I would cut from this medium or over the shoulder shot to a close up. So I think there still is value in it, but we will be using the most recent version of Premiere. Which is on the Creative Cloud, and I think it'll still be valuable. Any questions in the audience? Yeah, no, absolutely, I'm glad you mentioned that there's so much more to this course than just the software itself and all of those story telling tools and just the way to approach video as well. Can you just clarify for Harbor Phil, what is a sizzle real? What is a sizzle real? It's when you take a steak, that's a little fatty, no-- A sizzle real, again, that's good question, because it's jargon. You wanna show yourself off, you wanna show off your work whether you're a photographer showing off your photos or a videographer. You don't even have to, you could do a sizzle real on food. Which is kind of the steak analogy that I went with anyway. But it's to show things off. It's something that's quick and exciting. Usually you have high energy music, you might have some graphics or titles. It's a call to action. Usually you create a sizzle real to get people to do something. Either to hire you as a photographer, to hire you as a videographer, to hire you as an editor, actors have sizzle reals. It's to promote yourself, but it's clips. It's not something long. And it's one of those things where you can just make something tight, one minute. And I'll tell you, one thing about editing, it's harder to edit something short then it is to edit something long. I mean, it goes back to Mark Twain, and his quote, but it's very true. But if you have all the space and time to edit something, very challenging. And I'm gonna actually start right now with one of my tips and techniques. One of the hardest things for me and one of the most beneficial learning experience, was cutting commercials. Because when you cut a commercial, and this is back in the days when they were a certain length, not the internet commercials, you had 30 seconds or 15 seconds to tell a story. You're basically making a short film. And think about this, even with 30 seconds, you have 30 frames of video per second. So you have 900 images to tell your story. And I remember cutting something and we would shoot, we'd go out, we'd shoot this great stuff, and you're cutting it, and you get it down to like 40 seconds, and you're like what can I cut out? And then you cut out some things, and then it's like 37 seconds. 29, you know, you're trying to get it down to 29 or 28, so you can have a little space at the end for a tag. And you're shaving frames off. And then you finally get it and you're happy and it's a great learning experience. And then six months later you're watching, you go, you know, I coulda cut that to 15. But, the point is, you learn that everything isn't valuable, and that's one of the hardest challenges that we have as editors. Especially as producer editors or director editors, is we love everything we have and we feel we shot it, so we have to put it in. And you have to learn to kind of put aside, delete those scenes, because you may have loved it, but does it move the story forward? A perfect example of that is you may work really really hard to light something and get it just perfect, and you have this beautiful, four minute dolly shot, that's just brilliant, and Scorsese would be proud of you. And then you're cutting your shredding, you go, wait I only have about six seconds to show this image. And you're like, why did I take a four minute move? Or you know you worked really hard and it looks great, but it doesn't move the story, but you don't wanna let it go because you worked so hard. Your viewer doesn't know how hard you worked. So it's little things like that that we're gonna be talking about that you need to think about when you're editing, and that's really a thought process. I'm a big fan of not just teaching the mechanics. People come to me and they'll take like a three or four day class, kind of like this class will be, but it's nice and stretched over 20 days so you can really absorb it. And after they're done they'll go, so I can get a job as an editor. And I'm like, come back in a year, show me your stuff, and then we'll see if you can be an editor. It's like, a photographer, anything, you can get the mechanics very quickly, and hopefully that's what people will walk away with, but then you're continually learning and getting new ideas and becoming better and better. And that's really what an editors all about. They hire an editor because they have the skill, not because they know this tool or that tool. They don't hire a photographer because you have a Nikon, a Canon, or a Sony, right? They look at your picture, and they go, good eye! So it's the same thing.