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Lesson Info

Understanding Editing: Video Examples

I wanna talk about some of the nuances of video in relation to photography. That will be our initial touchdown. And so I kind of made this little animation here, and I'll bring it full screen, but I want to talk about it first. How many people here shoot still video? You don't have to hold the mic. Okay still video, that's not good. You wanna shoot motion video. Now how many people shoot photography, shoot stills? Everybody, it's not gonna polarize any. Anybody, you have an iPhone? Okay exactly. What's the resolution of your cameras? Just you can jump it out. 40 megapixels. Okay thank you. We're coming and shooting some stuff after this class. 40 megapixels. Okay that's a huge image. 40 megapixels and I'm trying to do the math in my head, which is always a mistake. Is that about, what's the square root of 40? Math people here? 15's 225, okay this is not a test. I could take out my phone and ask Siri. Many megapixel apply many, many, 20, 20, 20 by 20. Yeah that's pretty big. Other sizes...

? 20 megapixel cameras. 15 megapixel. Do you shoot with your phone? Yeah. What phone do you have? iPhone. iPhone what? 6S. 6S? 12 megapixels. Okay oh yes that's right. I'll try to remember but I will repeat if you haven't picked up the mic. 12 megapixels that respectable. You are like 12 megapixels. I have some numbers coming, some comments here. 22 megapixels. 22 megapixels, okay. 22 megapixels. I did this for a reason. How many people have hi-def televisions? Oh come on, if you don't have a hi-def television, you must have a phone, no. So hi-def television. Guess how many megapixels it is? Two. This blows people away. It is the highest of currently broadcast hi-def television is 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high. 1920 x 1080 you'll hear it refer to as 1080p. There's some jargon that we are already learning. Think about this that 20 megapixel image that's the average or the 18 megapixel image is 5000 by 4000 pixels. Way, way bigger than television and that's considered hi-def. So here's a little example of this image if it were video, if it actually was placed into a hi-def photograph. And I'm gonna bring this full screen. So should be playing, yeah it is playing. So this is what you see in your 1920 x 1080. This is a screen grab from a photograph I took at Niagara Falls. I should be doing perhaps a time lapse with this. This is the original image. That's how small it is. Now I'd bring this point into play for a couple of reasons. You can do beautiful moves on images, because you have so much resolution to work with. And if you do a time lapse, and this is where it gets really cool, you have motion, you have this giant resolution video now, and you can do pans across your time lapse, without having to have any fancy tools or anything because you've already shot it at full resolution. We're gonna look at that. Understanding that is pretty amazing. It also presents some issues that we're gonna talk about, if you have that mindset of photography and you are starting to work with video. You'll notice that on this image, I put some white bars on the side. I didn't really put white bars on the side. Still images that we're working with tend to be more square than rectangular. The aspect ratio is a little different. And generally there's two flavors or two formats of sizes that you'll find. Now I patiently wait for this to play to where I want it to be, hoping that the small little dialog box, I may fast forward here a little bit. It's exciting, it's exciting. There we go. 3 x 2. That's one of the aspect ratios that some cameras shoot. And if I pop this into a regular high definition television screen, I'm gonna, if I wanna see every part of my original image, I'm gonna have white bars so I have to think about that, that I'm dealing with a different aspect ratio when I'm shooting video. I have a different frame to work with, or if I'm gonna be bringing my images in to say that sizzle real, am I going to make a decision of putting bars or color behind it, or am I gonna do a move on it, or am I gonna blow it up a little bit? So for example that's 3 x 2. The other format or aspect ratio that we tend to use is 4 x 3. And in that case, as you can see we even have more white space. So our photography is a different aspect ratio. And this as I said is important because not only are you deciding how you're gonna deal with your photographs if you're gonna put them into a shot. But you also have to kind of change your mindset that you're working with a different frame, that it's like more theatrical and how you're composing your image is different. How you're moving, how you can move people through it is different. So this is what you would end up doing if I shot this image and I needed to put it into video. That's 16 x 9. Very subtle things but a different vibe. I think I zoomed out and hopefully I'm gonna play that back a little bit. So this is one of the things we do. Oh I don't have the fix there. Okay so here's your choices. This is the shot that I took in Japan. I thought it was great. This little coffee shop at the base of Mount Fuji you would think you were in Seattle, but no you are... And this is, "Okay, come here, have coffee." I have a choice. I took this picture. If I want to put it in, I can either crop it, I can blow it up so it touches the sides, but then I lose the top and bottom. Or I pillar box it so I can see everything. Same thing here. This is just such an example. I would crop it and then I would probably have to zoom in but we have the resolution. So we were talking about how large a photographic image is. And this is one of the challenges that a lot of photographers face is they jump in, they kind of get a feel for this. They bring in their images, and they are huge, and they end up having to shrink them to like 10% to see the whole image. And it's like you're making your computer do so much extra work because you're bringing in such a huge image, it's better to downsample that image to something that's more reasonable than that 40 megapixel which is beautiful, if you want that landscape details, I'm jealous. But that's one thing I do and you know, where am I getting these strange numbers from? Well I'm thinking of a world where we are dealing with high definition television, 1920 x 1080. So I'm gonna jump to the middle one because the math is easier. I just basically double everything. If I do 1920 x 1080, it's double, it's 3840 x 2160. If I bring the image in as 200%, that lets me zoom in to a certain level without losing any detail. The key is you have to think about, how much movement am I gonna do on this? Am I gonna do a little push? Maybe I only have to make the image this big. Am I going to do a lot of movement around it? Maybe I want it this big. One of the images we will be working with in the motion or moving your image around is a huge panorama, that's like 8000 pixels that I shot, and we want to just do a slow pan on it. So that's something that's very nice because it gives the feel of a real camera pan but you're leveraging the power of your still camera to do that. And it might be a panorama that you shot after watching Mike's class. So it's all good. This is just something to keep in mind. There's a lot of references on the web but I just wanted people to understand that you don't have to work with a full size image, because you can actually overload the process storing your computer. It's overkill. There's times that you may want to use it. And while we are talking about images, most of us will probably be working with JPEGs and TIFFs and maybe Photoshop documents but Premiere can handle pretty much any flavor of still image that you want to throw at it, including encapsulated postscript as well as and this is where I go blank. I'm thinking AI, uses artificial intelligence. No it's another Adobe product which is... Illustrator. Adobe Illustrator, there we go. I don't know this AI robot thing. I'm watching this great documentary. Westworld, it's not a documentary. It's a TV show. Or maybe it is a documentary. And I'm thinking AI, we are all being replaced. And I have one last little note here. Camera Raw is not supported. You guys maybe shooting Camera Raw. Camera Raw is an amazing tool. But it's not developed. That's what you do when you bring Camera Raw into Photoshop or you bring into Lightroom as you develop it. It's flat and it's huge. This is not the venue for developing Camera Raw. So you would need to process it and then bring it in. Now you can do color correction, but Camera Raw is huge. I mean those files are 25 megabytes verus a JPEG or a TIFF which might be five or four. So it's things to keep in mind. There are video formats that you hear, that shoot the equivalent of Camera Raw are flat video. You might hear that term. It's basically they call it log or Slog. And you apply something, that's one flavor but it shoots it very flat so you can expand it to get a high dynamic range. And some of that, the higher end DSLR's allow you to do that, and it's becoming more common. I'll tell you at the beginning, unless you really are a colorist, shoot it normal. Don't shoot it flat. You have to do a lot more work that the only time you should ever shoot something flat if your camera can do it, if you are in an environment where the dynamic range is just hurting you. You have blown out skies and dark shadows. Otherwise you're creating a lot more work for yourself. It's just a little aside because people have asked me that question. So lot of technical stuff at the beginning. Other things that you need to consider is frames per second. Not something you have to consider in photography and you'll hear a lot of different answers, a lot of people telling you, this is the right way to do it. Oh first of all, there is no right way to do it. Everybody has an opinion. There are more popular ways. So the more popular frame rates are things such as frames a second, 30 frames a second and some of the ultra hi-def might be 60 frames a second for a normal playback. Okay that's what your editing timeline is. So you start thinking in terms of a 30th of a second, 24th of a second. So 24 frames a second, you maybe shooting on your cameras, people think it is the film work. In a sense it is more filmic, because motion pictures have always been 24 frames a second. Television has always been 30 frames. You will sometimes hear it as 29. but think of it as 30. If you see those two numbers, the magic is basically in 1953, they needed to add color to black and white. So they had to take a subsection of the bandwidth and overlay the color, which is what we are dealing with 50 years later, 29. but think of it, 24th or 30, it has a slightly different feel. The more frames, the sharper and crisper it feels, so it has a different visceral reaction for your viewer. 24 is a little bit smoother. You'll blur if you move the camera, but it's a different feel, but beyond that there is much more to the film work. It's proper just like with photography, proper lighting, proper exposure, understanding focal length, all the tools. And this is what's really nice. All the knowledge that you might have as a photographer can be translated to being a videographer. You just have to get used to the movement within the frame or moving your camera. But you still wanna, do I wanna control my depth of field? Do I want to freeze motion? All the elements that you're dealing with, focal length. How old a person appear if I'm using a ultrawide angle, a 24 millimeter versus if I shot them with a 200 millimeter. And here is something interesting about that because I want to give you as much information as possible. If you're hand holding a camera the difference between a 24 millimeter lens, a and a 200 isn't just how the person looks. If you're holding a 200 millimeter lens, you're focused in maybe at the same framing on a person, but you shake a little, it shakes a lot. You are at 24 millimeters nice wide angle, you shake a little, the viewer doesn't see it. But it is a give and take, and it's understanding what different lenses will do when you're shooting video and how it will affect your final shot. This is the bulk of the video I believe that I was gonna show, I think I came to the conclusion of my visual notes. No, I haven't. Ah, see, that's the nice thing about being an editor. You can see on your timeline, oh look what's in the future. This is again, I talked a little bit about Camera Raw versus all the other formats. So you can successfully edit with TIFF files or JPEG files as an example. The challenge is TIFF files are huge. In Photoshop, imagine opening 30 different TIFF files every second. You can see you can choke your computer pretty easily. And what are you gaining? Yes it is not as compressed, but by the time you get down to television, and people's televisions generally aren't tuned right anyway, JPEG looks almost the same. And because it is a much smaller file, you can load them faster and you can get a more responsive computer and that was one of the questions that the class actually asked, one of the folks here asked me before the class started which was hardware. What hardware do I need to use for Premiere Pro? And first of all, it's bi-platform. So you can work on it in a Windows machine or a Mac. The project files actually translate. If you worked on a Mac and you take that hard drive, as long as the Windows machine can read that drive, you can open up and edit and move back and forth. So that's an important thing to understand. And as a matter of fact, when we're going through the lessons, I'll be using a Mac, but everything you see will be exactly the same on a Windows PC. There's one or two menu items that are different, and I will point that out. And some keyboard shortcuts uses of course Command versus Control, Alt versus Option, and I will call attention to that but from an aesthetic point of view, the interface is exactly the same. So that's one question that a lot of folks have. The other one is how powerful does my machine need to be? Well of course the more powerful the better, but there's also a point of diminishing return, where you don't want to throw so much money at your computer that you are only getting a little bit of a benefit. The things that improve performance. First of all is the speed of the CPU, the central processing unit, and the number of processors. That's the crunching that the computer does, within itself. So faster is always better. New is always better, but the software has been really tweaked that I'm seeing better performance even on old computers, than with older versions of Premiere. They're leveraging more of the modernizations. The second thing is RAM. How much RAM you have. More RAM is always better. I generally think eight is the lower limit. I like to work with sixteen gigabytes. It will use the RAM wisely. And so but that's a good start. I think four is a little bit shy. You can still work. You just have to be more patient. It will take longer for some things to happen and playback. The third thing that they really emphasize is your graphics card. This is something that's relatively recent over the last few years, that we have these incredibly powerful graphics card and instead of having the computer the CPU do the heavy lifting, they push it off to the graphics card, 'cos they're designed to do all these polynomic, that's not even a word, but we will call it a word today. All these polynomes, yeah that's another word that I've just made up. So that's two for the Wikipedia. But polygon, that's it. All these polygons per second. And so the faster and more VRAM, video RAM, that your video card has, a lot of times you'll get this better performance. Again one gigabyte VRAM is kind of standard now on a new machine. If you have an older machine, you will start seeing a little bit of a performance hit. Now it's a mix and different parts of the application, leverage different parts of the computer better. The last thing in reference to hardware. Solid state drives way better than spinning drives. Way more expensive and this is the challenge video takes up way more space than still photography, even if you are shooting Camera Raw, even if you're shooting 40 megapixels, you could shoot, I was out at in Sedona and I literally shot almost a terabyte over a handful of days. So I'm always bringing hard drives with me. But in SSD you can read and write faster, more responsive, but there's the pricing, so I actually use both, but something to keep in mind, video is much larger and it's something that you have to work into the equation, external drives or internal drives. A lot of the things that we'll try to go through video terminology jargon, please if I say something you don't understand, raise your hand throughout the course. Things to be we'll again talk about gotchas. Lot of people shoot television landscape. And I can't tell you how many times the same photographer because they're using to shooting portrait, shooting video this way, and I have to walk up and I go do you lie down when you watch television, and they are going huhhh. But that's changing a little too because if you look at iPhones or any phone, we have Snapchat, we have vertical video. It's becoming a standard, but it's something to keep in mind when you're delivering, when you're recording something if you're gonna be broadcasting it. You're gonna be putting it on the web. Most people are watching things in a horizontal or a landscape. And then we talked about this little bit of how to think like a videographer. And that just takes practice and we will be visiting ways to learn how to be a better editor by exploring the world around you throughout the course, yes. Going back to the 24 versus 30 frames per second, if we are not sure which look we want, is it better to shoot at 24 and then convert to at the end, or shoot at 30 and convert to 24? That's a great and very common question. The nice thing about Premiere is that it will if you put 24 frame per second footage into a 30 frame sequence, and we'll explore that as we start creating sequences, it will automatically compensate and convert that to a 30 frames per second. Conversely, it will do the same thing if you drop a 30 into a 24. Now here's the challenge. It's easy to go from 24 to because you can repeat half frames and fields and technical stuff, so we are more used to that to bring it up. If you're going from 30 to 24, the only way to do that is to literally delete frames, which isn't a good thing. So my philosophy is when you start shooting, decide how you're gonna deliver and try to keep everything in the same format. It's inevitable you will get footage or you may shoot footage that doesn't match. You just want most of it to be matching to whatever your sequence is. You may get stuff and we have people watching from around the world, they are going 24, 30, I have never heard that. We are 25 frames a second. So yeah, if you are shooting with PAL, you're 25, and actually it's really easy to go from 25 to 24. So again it's where you're going to play it back. The nice thing about the internet is you're not limited. You can play whatever frame rate you want, because it's all software, it's when you start putting things out to broadcast that there might be more specifications. So consistency is my recommendation and I think that's a great question. So it's the most important starting question when you're shooting. Great, well maybe we can run through a little bit rapid fire of these. Will be covering this? Absolutely. Okay cool. Yes, no, I'll think about it. Oh, maybe I'll have you ask first. I'm glad you mentioned 25 because there are folks that had asked that as well. Difference between 24 and 25 due to our global audience. Alright so Kevin Ferguson is wondering if you'll be covering any Adobe Audition tips like removing or minimizing background noise. We will be doing very limited Adobe tips. That will probably come at the end at the week four or the later lessons. I have a couple of really cool audition tips and techniques. We are not gonna get too deep into it, because it's a whole another application, and I don't want to like blow people's heads up. I sometimes like to teach a trick or two in another app that works in the creative cloud. Just allow you to like put that toe in the water. I go into this and I know how to do one thing and I get back out. And then maybe the next time you will learn to do a second thing, but trying to jump in and do a lot. So we're definitely gonna do something with music and maybe we will do something with vocal enhancement. And that will be towards the latter part of the course. Great and let's see. Paul Sidly is asking about the, you mentioned video interviews, when you're talking about how to use two cameras for that in terms of having that visual variety. Yes as a matter of fact, the interview footage we shot with will have four angles. We have a master shot which is the true shot of Mark and myself talking. We have isolated cameras on each of us and then we have a fourth camera which is an over the shoulder of my shoulders. You kind of see me interviewing him, and then you can see him in a wider shot and we talk about using them to one what's the feel, what's the difference when cutting to the different shots, and also to make editing smoother because you may want to cut to a closeup or a reaction shot, and then to an over shoulder shot of me. You may see my head moving but I can put different words in it, so we do discuss that when cutting. We actually use that for several of the lessons, and we will also use that footage for the multi cam. Let's talk one more thing. Somebody was asking if I am kind of a Lightroom user or a Photoshop user, will this class be easyish for me to jump into if those are the tools that I'm already familiar with? Again great question and I kind of referred that before. It will be, I don't want to say easier. It will be more familiar. Because you're still dealing with a lot of the same elements. You're still dealing with an image to tell a story. When you bring things in Photoshop you bring things in Lightroom, I'll start with Lightroom first, you bring in Adobe Camera Raw right or even if it's a JPEG, and then you're gonna do some basic color correction. You're gonna maybe open up the shadows, maybe bring down the highlights. Well you do that same type of color collection, within Premiere. As a matter of fact, a lot of the tools will be very similar. You have highlights and shadows and contrast and vibrance and saturation and sharpening. These are all terms that should be very familiar to those folks working in Lightroom and working in Photoshop. With Photoshop, it's even more familiar because you are used to working in layers and we are used to working in tracks. So you might have a background layer or a background of the interview, and then maybe you have a cutaway that will be layer on top. Or maybe it's a picture in picture so it's kind of like a smaller element. An example I will be using and I like to use when explaining tracks or explaining layers is that bottom layer say it's the interview layer, that's like the ground floor of a building. And then you go to the second floor of the building, and maybe that's your picture in picture, so it's a little smaller. So if you're looking down from the top, and it's the same thing in Photoshop, you see oh I can see around that little picture in picture, so I see the interview. Okay it's the second layer. Then you might have a third layer and that might be a title with transparency. And now I'm seeing both the picture and picture and the bottom layer. And so you start stacking things up and if you're used to that mindset, and used to being able to apply effects to each individual layer, it's very much the same with video. It's just doing it over time.