There is so much to explore in Adobe Premiere Pro, so we did a second lesson on video editing techniques! The starter included five words, culture, home, travel, energy, and relax. We were asked to think about what those words meant to us, and a lot of images and memories appeared in my mind, as each of the words were linked to personal experiences. For the next task, we were to choose one of the words as a theme, and I chose energy because I was reminded of my trip to Bulgaria, where I went hiking one of the many famous mountains. I used events from my trip as inspiration.
We learned of a website called Pixabay which is an amazing media catalogue that has a lot of free content to use. I looked through a variety of short clips that made me think of energy. My idea was to make the audience feel more alive by using calming colours, naturalistic visuals, and relaxing sounds. I decided on six videos to use and imported them into Premiere Pro to begin editing. Firstly, I did the basics, cutting the clips up, taking the parts I like, and arranging them together to form a video. To spruce it up a little, I went into effect controls, effects, and then preset transitions, where I could add fades, wipes, slides, and dissolves, and other techniques, to make the video more interesting to look at. I learned that the colour of the line above the clips has an important purpose, if it is yellow or red in certain parts, it means that the video will play with difficulty and not be of the greatest quality. To counter this, going into sequence, render into out, renders the video and allows for smoother playback.
The next technique we looked into was colour grading. Adjusting the colour palette of a video to be a certain way can be used to impact the mood and ambience of the video, and evoke an emotion out of the viewer. For my video, the aim was to make the viewer feel energized, so I went for invigorating colours like green, blue and brown. I already had a lot of those colours in the video, so I didn’t need to do colour grading all that much, however, some clips had different hues of green, for example, some more yellow, others more of a deep emerald. I went into effects, video editing colour correction and then lumetri colour, so that I could make basic corrections where needed, like exposure and contrast, but mainly to adjust the temperature, saturation and hue. Tint was another control that was really fun to play around with, and I used the stopwatch to keyframe it so that some specific clips changed subtly over time. Editing the effects of the video was where the theme of energy really started to shine through. The atmosphere of my video was just as I intended, a soothing, uplifting quality that linked all of the clips nicely. I quite enjoyed going into the colour settings, but I feel that I do need to work on my clip choice and position skills.
