Editing Practical

The purpose of this assignment was to asses my understanding and ability to edit footage into a final, smooth piece of work. I have done this by taking screenshots of my process, which I will explain below.

The first stage of the editing process, after downloading the clips from the camera onto the computer's D drive, was to "ingest" my clips into Adobe Prelude. This ensures that no clips are corrupted and saves you having problems with broken clips when editing. 

In the top left hand corner of Prelude after opening the program is a button which reads "ingest". After I clicked this, a window opened up which allowed me to select the appropriate clips. 

Once my appropriate clip was selected, I clicked a second button which also reads "ingest", located in the bottom right of the window shown above. Once the clip is ingested this means that the clip is ready to be used with Adobe Premiere Pro, the software I used to edit my short film. The ingested clip is shown below, and you can import it directly into Premiere Pro by right clicking on the clip and selecting "send to Premiere Pro".

Once my clips were successfully imported, I had to create an appropriate timeline for use when editing. Clips are shown my default in a "bin" which is located in the bottom left corner of Premier Pro.

 By clicking the button which I have circled and selecting sequence, Premiere Pro creates a timeline which can now be used for editing your clips. 

Shown above is a picture of the timeline of my completed work. Audio which has been added is shown in green. The long green bar is the music I used for me short film, and the shorter green bar is a sound effect of a door opening. Audio clips can be imported by selecting "import" from the file menu in Premiere Pro. I added titles by clicking the same button I circled above and selecting "title" from the drop down menu which appears. In between my actual footage clips I have added a second of static to break up the narrative and give the film a kind of "found footage" look.  

One effect I have used is colour grading, which I did in two ways. The first was a luma curve and the second was a three wheel colour editing tool. Both are located under the effects tab in the "bin" shown two pictures above. I wanted to go for a dark look in order to get across the eerie feel I was going for, however once shot the clips were too dark and grey. I used the luma curve to improve the brightness and contrast slightly, and the three wheel colour editor to enhance the colours I wanted to stand out. Both are shown below. 

As you can see, I only manipulated the luma curve and colour wheels slightly in order the get the image I wanted. While experimenting with these features I found subtlety was key to ensuring the picture wasn't washed out or too blue, for example. Bringing the highlights up into the yellow/orange range gave the image a slight glow, which I thought worked well. I applied these to all my clips except the last one. This is because in the last clip, the lights are turned on in the room, which meant that when I applied this colour grade the image was seriously washed out. 

The most challenging shot to edit was the one where there is supposed to be two of myself on screen at the same time. I did thins by layering one shot over the other so they were both playing at the same time. I then selected "crop" from the effects tab as shown above. I cropped out the left half of the bottom clip which gives the effect of two people being in the same room. It took a lot of time to chop up and edit the audio as I had not quite left myself enough time when I was responding to myself in one of the clips. The final shot looked like this:

The actual crop line is just to the right of the TV, as I found when editing that cropping in the middle of the TV created slight but noticeable inconsistencies in the static which made the crop line visible. I experimented with a feature called "garbage mat", also located in the effects tab which is a more advanced version of the "crop" tool. However, it was unnecessary for my film as the same effect was easily do-able with the crop tool. 

My final film is available on this link:

http://vimeo.com/114230212