Software Suggestions
If
you feel that you need a better video editor than Windows Movie Maker, you can
download the free tryout version of Adobe Premiere (for a 30 day
period). Adobe Premiere is a video editing software which allows you to create
various effects such slow-motion, reverse-time, and basic chroma-keying
(green-screening). The chief advantage of Adobe Premiere over Windows Movie
Maker is the ability to manipulate the basic elements of your video footage
(speed, size, shape, color, and opacity) and combine various clips together to
play at the same time.
To
get Adobe Premiere CS4 or any other Adobe Software, follow this link: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/
and click "Free Trial" to download.
You must create an Adobe
account to download any of these programs, but it only takes a moment.
In addition to Adobe
Premiere, there is a program called Adobe After
Effects out there which is capable of creating extremely high quality effects.
You can simulate virtually anything in After Effects, but it is a much more advanced software that is hard to use without
detailed instruction or prior experience. The good news is that there is a very
helpful website out there which gives you step-by-step video tutorials that can
instruct someone without any experience at all on how to create advanced
special effects such as soul sucking, obliterating people or objects, advanced
chroma-keying, blowing up planets, stopping time, and simulating a person
getting hit by a car.
For these tutorials, follow
this link: http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/
The only issue with these
tutorials is that a few may require extra plug-ins. If you need help finding these plug-ins you can contact Aris at asantas93@hotmail.com
or call him (229 630 5423).
If you would like to learn
more about After Effects so you can come up with your own effects, the same
website has a series of "basic training" tutorials that will help you
understand how the program works (this is highly recommended). One of the most
fundamentally useful qualities of After Effects is its ability to control the
part(s) of the video(s) you want to be seen.
Below is a freeze frame of
someone busting through a wall with After Effects. (This is an effect Aris
threw together, not one of the "extremely high quality" effects.)
Limitations: After Effects
is not a sequencing software. It is recommended that
you edit individual scenes in After Effects and then put them together in
Premiere.
One final useful tool in
video-editing is something called Action Essentials. This is a set of HD video
footage of explosions, muzzle fires, smoky atmospheres, blood, and other various action-oriented footage. This is not a
program; it is a collection of videos, so there is no trial version. However, you
can contact Aris if you are interested in using Action Essentials.
To use Action Essentials,
you simply drag the footage into place over another video and resize it if
necessary. (Note: If you are not using a tripod, this can be a little more
complicated.)
Muzzle flash effect from
Action Essentials:
Videos
created (By Aris) with Windows Movie Maker, Premiere, After Effects, and Action
Essentials:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7684932960152723720&ei=BEn7SrrDIoeqqAK1hMTfDQ&q=the+most+dangerous+game+aris&hl=en&view=2# - made with Windows Movie Maker
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb4cmq_ode-to-the-grapefruit_music
- made with Premiere only
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hhqyYhDL1g - made with After Effects, Premiere, and Action Essentials
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCVFjEOzXC8 - made entirely with After Effects
Note: Premiere can create
more advanced effects than those seen in "Ode to the Grapefruit". The
ones seen are the ones that are creatable by a few clicks of the mouse. Also,
the quality of the videos is almost exclusively affected by the camera and
video converter used, not the editing software.
IMPORTANT: These programs
will create very large files, After Effects being the worst. Videos lasting
thirty seconds may be up to gigabytes in size. Premiere will decrease the size
of the final product, but a five minute video may still take up around 1
gigabyte of space, depending of the resolution of the video (The standard 720 x
480 frame size will take up about half this much space). The best way to solve
this without ruining the quality of your video is to upload it to YouTube,
which has improved greatly of the years. The only issue with this is that
YouTube does not accept videos with a length of over 10 minutes, so if your
video is longer, you will either have to break it into segments an upload them
separately or upload them to a different site such as The Daily Motion, which
allows 20 minute videos. The other option is to "compress" your
video. Any Video Converter will do this, but the problem is that it will lower
your video's quality. AVS Video Converter is a better program for this, but it
isn't free. (around $30) http://www.avs4you.com/AVS-Video-Converter.aspx
You can download the trial, but your videos
will have an AVS watermark on them.
Installation
- Download
the program from http://www.adobe.com/downloads/.
(You may need to download the Adobe Download Manager. You be prompted to
when you try to download any programs if you do.) Open the download
compressed folder. (Select Open if you want to
install immediately or save if you’ll install it later. Open the
compressed folder before the next step.)
- Go
through the folders until you find “setup” and double-click it
- Select
“Extract All” and select a place to extract to.
- Find
the extracted folder, find “setup” again, and double-click it.
- Follow
the installer’s instructions.
- To
open the program, look for a file called After FX or Premiere (or
something very similar to the software’s name). It should have an icon
with the letters AE (for After Effects) or Pr (For Premiere). Double-click
it to open the program. If you want a desktop shortcut, right click on the
file, select “create shortcut”, and drag it to your desktop.
- If
you need help with installation, contact Aris.
Some Suggestions on Creating Videos
Tips on Taking Videos:
Generally speaking, the more
light your camcorder is exposed to, the better the quality your footage will
be. (This is extremely important to chroma-keying.)
Using a tripod will get rid
of unwanted motion blur and camera shake.
Switching camera angles
often gives your video better flow. (This is especially important in dialogues,
which can become visually boring if shot from only one angle the whole time.)
Actors/actresses must raise
their voices to be heard. (This is extremely
important on windy days, and if at all possible, avoid shooting on windy
days all together if you want your actors/actresses to be heard.)
Also, whenever recording audio by any means, record at a
higher volume; digitally increasing the volume after recording will lead to
distortion of the sound.
Transferring Videos From Your Camera to the Computer:
For cameras using memory
cards:
Use USB connection and cut and paste video files. Attempt
to import the videos into the video editing software, if unsuccessful, you need
to download a video converter to encode your videos to a
supportable format. (Go to your
software, click import, and check the acceptable file extensions to see a list
of supported formats.)
There are many video converters out there, but a one free
program out there is Any Video Converter. http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free/
This is not a very high quality software.
A
higher quality option is Adobe Media Encoder, which is automatically installed
with Adobe Premiere. To find it, run a search for "Adobe Media
Encoder" in your C Drive.
For cameras using tapes or other media:
You will need to buy
a firewire cable to "capture" your video footage. To capture your
footage, hook up your camera via firewire and run Adobe Premiere. Go to the
Window toolbar and check "Capture".
Press
the red record button in the capture window and press play on your camera if it
doesn't play automatically. Press stop when you the footage you need has played
all the way through. It will then
appear in the Project Window.
Capturing
can sometimes be a hassle. You may need to consult your camera's user manual or
an online forum for help.
Note:
You cannot capture in HDV in the trial version of Adobe Premiere.
Basics of Special Effects:
The whole basis of special effects is giving
the illusion of something happening which did not really happen in the footage.
The advantage that the video editor has over his or her audience in creating
special effects is that videos can only be seen in the perspective that they
are shot in, meaning that the editor only has to simulate the effect on a
two-dimensional level. Because the audience can only see what happens on the
surface, the editor only has to make one perspective look real.
Most special effects are created by
"stacking" different videos or pictures on top of one another in such
a way that gives the illusion of three dimensionality, while in actuality, it
is nothing more than digital cut-outs of various media stacked on top of one
another to make a sort of video collage.
Chroma-Keying
This makes chroma-keying immensely popular.
Chroma-keying works by picking a color in the footage and eliminating all
objects of that color from the video. The person stands in front of a
"green screen" and all the green is cut out, allowing you to isolate
the person. By isolating the person, this allows you to manipulate them
independently of their surroundings.
Chroma keying can be used for effects such as
background replacement (such as in the news), teleportation, flying, and any
effect which you only want to apply to the isolated person/object.
If you don't want to buy a green screen, you
can just use a large green piece of fabric (or blue for that matter). Try to
get as many wrinkles out as possible; they will create shadows.
Note: While chroma-keying is possible in Adobe
Premiere, the chroma-keying in After Effects will look much better.
In After Effects In Premiere
After Effects utilizes an effect called the
Keylight, which decreases the opacity of the green, rather than making each
green pixel invisible (as shown in Premiere). This gives a smoother edge. If
you zoom in, you may notice that the arm in Premiere looks like a cut-out,
rather than just an isolated hand.
After the hand is isolated,
you can put a background behind it.
The compromise for the
smoother edge in After Effects is that with improper lighting, the edges will
be slightly transparent. However, this usually looks better than the rough,
pixelated edges created in Premiere. Additionally, the color key in Premiere
will often appear to eat away at the person you are trying to isolate, forming
holes in them, or it will leaves stray green pixels that are not quite the
right shade of green to be recognized by the color key.
This leads us to the most
important part of chroma-keying, lighting. In order to successfully use the
chroma-key, you must make the green background as uniform in color as possible
by exposing the whole background to an equal amount of light (eliminate as many
shadows as possible). This is because if the range green selected to be erased
is smaller, the chance of part of your subject being erased is greatly
decreased. In addition to making the background uniform, you need to attempt to
keep the green light from being reflected onto your subject. Also, YOUR SUBJECT
SHOULD NOT WEAR GREEN.
Example of poor lighting:
As you can see, bad lighting
will negate the effectiveness of chroma-keying, especially in Premiere.
Tip for Chroma-keying: If
you are doing a news-style video and are doing a background replacement with
chroma-keying, use a blur effect on the background; it will do wonders for the
look.
If you have any questions
about making a video, you can contact Aris at asantas93@hotmail.com or call him
(229 630 5423).