Working with Premiere Pro

 

Premiere Pro has... been intriguing to work with. I have to say it is very intimidating at first, but I was able to quickly get the hang of it on my own which was surprising. We have had a couple of issues getting to class with our Premiere Pro assistant, so that indirectly harms me and the other remote learners who relied on outside help every now and then, that being said, it was not a major issue.

Putting the clips together

 Starting Premiere Pro with little to no knowledge almost feels like trying to blindly find something. That being said, it did not really take me longer than an hour to grasp how making a clip works, it was fun importing the different clips and learning how to mess with them to my liking until I felt what I had was long enough, but also short enough to clip out any unwanted scenes or parts of the videos.

After enough time and some searching online for assistance on a few last things, I finally had the video ready, and only needed to add music/sounds/and text.

Sound and Music

Finding a way to mute sound from the clips was tricky and mildly annoying, I had one of the clips open in another tab, where it kept making a loud noise at around 20 seconds in, and I thought the entire time it was Premiere Pro, which was a nuisance, but eventually I fixed that and found a way to mute sound.

Now that sound was muted, I had to find a car crash sound effect add to my clip, and sad music.

I was able to find the car crash sound effect relatively easy, and it was also free to use without copyrights so that was useful.

I was also able to find sad guitar music (also free to use without copyrights), which I downloaded from YouTube into an MP4 and inserted into the project.

Once I had that, all I had to do was adjust both things so that they would play at the desired times, and then I added a black background layer to the beginning of the video to smoothly present the car crash, and the music.

I was originally going to record my voice and add it on a separate layer so it would play during the film, but I could not find a good voice tone or someone to help me out with the voice part, so I had to stick to text as a form of dialogue. I added text on the desired times, and also made some edits to the text (dialogue) to make it look more realistic, and then changed the font and sized, and also made some final adjustments to it so it would fit nicely into the video.

Transitions

Transitions were surprisingly hard to find, I tried to add special typing transitions to my text (by adding mask layers and skipping frames between each letter, around 3 frames each), but I was not able to make it work and my Premiere Pro was beginning to lag a lot, so I decided to keep it to simple transitions. 

The shots all had their own transitions too, you could make a shot without a transition of course, but it would be hard to pull off without it looking weird. The best scenario where I could think of this is if I had numerous scenes playing one after the other in short periods of time. 

Finally, I also added some transitions to the music, so it would fade in and then fade out at the beginning and end of the video.

Coloration

The hue and saturation of the video stayed the same, I was having similar issues as the ones with transitions, so I kept it out so my video would play smoothly. That being said, the desired hue/saturation changes were minimal, so I am not too bothered by this.