Category Archives: Videos

Video Intros Outros

Videos look a lot more professional with a short Introduction segment and a set of Rolling Credits at the end.

In this article we show how we do Introductions and Rolling Credits for our Music Videos.

All of our work is done using the Adobe Creative Cloud, and so we will be talking about using Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, and Fireworks.

 

Video Introductions

Some video makers really “go to town” with over the top animated 3D looking introductions made using Adobe After Effects.

Certainly if you take the time and effort to make a fantastic introduction to your video production company, then it is the gift that keeps giving, and you can use it over and over again on every video you produce.

If you want to do this sort of thing, then see the links in the “Further Reading” section at the end of this article.

For our live music videos we are determined to make it all about the Client, rather than us, and so we focus the brief introduction based entirely on them.

We also like to keep it simple, and so we use either a still slide we have made in Photoshop or Fireworks, or a simple animated graphic or text of the Band’s Name and/or Members.

If the Band already has a great logo on their FB Page or Website, then as shown above, as simple intro can be made over the top of the intro bars of the first song, and then this can fade out to reveal the musicians.

We do this by making a new 1920 x 1080 black background slide in Adobe Fireworks, importing the Band Logo image (captured off their site using the Snipping Tool if we cannot save the image).

We then flatten the layers and save it as a high quality JPG file about 150k to 250k in size.

It then goes into Adobe Premiere as a layer above the video, with a fade out reveal type effect on it.

 

The second type of Introduction we do is basically the same as the Band Logo one above, but instead we make a 1920 x 1080 sized Band Poster to use. (Play the first few seconds of the video below to see this in action).

In the opening slide for the above video, we took a band photo and made our own text (using dafont.com to get the right style) and also made the 3D winding grid pattern in the background.

This was all done using Adobe Fireworks, but could have also been done in Photoshop.

 

The third and final type of Introduction we like to do is a simple rapid grow text type introduction, as in the following video.

This type of animated intro can be easily made entirely in Adobe Premiere Pro, and does not require the use of Adobe After Effects at all.

We worked out how to do this frame by frame type resize tool on a basic graphic we made first in Fireworks by watching the following “How To” video.

This video explains how to put in key frames and animate intro text:

We first made a cropped image of the Size Matters Logo in Fireworks, and saved it into our video project folder.

Then we put it into media browser preview and moved it down onto the timeline as the top layer.

Then we clicked the top of screen “Effects” in the left media preview browser and changed its size from small, and using keyframes made it bigger and bigger by dragging its corners each keyframe.

In the How To video he says to click the clock to make a new keyframe, but in Adobe Premiere Pro CC we had to instead click the diamond keyframe symbol each time to make a new keyframe.

It was very easy after watching this video, and you can make a back background image in Fireworks or Photoshop like we did as our starting point , rather than enter text with Adobe Premiere Pro.

 

Basic Video Outro

BasicOutro2

If the video is a basic production that does not require a minute of rolling credits at the end, then we tend to simply use a closing slide like the one shown above.

 

Rolling Credits

Making a Rolling Credits Ending or “Outro” for a Video is a bit more work than making an Introduction and involves using Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, and creating a “Black Video” in Adobe Premiere.

The great thing is that once you have made your first one, you can easily do Save As on the Photoshop .PSD file and then edit it in Photoshop to make another one for another video.

We also find that it works well to use a suitable soundtrack from the live band to run behind the rolling credits, rather than have complete silence.

If you go to the 13:50 minute mark in the following video, you can see an example of our standard Rolling Credits:

After watching several YouTube “How To” videos about Rolling Credits, we found the following “Gem”, which we refer to everytime we make rolling credits:

One very important thing we found out (by trial and error) is that to get the smoothest rolling credits it is important to make the After Effects animation have a total duration that is a multiple of the frame rate of your video.

Eg. If your video is running at 25fps, then the Credits duration needs to be 25, 50, 75, or 100 seconds to get the smoothest animation in the final rendered video.

 

Further Reading

There are plenty of YouTube videos about how to make spectacular Adobe After Effects animated Introductions.

The following is an AE Tutorial on how to make Cinematic opening screen with 3D letters:

The following website has a tutorial about using text in after effects, several videos plus free resourses:

Free After Effects Tutorials

The following video shows how to make a cinematic introduction with text and flare effects:

This next video shows how to make a Flame Text intro in After Effects:

This next video (with over 1 million views) shows how to make a spectacular video opening using Flare and Particle Tracking Plug Ins:

The following After Effects Tutorial shows how to make a very flarey cinematic film opening:

This is a brief selection of After Effects Tutorials, there are many more of these type of Tutorials to be found on YouTube.

 

We hope this article helps you make some wonderful videos.

Enjoy,

Paul at Photos By Passy

 

If you found this article useful, then make sure you give our
“PBP Photos By Passy” Facebook Page a Like.

Photos By Passy Facebook Page

How to use Adobe Premiere for Videos

WARNING: This article contains quite a few embedded how to videos, and may take a while to load in.

Recently we built a powerful Windows computer for Video Rendering, and learned how to use Adobe Premiere to combine a series of DSLR Camera video clips into a short movie.

You can watch two of our finished products here:

and

Takin' Cover Band – Live Covers from Paul Passy on Vimeo.

If the videos are loading too slowly, they are also uploaded to our Vimeo Channel at the following links:

Takin Cover Video on Vimeo

Appetite for Destruction Video on Vimeo

These were the first two videos we ever made using Adobe Premiere. Since then we have made several more videos which you can view on our Portfolio page at the following link:

Photos by Passy Videos Portfolio

 

The Takin Cover Video is also available on YouTube:

The filming for the Takin Cover Video was done completely hand held, and some up and down wobbling is visible in places.

For wide angle shots it is far better to do this type of filming with a Monopod, like was done for the Appetite for Destruction Video.

However close up shots really need to be done hand held, but I am investigating getting some kind of gimble rig to do this in the future. For now it is hand held for all close ups.

For the Monopod setup I had to make my own safety strap for the camera that was long enough to raise up the Monopod, but short enough so the camera would not hit the ground if dropped! Customising a standard sling strap did the trick.

Obviously a $3000 powered zoom lens would help too, but we just do not have that sort of money around at the moment.

Getting a proper Video DSLR setup (eg. Sony A7s II when it comes out, with a power zoom lens) is possibly further down the track in one or two years time. (Estimated Cost: $6000 to $7000 !) For now it is a matter of developing solid skills with our current equipment.

 
 

How to Use Adobe Premiere CC Document

Rather than write a very lengthy post here, we have written all about how to use Adobe Premiere Pro CC in a PDF document which can be downloaded at the following link:

Adobe Premiere How To Guide by PBP

In the document there is a step by step journal of how we learned Adobe Premiere and made a Live Music Video.

There are also links in the document to many YouTube videos and useful tutorials that we found on the Internet.

 

Getting Started in Premiere CC

Probably the most useful video for getting started in Adobe Premiere, for complete beginners, was this one by Gary Fong:

The following video shows how to use the effect controls panel to modify Video transitions:

For Audio transitions, watch this video:

 
 

Creating Black and White Video

For Colour Correction of Clips, including making clips Black and White or Sepia, watch these videos:

and

 
 

High Contrast Black and White

The standard B&W conversions in Adobe Premiere using Desaturation or B&W effects can sometimes produce very ordinary grey looking videos.

HOWEVER

Hidden away in Effects: Video > Channels > Calculations

is a two layer blending technique where we can set one up as say green, and the other as red (blue is very noisy), and then on this same panel set up the blending mode as
Multiply, or Hard Light, or Color Burn and we get great high contrast B&W effects.

This following YouTube “How To” video shows how to do this:

Here is a short video we made trying out these techniques.

Our objective was to make a grungey black and white video in bad lighting conditions and test out the Sony A57 DSLR for run and gun video. The final result is a bit “rough and ready” but we think it captures the essence of live rock in a small venue.

This video had focusing issues, and the lighting in the venue was awful, but we believe we could use these Premiere techniques to make some better quality High Contrast Black and White clips in the future.

 
 

Creating Selective Colouring

For Selective Colouring (also known as Pleasantville and Sin City Movie Effect), watch these videos:

and

 
 

Speeding Up and Slowing Down Video Clips

Sometimes we have scenes like walking along a street, or riding a bike along the road, a crowd filling up a venue, a band setting up the stage, etc where having the footage play at normal speed will be a bit long and boring in a Video we are making.
What people usually do is make this footage run in high speed, almost like a time lapse sequence.
Speeding up a Video like this using Adobe Premiere is very easy.

We may also have some footage that we want to make into slow motion, by decreasing the speed, and we can use the same tools in Adobe Premiere to do this as well.

Here is the first video we ever made trying out these effects:

There are two ways of changing the speed of clips in Premiere.

The following Tutorial video shows both ways, and in both of them click on your clip to have it selected.

 

To Summarise:

First Method is Window > Tools > then in the pop up tools use the 5th one down: “Rate Stretch Tool” or press the letter “X”
Then on timeline shorten back the clip and it does not lose any footage but just speeds it up to fill the shorter length.
Stretch the clip if you want to make slow mo.

Second Method is click onto the clip to have it active and then right click on the clip and pick “Speed/Duration”
or up on the top menu click “Clip” and then Speed/Duration
If you make speed in pop up box 200% it plays twice as fast, 50% makes half speed, 400% = 4X faster etc.

For our Bike Riding Video we found that the ultra fast speed for boring riding segments to use is 800% (or 8x normal speed).

For the slower section near the boats we used 200%, but as it is a long segment riding past all the boats, maybe we should have used 400%.

The Right Click Speed/Duration % method for speeding up video in Premiere seems to work really well.
We have not investigated “Speed Ramping”, because if you have a clip that is going faster, and then the next clip is normal speed, Premiere seemed to automatically do the gradient slowing down okay.

If you want to do very smooth fast then sudden slow motion, then try out “Speed Ramping” with Keyframes, as in this Tutorial:

 
 

Watermarking Your Video

For making a Watermark on your video, from a transparent PNG file that you have made previously, watch this video:

 

Multi-Camera Shoots

Using one Camera on a Monopod to do the wide angle view and capture the main soundtrack (eg. A Sony A77 with ECM-ALST1 stereo microphone), and then having other people operating basic handheld fully automatic cameras (like the Sony RX100 or the Lumix LX100), enables much more sophisticated Videos to be produced in Adobe Premiere.

This was the approach we used for making our “Appetite for Destruction” Guns and Roses show band Video Montage.

The following YouTube video has good suggestions about doing multi-camera shooting:

This is an example of a finished product, which shows to change the cuts on either a beat, or the end of a phrase or verse:

This is another good music video shooting type video how to tutorial:

 

Synchronizing Multi-Camera Clips

For our multi-camera “Appetite for Destruction” Video we used a wide angle camera and a close up camera.

Basically the wide angle shot was laid down as Video/Audio 1, and then the close up shots were pre-trimmed and laid down as Video/Audio 2.

Then comes the challenge of getting all the pairs of clips in sync, one at a time, using Premiere’s audio track matching function.

Unfortunately, on our main wide angle video, and the close ups videos, Premiere’s automated matching on Audio track wave forms only worked about 50% of the time.

When it did work it was pure magic, but when it did not work it was very long and tedious getting the close up cut in video manually shifted along the timeline to sync up with the main wide angle video.

Once the two clips are synched, we then unlinked the audio on the Video 2 cut in clip, and muted it in Premiere. We successfully rendered the final video without removing the muted clips at all. We also found for Audio transitions that using keyframes and our own custom fade in and outs was extremely useful.

It ended up taking about 12 hours of work, from camera unloads all the way to final uploaded web video. With experience this time could be reduced, but we reckon it would take at best 8 hours to make a 10 minute video featuring between 3 and 4 songs. Therefore Video is far more costly to produce in terms of labour time compared to a set of around 50 still images.

The following six minute YouTube video shows the basics of editing multiple Audio tracks in Premiere Pro CC:

Here is another video which also shows how to sync multicam clips:

This next video is rather long and is all about editing people dancing to Dance Beats:

This next video covers doing multicam editing for a music video.
The guy who did this video has quite a few other videos on YouTube that are worth watching.

 

Rendering Output for YouTube and Vimeo

And finally, to get to grips with all of the intricacies of Exporting Video to YouTube and Vimeo, this video is the one to watch:

So if you are interested in making movies with Adobe Premiere, using DSLR footage, then read our PDF document, and watch all the Tutorial Videos that are in it.

Enjoy,
Passy

 

If you found this article useful, then make sure you give our
“PBP Photos By Passy” Facebook Page a Like.

Photos By Passy Facebook Page