.
Once I had shot all the footage for my music video I then began the process of editing - I was lucky enough to have an actress who was often free and so I was able to shoot the music video within a week or two, therefore I thought I would wait to gather all my footage before beginning editing. I chose to edit my music video at home as I own Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, the same software my college uses and one I was already familiar with, and because I used my own DSLR camera, the Canon EOS 550D, my footage was in the form of 720p HD .mov files which needed to be transcoded to a different format before I could work with them in Premiere (CS5 allows native editing with .mov files however CS4 does not). I chose to transcode them to the .mp4 file format using Adobe Media Encoder which did compress the footage to make the files a smaller size but didn't impact the quality.
Then I began a new project in Premiere Pro and added all of my source files to the bin and divided them into different folders so I knew what "scene" each set of clips belonged to (Fig. 1). After this I then added every clip into the timeline and rendered all of the footage so each clip would play in the timeline without lagging and therefore would be easy to discern where I wanted to cut the footage or if there were any problems with the footage and I needed to re-shoot, luckily all of the footage was fine and I didn't need to re-shoot anything.
Fig. 1
After all the clips had rendered I went through each and cut them down to what footage I would actually need in my video using the Razor tool primarily, out of habit, but sometimes using the simpler option of dragging the end or beginning of the clip to where you want to cut. Once I had done this I then began the task of creating the music video itself as per timings from my shooting script. I unlinked and deleted all of the audio from my clips (excepting the lipsync clips I had at the end of my timeline to be used if I needed them) and then began cutting the clips down and making each cut fit into the beat of the song, a popular music video convention. This was helped by using the visual waveform of the .mp3 to mark out the points where the music hits peaks, for example on drum beats (Fig. 2). I also turned made some of the footage slower and faster than it originally was which was ahcieved by simply right clicking on the footage in the timeline and adjusting the speed duration. I made the shot of the fake blood dispersing into water 250% faster as it gave a very intense feel and the minor shakes from the camera were emphasised which I liked, and I made the shot of the actress submerging herself in the bath water slow motion (50% slower) as it fit with the lull within the song and emphasised the act of her sliding under the water.
Fig. 2
Once I had all of the cuts in place and in time with the track, I then decided to add effects to each clip in the timeline to make them stand out more and generally give them a more filmic look like professional music videos. I began with the two scenes in the video that were outdoors and therefore had natural lighting and used an RGB Curves effect, an effect I already had a good knowledge of how to use thanks to editing photographs (and the images used in my digipak) in Adobe Photoshop. I highlighted the reds and greens in the image but didn't touch the blues as this would have made the scene look too "cold" (Fig 3 & 4).
Fig. 3 & 4
When it came to editing the colours for the three indoors scenes I had to use two different effects to obtain a result I liked. The original image was a very orange tone due to the incandescent lighting in my house (Fig. 5) so firstly I added contrast to the image using RGB curves again (Fig. 6) but then I added a Fast Colour Correcter effect and made the image predominantly blue, however when combined with the RGB Curves the overall effect was more of a muted purple colour, an effect I very much liked and one that fit with the dark theme of the video (Fig. 7).
Fig. 5, 6 & 7
However, another small section needed to be edited and that was the flashes the actress sees of herself spitting up blood after touching the cross necklace for the first time. I think that the original image looked very effective as it was due to the use of a strobing power torch for the lighting (Fig. 8) however it didn't connotate strongly enough that this was a vision inside her head so I used the RGB Curves effect again to add a bright red hue to the footage which I feel made it much more clear that these flashes are not real life (Fig. 9).
Fig. 8 & 9
Next, I decided to overlay footage of the actress with her mouth covered in blood and staring directly at the camera over the shot in which the cross necklace falls into the bath towards the end of my video which was a simple enough procedure in which I placed the video of the actress on a new video track above the footage of the cross necklace and changed the opacity settings to 'Overlay' (Fig. 10).
Fig. 10
Finally, to finish off the video I made the scene in which Cherry’s reflection acts independently of herself work correctly. I placed Cherry’s actual self footage on one video track and Cherry’s reflection footage on a track directly above it. Due to the way I shot the scene I made sure there was an empty space between the actress and the mirror itself so that there was an easily definable space in which to crop the top piece of footage to reveal the footage underneath (Fig. 11). The effect was simply called Crop.
Fig. 11
Then it was simply a matter of exporting the footage to create a working movie file ready to be uploaded to YouTube and burnt to a DVD, however it wasn't as simple as that for me as I will detail in my next post.
Once I had shot all the footage for my music video I then began the process of editing - I was lucky enough to have an actress who was often free and so I was able to shoot the music video within a week or two, therefore I thought I would wait to gather all my footage before beginning editing. I chose to edit my music video at home as I own Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, the same software my college uses and one I was already familiar with, and because I used my own DSLR camera, the Canon EOS 550D, my footage was in the form of 720p HD .mov files which needed to be transcoded to a different format before I could work with them in Premiere (CS5 allows native editing with .mov files however CS4 does not). I chose to transcode them to the .mp4 file format using Adobe Media Encoder which did compress the footage to make the files a smaller size but didn't impact the quality.
Then I began a new project in Premiere Pro and added all of my source files to the bin and divided them into different folders so I knew what "scene" each set of clips belonged to (Fig. 1). After this I then added every clip into the timeline and rendered all of the footage so each clip would play in the timeline without lagging and therefore would be easy to discern where I wanted to cut the footage or if there were any problems with the footage and I needed to re-shoot, luckily all of the footage was fine and I didn't need to re-shoot anything.
Fig. 1
After all the clips had rendered I went through each and cut them down to what footage I would actually need in my video using the Razor tool primarily, out of habit, but sometimes using the simpler option of dragging the end or beginning of the clip to where you want to cut. Once I had done this I then began the task of creating the music video itself as per timings from my shooting script. I unlinked and deleted all of the audio from my clips (excepting the lipsync clips I had at the end of my timeline to be used if I needed them) and then began cutting the clips down and making each cut fit into the beat of the song, a popular music video convention. This was helped by using the visual waveform of the .mp3 to mark out the points where the music hits peaks, for example on drum beats (Fig. 2). I also turned made some of the footage slower and faster than it originally was which was ahcieved by simply right clicking on the footage in the timeline and adjusting the speed duration. I made the shot of the fake blood dispersing into water 250% faster as it gave a very intense feel and the minor shakes from the camera were emphasised which I liked, and I made the shot of the actress submerging herself in the bath water slow motion (50% slower) as it fit with the lull within the song and emphasised the act of her sliding under the water.
Fig. 2
Once I had all of the cuts in place and in time with the track, I then decided to add effects to each clip in the timeline to make them stand out more and generally give them a more filmic look like professional music videos. I began with the two scenes in the video that were outdoors and therefore had natural lighting and used an RGB Curves effect, an effect I already had a good knowledge of how to use thanks to editing photographs (and the images used in my digipak) in Adobe Photoshop. I highlighted the reds and greens in the image but didn't touch the blues as this would have made the scene look too "cold" (Fig 3 & 4).
Fig. 3 & 4
When it came to editing the colours for the three indoors scenes I had to use two different effects to obtain a result I liked. The original image was a very orange tone due to the incandescent lighting in my house (Fig. 5) so firstly I added contrast to the image using RGB curves again (Fig. 6) but then I added a Fast Colour Correcter effect and made the image predominantly blue, however when combined with the RGB Curves the overall effect was more of a muted purple colour, an effect I very much liked and one that fit with the dark theme of the video (Fig. 7).
Fig. 5, 6 & 7
However, another small section needed to be edited and that was the flashes the actress sees of herself spitting up blood after touching the cross necklace for the first time. I think that the original image looked very effective as it was due to the use of a strobing power torch for the lighting (Fig. 8) however it didn't connotate strongly enough that this was a vision inside her head so I used the RGB Curves effect again to add a bright red hue to the footage which I feel made it much more clear that these flashes are not real life (Fig. 9).
Fig. 8 & 9
Next, I decided to overlay footage of the actress with her mouth covered in blood and staring directly at the camera over the shot in which the cross necklace falls into the bath towards the end of my video which was a simple enough procedure in which I placed the video of the actress on a new video track above the footage of the cross necklace and changed the opacity settings to 'Overlay' (Fig. 10).
Fig. 10
Finally, to finish off the video I made the scene in which Cherry’s reflection acts independently of herself work correctly. I placed Cherry’s actual self footage on one video track and Cherry’s reflection footage on a track directly above it. Due to the way I shot the scene I made sure there was an empty space between the actress and the mirror itself so that there was an easily definable space in which to crop the top piece of footage to reveal the footage underneath (Fig. 11). The effect was simply called Crop.
Fig. 11
Then it was simply a matter of exporting the footage to create a working movie file ready to be uploaded to YouTube and burnt to a DVD, however it wasn't as simple as that for me as I will detail in my next post.