Tech Session - Premier Pro

This morning we had a tech session demonstration on campus with Charlotte and Emily (our course technical demonstrators) on Adobe Premier Pro. Having never used this software before and still getting to grips with other Adobe programmes from level 4 I wasn't feeling that confident before beginning the session.

We began by learning some basic information about the programme. Its used for importing videos, audio and graphics in different formats. You can edit these in a visual timeline and add in effects, graphics and titles. We learnt about keeping our files organised and pixel sizes:

HD = 1920 X 1080 4K is literally 4x bigger than HD

4K = 3840 x 2160 4K can be scaled down to HD but HD cannot be scaled to 4K.

After going through the basics we were left with our task of making a short 10 second video to help us get used to the running's of Premier. I found this helpful as being on campus meant we were able to ask Charlotte and Emily questions easier and being able to talk to others about their work and process. I started by selecting some videos I already had on my phone as I hadn't started filming my mini project one yet otherwise, I would've used that. Instead I chose a few videos from when I went travelling last year. I chose these because I filmed them with a higher quality setting on my iPhone therefore they looked more professional. I uploaded these to the project panel and dragged them over to the timeline and watched them through. I had some trouble with this as the videos were playing back lagged and frozen, Charlotte told me this was because I hadn't rendered it which I then did so by pressing enter. This made the video in the timeline present as green instead of red which I then learnt meant it was well rendered.

I had some trouble cutting down my videos and placing an order without knowing what background music I wanted to have. I decided to leave the video and focus on finding some audio which I did by clicking the audio button then browsing the samples Adobe have. I chose my favourite, a low-fi crackled hip hop beat, and saved it to my CC library to place into the timeline. After doing this I was able to cut down my video and edit it in time and beat to the song to help sync it up. This took some trial and error to find out what I thought looked best and what clips looked better where but I got there in the end, I ended up adding a few more clips in and was able to get it where I wanted it. I struggled doing this as I didn't initially know you could zoom in on the timeline panel to make it more precise when trimming videos down but after learning you can press the '+' and '-' it was a lot more easier. I finally finished the project by adding in a credits page that was made default by Adobe just to finalise the video. Watch here:

Overall I found my video a success. Looking back to the start of the day when I was worried and confused on where to even start with the program, I am proud that I was able to produce something final and not just play around with some settings. Next time or in future I want to explore the effects and colour panels and play around with that side of video editing. Doing this has made me feel more comfortable for creating my Birkenstock mini project.