Draft #3

Editing The Third Draft!

I wasn't quite satisfied with the second drafts effect and thought they were quite mediocre. I also thought i could've added much more on beat editing so I decided to re-edit the whole video starting from scratch! Now I know that some of you would think that this would be repeating a very long process for the second time, however, after completing the first draft I was able to get a grip of the program and learnt more shortcuts and tricks! This time however I made sure that I did everything methodically as i knew that this would help my editing more organised. So what I did first was lay out all the footage on the time line and made sure that the lip synching was on point on all of the footage. I then played the whole song and set all the markers using the shortcut 'M'. I also added some flicker effects which are more towards the end, however, as this involves more cutting I had to do this manually with the blade. I then rendered it and this is what I got. 

Now the quality of the footage is good (considering it was filmed in 1080p/720p) however, due to the editing it did lose some of its quality and saturation. So what I intended to do next is correct the colours, hue and saturation. I also wanted to add an anamorphic frame onto the footage. Now for those of you who don't know what an anamorphic view is, its basically the twi blocks you see at the bottom and top of a movie. There is no real technical reason why this is used however it is used as it gives 'scope' to the footage which somehow increases the quality of the footage. 

This screenshot shows how I used the curved and solids to edit the footage. also, as you can see from the screenshot I am using After effects. Firstly I inserted the footage into the timeline. I then added an adjustment layer, which is where the quality of the footage will be controlled from. I then chose the curves setting which brought up the RBG curves panel. From here i can mix all the reds, blues and greens of the footage. This is cheaper way of enhancing the quality of the footage without having to buy plugins for £100 or more! If done correctly, you will get excellent results. 

After I was done with the curves, I then started with the anamorphic view. I did this by creating two new solids; One that was 1920x1080 and one that was 1920x817. I then put two rectangle masks over the HD view which is what left the two blocks only visible and that was basically it. Next the final things which i will be adding to the music video is the filming logo, artist logo and artist promo.

Draft #2

Making Of The Second Draft!

In the second draft, I intended to add some distortion to the music video, to give a sense of mystery; then the idea of a TV warp came to mind. So it was time to go onto After Effects :)! After Effects is very useful in making high standard effects as multiple plugins are released from different developers excluding Adobe. 

What i first did was import the first draft into the composition. I then added an adjustment layer which is what I actually add the effect to and which is where the effects functions from. I then shortened the adjustment layer so the effect only function where it pasts a section of the adjustment layer. In order to gain more accuracy I lowered the timecode into frames as seen in the screen shot above the time lap.

This is how the effect looks when it is in function. Settings can be altered and manipulated on the side panel; for example, the wave warp, wave speed and noise. This can determine how strong the distortion can be however, I picked a low amount for each setting in order to get a moderate effect in terms of strength.

I added some turbulance to add some added distortion to the image. The turbulance was a different plugin which was already on the presets when you buy After Effects. Again, the setting can be manipulated to your preferences.

 This is how the whole composition looked when I was finished adding the effect to sections of the video. I tried not to over use it and use it in relevant places which would be memorable. I then rendered it, which took me quite a long time to render on my mac even with the minimal amount of effect i used due to the low amount of RAM.

Draft #1

Making The First Draft!

For the first draft, i decided to use Final Cut Pro X! It was my first time using the program, however, it is not quite as complex and sophisticated as After Effects or Premiere Pro; however, it is suitable for the first draft as i will be simply mixing the footage together and doing some on beat editing, so the simple functionality should make it fairly quick for me to edit. We will get to the nitty gritty editing later!

Firstly I imported all the footage I needed into the panel before I started any editing. Final Cut Pro X is good for this type of editing as it allows you to add sections of the footage if you do not intend to add all of the footage. However, as it was my first time using Final Cut, I added all the footage. Once I added the footage, i then added the track in a MP3 file format (which is easily recognisable by any video editing software). So this saves me time, I then made sure I made the Lip Synching on point. I did this by muting the sound coming from the track and then increased the volume of the actual footage to see when the track started in the footage so i could match it with the actual MP3 track. I then cut the footage which was not needed. I did this to every piece of footage.

I then started the on beat editing. Theres a specific function which helps a lot in Final Cut Pro which is known as the Marker tool. It was really down to my sense of beat to mark out when the beat dropped. It was made easier by using the shortcut which is simply the key "M" on the keyboard to mark out the beat every time it dropped as the footage/track played. Once you set the markers, the will show with small blue mark points.  

I then used the Blade tool (shortcut "B") to cut the footage on the markers that i set which would allow me to cut any footage i would wanna replace with any other section of footage that I wanted to use. Again, this would've taken me much more time if I did this process with each an every footage track individually as i would have to match the lip synching every single time I cut a piece of footage. This is what it looked like when I cut some of the footage out (a lot of beat markers -_-" thank god for shortcuts!). 

Once I was finished I then rendered the footage to the correct settings! Draft One Finito :)!

Organisation Of Footage

It is very important to have your footage organised and numbered like the screenshot shows. This saves a lot of time as you wont have to continuosly watch each individual video to check what the footage is; normally it will show a frame of it (it doesn't show it on mine because my macbook decided to be slow    -_-")