Hi! It’s been another long week of In-Depth, and I’ll be reporting on my two-week progress, and chapters 4 and 5 on How to Have a Beautiful Mind.
Progress Update
Since my 2nd In-Depth post, I’ve had my third meeting with my mentor, but I missed out on the fourth due to an interference with another extracurricular. That was a miscommunication on my side, so I apologize for that. In our third meeting, my mentor gave me some feedback on the Humanities video I edited in quarter 2. He thought that it was well-done, but the one element that brought it down was the audio. For that reason, we spent a lot of time in that meeting for him to teach me the basics of audio editing/engineering. I learned the fundamentals of using a parametric equalizer to make audio clearer or less distorted in Premiere Pro.
Of course, we also discussed how the orange juice video was coming along. I was halfway finished at that time, but it turned out I had I forgot to set all the clips to the same framerate, and I had to start over. If I had left the clips I was using at different framerates, the exported (final) video would end up being noticeably choppy and inconsistent in frames. My mentor mentioned that this was a common mistake that amateur editors make. This week, I finished the orange juice commercial, my first practice video for my In-Depth.
Video Critique and Reflection
It seems that each time I re-watch that video, some critiques stand out more and more to me. Honestly, I have very few good words to say about my first video. That being said, it’s definitely a start and not an utter failure. I didn’t just throw all of the clips together. There were movement and cuts, you could perceive some kind of story, and the music fit decently.
Two major negative points stood out to me in the video. First, the video had a half-story, but it lacked a theme or a setting. The shots seemed scattered and it didn’t look well planned out. I couldn’t blame myself too much on this, as I used stock footage. Secondly, the cuts and transitions weren’t clean and seamless. Again, this could be partly blamed on stock footage, but I can see more than one place where there could have been a good opportunity for a seamless transition. The video didn’t flow well which made it look not very professional. All in all, I still think that I’m off to a great start and I have much more potential to improve on my future videos.
Editing efficiency and more
My general time goal to edit this video (excluding selecting footage and music) was 1.5 hours, as it takes professionals around half an hour to edit a video of this length, not to mention producing a much higher quality product. In total, I took over 2.5 hours to edit the video, but if I hadn’t messed up with the framerates, I would have taken just a bit under 2 hours.
There are probably three factors currently that I believe are slowing me down the most. My mentor might think otherwise, so this would be a question I will ask him in our next meeting.
First, I’m not using shortcuts enough. This is just something I need to get used to by constantly reminding myself to avoid using a mouse and focusing on editing with a keyboard.
Secondly, I spend an absurd amount of time, possibly up to half the time I’m editing just searching up either how to do an edit, or how to do an edit quicker. Again, it’s something I believe just comes along with time and experience. Editing videos are turning out to be several times better practices than simply navigating through the software. Plus, it’s more entertaining too!
Thirdly, my PC seems to be having trouble with the CPU intensive editing software I’m using. The major problem is playback lag, along with slow loading and exporting, which slows my editing speed down a ton, I estimate around 20% of editing time could be saved with a faster and smoother playback. I had considered this might be a possibility before starting on my project, but my PC met the software’s requirements, and my mentor didn’t think it would be a huge problem either. I thought I would since I had a decent playback while editing the Humanities project (loading and exporting times were very slow though), but it turned out that was because that project was composed mostly of moving images so there were not many frames to playback. When I started my orange juice project though, the playback was painfully choppy. I tried a variety of methods to solve this issue, but it seems that it was just my computer that couldn’t handle it. As a compromise though, I ended up rendering sections of the video I wanted to playback just to see what my edits looked like, but this still chipped away at the precious seconds a video editor needs.
A better PC would not only help with my In-Depth project but also for future situations where video editing comes in handy. Not to mention, it would make my daily online tasks go much faster too. I brought these (logical) points to my parents requesting a better PC, and they agreed! I’m hoping to have it completely ready to go by the end of this month, but that would depend heavily on shipping times.
How to Have a Beautiful Mind
How to be interesting
In this previous week’s meeting, the first topic that we were tasked with was being interesting. I focused on elaborating to pull interest and using the “what if” statement. For example, when my mentor was explaining to me the steps to set the framerate of all clips and the timeline. I asked, “what if the clips were set to a certain framerate, and the timeline was set to another?” This opened up another line of thought, of how the program would react to conflicting instructions.
How to respond
The second idea for this week was how to respond. For this topic, I asked for clarification where I didn’t understand an explanation from my mentor. For example, when I was learning about audio editing, he was explaining two parts of the audio: frequency and pitch, at the same time. I found it confusing, and hard to differentiate between the two. When I asked for clarification, he demonstrated with his own voice and showed me what the audio chart looked like. I understood quickly after that, and the result was me knowing the frequency and pitch of audio rather than staying unclear with the two components. For how to respond, I also supported points my mentor gave with videos I had watched previously. My mentor was explaining that music was arguably the most important portion of a video and that an editor should always take their time choosing the right music track. I completely agreed and supported his point by mentioning a video I had watched earlier that showed the contrast between two different music tracks on the same video clips and how the viewer was affected.
Thanks for reading my In-Depth update, if you’re interested to see what I’m up to in my video-editing journey, just give a quick check-in here every 2 weeks to see my latest progress!