Editing Tips Cheat Sheet

Colour Grading:

• Create an adjustment layer so you don’t have to edit each individual clip, you effectively make a filter that is applicable for each bit of footage. This is handy because often you don’t want to edit the actual footage. This is done by clicking ‘New Item, Adjustment Layer’. This later controls my colour correction, this saves editing each clip/new shot individually. Right Click, New item, Adjustment Layer.
• With the clip I selected I go to the effects control panel. Effect Controls-Video Effects-Colour Correction, after that I open up the 3 way colour corrector.
• To Change the colour wash of the whole clip I’m editing click the master button. By doing this all effects that are applied are applied onto the image.
• Saturation (which you can find under the 3 colour palette circles) when raised, gives you brighter, bolder, more prominent colours. Its preset is 100, by boosting it to say 130 you get a much more heated/glary image, by lowering it to say 80 you get a much cooler picture. I think saturating the image only slightly makes it a bit deeper, bolder and starker. Obviously you don’t want to overdo things. Feel free to experiment with saturation. You master work with the master saturation.
• Make sure when you are operating the three different colour palettes (3 way colour corrector)-the midtone, shadow and the other one (I can’t remember at the moment) that the first one that is tweaked is the midtone one. Its also important to click the box next to the Master Button, If I don’t do this I don’t think the colour get applied to my adjustment layer. Note: Blues give you a cooler image, Whereas Orange (and its various shades) give you a much more heated, punchy image. To get the 3 way corrector on the adjustment layer, you simply Drag It on.
• Below the 3 way colour grader are Input Level Bars. On the input level bar if I drag the triangle to the centre of the black patch my darker colours become darker, if I drag my white colours to the centre of the white patch, my light colours become lighter. The white colours generally become washed out and blown out if overused, so it’s important to be subtle. For Black, you slide the triangle from the left, in turn you get greater contrast. This is known as the ‘Master Levels’ in Premiere and it heavily effects the contrast.
• RGB Curves. For RGB curves you can pull the individual colour channels out, such as the blue and red. For example when you drag the red one to the left corner (the extreme) the red on her jacket really shines. You drag these RGB curves onto the adjustment layer.
• To continually compare your edited image to the original image, you can toggle the RGB on and off, or you can just click off The Master button. Alternatively you can view the source monitor to see the unchanged clip.
• The Luma Curve controls the light which effects how bright the image is overall. It effects the light and dark of the image without effecting the overall colour values. With this you don’t want to push it to the extremes because it can become too ‘Contrasty’ and not very natural.
• To remove effects you can either click off the effects or go into ‘effect controls’ and hit backspace. This takes away the effects completely-you can also toggle effects on and off.

Applying Transitions

• Effects, Video Transitions, Dissolve (the most common one), and you drag your effect onto the footage. If you want it to go for a longer or shorter time you can trim it in or trim it out. By zooming in and either dragging it to the left or right of screen you can ‘play with’ how quick these transitions happen by merely trimming in and out.
• Often when beginning or ending a short clip its could to apply the transition ‘Dip to Black’, it looks more subtle and nuanced. For big jumps cross dissolves are good to use.
• You can right click on a certain type of transition and make it your default. The 2 common ones are cross dissolve/film dissolve. You can drag and drop it on the clip where you want it if you want the same transition over every single cut/clip or you can highlight all or click on each individual clip whilst holding shift and go to ‘Sequence’ and ‘Apply default transitions to Selection’. You get your default transition on where you selected, if you don’t want to highlight everything just click on the cuts you want whilst holding shift-and you can trim, drag and scale how you wish.
• By double clicking it you can edit in an alternative way, you can edit the duration by clicking on the duration box and typing in the number of seconds.
• By going to the right of the screen you can choose where the transition occurs on your clip. Do you want it to be smack bang on the cut or a little bit earlier or later? You can change/drag where you want it too start and finish.
• If you get Zebra Stripes whilst doing this it means there are not enough frames for a smooth transition, everything appears quite still, because adobe copies the image in order to fill in the time. It duplicates the frames and everything looks very static.
• If you want to trim your transition in the timeline but perform the action at the top of the screen, by pressing shift K and by having ‘Loop’ ticked you can get your transition constantly being played on one of the screens, hence you can always view how your dragging looks.
• There are also options for special effects transitions and what not. A particularly experimental one is ‘Displace’-it gives you quite a strange look.
• Iris Cross is funny-if you don’t want to delete the bad ones you can just drag things over the top of them.
• By Dipping to Black at the end of the video looks quite smooth.

Speeding Up and Slowing Down Clips:

• Windows, Tool, Click Stretch Rate. What this does is stretch he frames and makes them go for longer, a by-product of this is slowed down footage. You can drag it out short or longer, what it doesn’t do it cut any footage-it just changes there delivery pace.
• Or you can Right Click, ‘Speed Duration’. 100% is base speed, 50% makes the clip go for two times longer, hence two times slower. 200% works the other way, it makes it go two times quicker.

Thoughts after practical use

• You create adjustment layer where he clips lie, and you drag your effect onto the video to be able to engage and edit it, you also must click on effects control at the top of the screen.
• I made my midtones more orangey for a warmer feel as well as my shadows, and I made my highlights blue.
• I dragged my input and output levels in.
•  Tint on Premiere if you go from ‘Map Black to’ ‘Map White to’ you completely tint and colour the image from black to white, as if you clicked the black and white thing on windows movie makers. You can even tint from green to purple