So this weekend I’ve started playing around in Premiere, upon opening it up in the tutorial I was overwhelmed with the interfaces that were on the screen but after playing with them I became accustomed to them. After getting used to the interface, I went on Lynda.com to learn how to use the program.
The instructional videos were very helpful, one of the main points that I found was getting used to the keyboard shortcuts. Using ‘I’ and ‘O’ to mark your starting and end points of a piece, using ‘shift ‘+ ‘1’,’2′,’3′ or ‘4’ to switch between the interface panels saves a decent amount of time. Using ‘comma’ or ‘fullstop’ to insert or overwrite in the edit definitely is more preferable than selecting, deselecting, reselecting, drag-drop etc. The only problem is committing these functions to muscle memory. Having used other programs in the past (iMovie, windows movie maker) it was more of a click on the screen rather than the use of keyboard short commands. Even things like autoCAD when I was learning how to use it in engineering they never really emphasised the use of keyboard shortcuts, more like a ‘find your own way of doing things’ kind of thing and this ultimately wastes a lot of time for students. That was a bit of ramble, anyway using Premiere like this makes me feel more professional, in the sense that the actions I’m doing are easy and seamless but from the outside what I’m doing looks rather complex from someone who wouldn’t have a lot of knowledge of editing.
So how far am I up to in project brief 2? Well I really like a shot that I used from project brief 1 of me turning on my Xbox, I want to use a couple of shots from that. I’ve only done one shot however of me turning my Xbox on and fading out, which I imagine would be the start of the video and would transition into stills accompanied with a voice-over. What I want in my next project brief, stills accompanied by a voice-over by me, maybe a video of me playing guitar, reactions of me playing games or watching TV/sports something like that. As for the voice-over, I think I’ll just go over things like ‘this is me, this is my life’, sounds corny but all the videos from last year I’ve watched so far have been something along this nature. Maybe I’ll come up with something new, who knows.
Anyways I’m out for now, thanks for reading if you’ve stuck with this post for that long. Until next time.
