About Me
About Me
Online course via LinkedIn Learning.
Maxim Jago is an award winning Filmmaker, best-selling Author, consultant Futurist, Director of The Creativity Conference, and an International Public Speaker.
Maxim is currently engaged in three feature film projects that include virtual reality storytelling elements, a practical philosophy book intended to offer actionable approaches to living a purposive and fulfilling life, hosting the next Creativity Conference, editing his Directorial Debut Feature Film, ‘It’s Haunted’, consulting for technology clients, and preparing a series of new books exploring emerging trends from a Futurist perspective due to be published by IEEE-USA.
Here is a sample from the LinkedIn Learning course. This section is available on YouTube, but the rest are behind LinkedIn Learning's Paywall.
While becoming reacquainted with Premiere, I worked on creating two proof-of-concept type experiments with a few other productions that are based on comics.
Cowboys and Aliens was the first experiment.
It jumps around a bit, it's much too fast, and there were a few issues with the recording, but it's a start.
So, that 87-second video took a couple hours. Overall, I enjoyed playing with it. The quality is a bit low, and the recording I used had some chunks missing. I recorded it off of YouTube instead of setting up my Blu-Ray recorder, and I'm guessing the missing snippets are to try to keep it from getting flagged by YouTube's auto-copyright infringement detection.
One of the newer features in Premiere Pro will analyze the imported video to add cuts automatically at scene changes. When cutting recordings, it can be very tedious to try to determine between exactly which two frames the cut happens. This new feature saved a lot of time. It's not 100% perfect, I think I noticed one cut that it missed... but still, a great new feature!
Due to when Ang Lee's Hulk came out, a lot of home TVs were still using the old 4:3 aspect ratio. As such, a lot of the interviews are not widescreen. Some of these recordings are in full screen with bands on the sides, some are in widescreen, some are widescreen shrunk down to fit inside of a full-screen resolution. That's the next part I'm adjusting.
On the timeline here, you can see all the pink sections. Those are full screen sections that I've replaced the distracting green bands with black. I'm scaling up the wide screen sections to fit within the screen itself; so there will be no black bands around the wide screen sections. This was pretty easy to learn.
Every time I go through it, I find more things to adjust. I think this is the fourth major edit- the first three were mostly sequencing and re-sequencing, adding new clips in, adding additional B-roll, and removing clips that were repeated from different sources. There are still some chunks of B-roll that repeat, and they may or may not remain in the finished product. I'd prefer to remove them, but they aren't super high priority to me. The total length is about 30 minutes right now, and I'm finding a few segments to cut here and there to decrease the time and improve the flow.
I'm also noticing more issues with color and brightness. The quality from the different recordings varies a lot. Some of them are washed out and need significant bright and darkness adjustments. Others also have significant color issues. This was the next new thing for me to learn in Premiere, not hard but I feel like its made quite a bit easier by jumping between different workspaces. When I work in Photoshop or other tools, I typically just stick to one workspace. As such, I don't really like jumping between different workspaces. I'll probably get accustomed to it though as I continue working with Premiere.
An example of the color and brightness issues are the interviews with producer Larry Franco are a bit dark, and extremely warm. You can see the original on the left, and the color adjustments on the right.
The finished amalgam of various behind the scenes ended up being 27:40 in length. I still would like it to be shorter, but at this point, I'm not sure what else to chop out. I think this will be the length it will remain at, for the time being anyway. See the end result on part 2 of my Ang Lee's Hulk Study.