P5 - Editing my Music Video

 P5 - Editing my Music Video

After I had recorded all of the shots I needed for the video, I promptly took to the next stage, which is editing the shots together into a music video.

The program I used for this was Adobe Premiere Pro for Windows, which I used on my personal computer at home since we are still in remote learning. Originally I would've used Final Cut Pro on one of the school's Macs.

This was how my music video folder looked pre-editing. I had all of the shots organised by scene alongside the audio file and Premiere project file I had just created.

The first thing I did on Premiere was import all of my shots and organise them into folders according to the scene they were from. This was quite simple to do since I had already organised my recordings on my computer, so I could import the clips one scene at a time.

Then, I added all of the clips to the timeline and also imported the audio file and added that to the timeline. At this point, the project is over 30 minutes long! This is mostly due to some clips including several other takes that were recorded alongside the take I chose to keep.

Once I had all the clips on the timeline, I begun the bulk of the editing process. I cut all of the shots down to the correct length, also changing the speed of some shots so that they fit better within their shot duration. This is partly because while

recording the shots, I only estimated the shot duration based on the timestamps I detailed in the script. 

To create the jump cuts that appear in a few shots near the beginning of the video, I used the blade tool to cut a single clip into multiple segments then deleted some of the segments, rearranging the remaining segments together to cut between a single shot.

With this, the basic edit is done.

After completing the basic edit, I began creating the more complex edits. I started by adding dissolve transitions between shots 7 & 8 and shots 50 & 51.

Then, I added the title card onto shot 3 using the text tool, Placing it just above the centre of the screen.

The whip pan effect is used in 4 points throughout the video, indicated by the pink layer above the main video track.

To create the whip pan, I followed a YouTube tutorial. I created an adjustment layer and then added the offset, directional blur and posterise effects from the video effects folder. I used keyframes to increase and decrease the intensity of the effects at different points of the clips. The blur and posterise effects peak in intensity right as one shot cuts to the next, which masks the cut entirely, creating the appearance of a single shot.

The last edit I performed was adding an overlay of the phone screen onto shots 4 & 5. I used the corner pin tool to morph the phone screen clip onto the phone in the main shot to appear as though they are one. I also keyframed the opacity of the screen in both shots so that the phone screen fades in and out, just like it would in reality.

These are the export settings for the final video. I used the H.264 codec and made sure that the resolution of the video was 1920x1080, which is the same resolution as all of the recorded shots. I chose the "High bitrate" preset because it will ensure that audiovisual quality is not compromised.

Final Music Video