Last week I went downtown and shot some video of landmark buildings in Williamsport to serve as stock footage for my video editing projects. I got this idea from my After Effects book which includes some stock footage on DVD for its tutorials. You can buy stock footage for use in your video editing projects but it is expensive. I thought it would be better to shoot some video of my own.
I put together a tour of the city using my new stock footage. This gave me plenty of practice using Adobe After Effects. I spent an entire day editing my clips, rendering video, and uploading the finished video. First I sliced my video into clips in Adobe Premiere Pro. I wanted a separate video clip for each location. I have six location shots; Lycoming College, the Mary L. Welch Theater, the James V. Brown Library, the old City Hall, the Community Arts Center, and the Community Theater League at the Trade and Transit Center. Each clip had to be carefully sliced so there are no frames of another location at the beginning or end of the clip. I exported each clip as a separate WMV file.
Then I created an Adobe After Effects project for each clip. I imported the media, i.e. video clip, and added it to a composition. Then I added an Adjustment Layer and sharpened the image and did as much color correction as possible. The sky is an ugly shade of washed out aqua in some clips and I tried to correct that in the Lycoming College clip by adding a blue gradient. I also added text to the adjustment layer and animated the text by setting keyframes for its position. The clip title begins in the middle of the frame and then gradually sinks to the bottom of the frame. The intro clip features a more sophisticated text animation based on the Creating Motion Graphics book’s chapter 1 tutorial.
I had to render my compositions several times to correct the stroke color for the text, the size of the text, and for several other minor adjustments. This is where I got the most practice with Adobe After Effects because I repeated the same steps many times. After all six clips were rendered I imported them into Adobe Premiere Pro for final editing. I added a transition effect in between each clip. I also added the background music which came from a Music Trax multimedia tools CDROM I happened to have. This is royalty free music for multimedia. I need more background music for my video editing projects because this final step often delays my projects. I’ve tried to create my own background music using software synthesizers but I don’t understand music enough to create anything that sounds acceptable. You can buy royalty free background music but that is expensive.
I exported the entire video from Adobe Premiere Pro into the WMV file format using two encoding passes which improves the video quality. Then I uploaded the video to YouTube where the intro looks like crap due to the loss of quality that occurs as a result of their processing. I also uploaded this video to Stickam where the video is still processing two days later. The intro looks a lot better on Soapbox but I don’t like their video buffering which frequently interrupts the clip. I’m trying to upload my video to LiveVideo but I get an error after uploading 80% of the file. So for now I can only embed the crappy version on YouTube:
