November 24, 2018

Putting the Adobe Premiere Elements Knowledge to Work

For this post, I get to play producer (and director, as much as our cats take direction) and practice some of the things I’m likely to use from Adobe Premiere Elements during my build.

Playing around from the first post about Premiere, I already have two videos and a music file from bensound.com.

Here’s what I want to cover…

  • import a still image
  • pan and zoom with that image (use as video intro)
  • import a new video
  • add all three videos, then trim
  • add video transitions between clips
  • fade to black before the first clip
  • on one clip…
    • do a freeze frame, then…
    • add text and line to show what the cat is playing with
  • do a faster than 1x time lapse
  • add motion titles to introduce clip 1, clip 2
  • render and save
  • upload to YouTube
  • embed the YouTube video into this post

Import a still image

This was a drag-and-drop from Windows Explorer…

Pan and zoom

I dragged the image to the timeline…

…then clicked the Pan and Zoom tool…

I realized the image duration wasn’t long enough to have much impact, so I went back to the timeline to lengthen it to 10 seconds by dragging the right side in the timeline. In the Pan and Zoom tool, I get some defaults: 1 second of hold on either side (green), then 10 seconds of motion (blue)…

For the final version, I did two pans by adding another frame and changing the control points…

Clicking Done put it in the timeline.

Import a new video

Another simple operation… First, I plugged in the camera and put it in USB mode. Next, I used Premiere to add it directly from my device.

I chose to not add it to the timeline, as I’ll use that clip toward the end of the video. Also, the default was my Videos folder, so I changed that to where my other videos for this project are saved.

Add all three videos, then trim

I multi-selected the videos to add, then dragged them to the timeline…

I didn’t want to use the audio recorded in the clips, so I removed it by right-clicking on the audio track for each clip…

Next, I dragged the music file from the Project Assets; note, the audio (green) is shorter than the video clips combined, so some trimming is required.

There are multiple ways to do this, but I decide to trim the third video by double-clicking on it. You can edit the in and out points from there…

Next, I right-clicked on the timeline to close things up…

I repeated the same process on the other video clips.

That’s looking better! Now we can add some transitions.

Add video transitions between clips

There are a lot of transition options in Premiere that I likely won’t use. However, dissolves are pretty tame, so I added 2-second film dissolves between each clip…

Fade to black before the first clip

I inserted a 5-second (default length) black video…

One problem here was that inserting the video broke the audio…

Unfortunately, you can’t close the gap with a right-click. Also, moving the left boundary of the right side of the audio clip will close the gap, but you can tell the music isn’t continuous on playback. Even moving the audio to the Audio 2 track and then adding the black video to the Video 1 track still left a gap! The solution was to remove the audio all together, deal with the video first, then add the music. That’s a lesson learned: Add the music at the very end.

All that was left was to fade out the first video clip…

You can see the yellow keyframe node and line (left side) showing the rate of fade…

Freeze frame with text

I set the CTI to a frame where Pantalaimon was about to grab my pipette…

Then I used the menus to create a freeze frame…

From there, I set the duration to 3 seconds and added it into the timeline…

I added some text to go with the freeze frame…

I adjusted the duration of the text to match the freeze frame by dragging the right border of the text (pink)…

Next, I added a white rectangle, changed the text to black, then used the line tool. (I needed to right-click on the text to bring it in front of the rectangle.)

Do a faster than 1x time lapse

I selected the video to manipulate, then used the Time Remapping tool…

Next, I selected in the in and out points, set 3x speed, then clicked Done…

Add motion titles to introduce clips

I selected one of the lower third styles from the “Kinetic” collection…

Next, I removed the purple background and set it to transparent…

From there, it showed up in the timeline so I could align it with the other clips…

Render and save

I chose Export and Share under the file menu and used the default settings for HD 1080…

Upload to YouTube

This was pretty straightforward as well. I went to https://www.youtube.com/upload…

While it’s uploading, you can put in some metadata…

The rest was just waiting for the upload to finish and following a few other steps.

Embed the YouTube video into this post

YouTube gives you the HTML snippet to put in the text (HTML) portion of the WordPress post.

Copy and paste did the job…

Up next

At this point, I have my modeling space set up, learned about my camera, and produced a video.

The F-4 kit contains about 300 pieces and has several configurations (armament, landing gear, cockpit, etc.), so there are decisions to consider. Something I learned from my first build (Chevy Camaro) having watched a video from a scale modeler, sometimes the desired build sequence is different than one given in the instructions. For example in this model, the instructions may say to glue in the landing gear early on; however, it’s easier to work with the entire airplane underbody for painting, decals, and weathering first, and then put the landing gear on once that stuff is dry.

I found two YouTube videos to study — one is an end-to-end build, the other deals with the cockpit. From there I can compare those with the kit’s instructions to develop the build steps I want to follow.