Editing Practical

Editing Practical

For my editing practical, I tried to manipulate stock footage to give it more of a cinematic look and feel. The "cinematic" look is often made up of the brightness and contrast, the manipulation of RGB and the fps that the footage is shot in. American cinemas play their movies at 24fps while British ones go to 25fps. While going at a higher fps and shutter speed adds more of a realism effect, it is not what is the movie standard. Shutter speed is what effects how much motion blur can be seen within the footage, it should always be half of what fps you're filming at. After around 20minutes in after effects with just some light changes. This was my end result. It's sad to say that the amount of workload my computer can handle is very limited and so it's hard to use effects which require a lot of CPU power and so some things I wanted to do isn't possible because of how much stress After Effects puts on the computer. There was also the problem with the white lines being present on top of the black bars which randomly happened and so I didn't know how to fix it, it may have just been the footage I used. 

 

 Originally, I was going for a look shown in the below picture where I could show the direct changes side by side, but the workload on my computer was too high and so made it really laggy and hard to work with. The render times would've also been really high. I also added black bars to my altered footage and so it would've looked like cropped footage if I continued with it. However I do think that this was a more effective way of showing the comparison, it's just a shame I couldn't do it.

 

I went for an RGB (red, green and blue) to play around with the colour to correct it. This is something which takes time and patience, also it needs a lot of experience to know what colour levels work best with your footage. I did not have any experience with colour correction prior to this and so it came out looking more blue than I wanted it to. 

 

I wanted to add a vignette effect (where you reduce the brightness or saturation around the edges to amplify the effectiveness of what's in the middle) however it didn't look right. To do a vignette effect you got up the oval shape tool and put it over your work whilst holding shift (this allows it to be formed in a consistent way) and then change the mask layer to subtract. Film making also consists of making the lights, lighter and the dark darker. To do this I used to the pen tool to map out some areas where light was shining and then putting the masking layer on subtract, overall making it lighter while keeping the rest of the areas dark. 

 Adding the black bars was simple enough, simply getting the rectangle shape tool and pressing shift, then duplicating that layer and move it down. I however, do not remember how the white lines came to be and will certainly look into it when doing this with other practical tasks. I decided that I wanted to add a blur tool at the start whilst it is panning up to give it the effect of not being in focus, this was created by adding an effect called "blur". I set it to about 21 at the start and gradually as the scene progresses the blurriness effect is less prominent making it seem as if it's going into focus.

 To render it out, the settings I used was a video format of H.24. I decided against adding music as the footage was too short anyway and the render time would've been longer. Overall, the time spent using the tools that professionals will also use is valuable in allowing our final product to look as crisp and as close to film like as it is on the big screens.