Today’s Plan:
- A Tip from Steve Stockman
- Work List #1 Assignment: Introduce Yourself
- Working with Adobe Rush
A Tip from Steve Stockman
I used to assign Stockman’s How to Shoot Video that Doesn’t Suck book in this class; I switched to the Schroeppel because it offers a bit more aesthetic depth. But Stockman does have three principles worth discussing for our first project: keep your shots short. If you watch a professionally edited piece, you’ll notice that most shots are 3-5 seconds long.
Work List Assignment #1
This first assignment is meant as an introduction to video editing. For some this will be review, for others it will be new. I asked you to record three ten-second clips of yourself doing something. Today we want to edit those clips. So, in a minute, we will fire up Adobe Rush and import your clips into the program.
Expectations:
- At least 4 shots
- Shots are between 3 and 6 seconds
- Shots are lined up using the rule of thirds
Note that you could cut up one of your 10 second clips into two 5 second clips. You could put a slight zoom on them and then either sequence them or separate them.
This assignment is due before the start of Friday’s class.
Working with Adobe Rush
Today we are going to watch a few Adobe Rush tutorials and then you will have time to work on your project.
Hey Marc, if the onboard tutorials aren’t great, this one that you used in 2020 is pretty good.
Super important note about saving and storing assets/video projects
TL;DR: Save your Adobe Project file on a stick drive with all of your video clips. Or save them in a folder and then .zip that folder and upload it to a OneDrive or Google Drive.
Let’s talk about how to avoid the red X’s of death. Two things. First, recognize that there is a difference between a project file, the file you work in to trim clips, add transitions, edit content, etc (the working file) and the file any other person can watch. In Adobe Premiere, it is .prproj. These files can only open in their respective Adobe program, and will NOT work separate from the files used to create them. To share a video project like these, you need to use the export function and convert them into an .mp4 (there’s other video extensions, but .mp4 is the pretty much universal file extension).
One thing you should realize is how video editing softwares work. When you “import” a file into a video editor project, you aren’t actually copying those files. The computer is making a “path” from those files, located in a specific place on a specific computer, to the working file (say, the .prproj file). Those files only get copied when you export the working file into the .mp4. Once exported, a .mp4 file cannot be edited, it is a finished product.
What does this mean? It means if you move the .prproj file, if you separate it from the clips used inside that file, then the working file will no longer be able to find those clips. Where those clips should be, you’ll find red X’s of death (which symbolize File Not Found). Your work will be gone.
What does this mean? It means, when working on a video file, that you have to save the project file and all the assets used in the project (video clips, audio tracks, still images, whatever) in the same folder. Which means if you want to work on video projects in class and then, say, in the library or at home, that you are going to need a way to move files around. There’s two ways to do this.
First, you can purchase a flash drive. Ancient technology, I know. These days you can get a 32 GB flash drive for like 6 bucks. One nice thing is that you can work and save files directly to the flash drive.
Second, you can use cloud storage, like a Google Drive or a Microsoft OneDrive. These are okay, but recognize that you will have to download all the files when you start working in a .zip folder, and then upload them all back up to the cloud when you are done. This can be annoying.
