An Intro to Adobe Premiere and After Effects

Listen to the music. We need to know what we’re editing to! What we’re hearing will drive what we expect to see. So, close your eyes and listen to the music over and over again so you have a clear picture of where you would expect changes, motion, speed to be applied to your project.

As we listen through the music to find the points we want to use for any changes, we can add markers or edit points. Evan goes through his process to show you how he would go about marking the audio up ready to edit the footage.

AREAS COVERED

• Listen and Analyse the Music
• Setting Markers and Edit Points to Beats
• Putting Clips in the Timeline
• Editing to the Narrative
• Mark in/out Points
• Roughing in the Footage
• Using Timelapses in the Timeline
• Moving the Audience with your footage choices
• Speed/Duration and Rate Stretch
• Editing for a Thematic Mood

We briefly touched on putting footage into the timeline in lesson 1. Here, Evan goes into more detail about moving footage from the project window into the timeline, via the source window. We also go into a little bit about editing to the narrative, which is always important.

Evan starts to add footage to the timeline and roughly edit in the sequence, so we can start to see how are title sequence will look. Some of our footage, like time lapses and footage that has been sped up, will be placed in our timelines solely so we can rough in our footage. Later, we will link through to After Effects and edit the time lapse and sped up footage.

Once we have our footage all roughed in to the timeline, Evan reviews the choices he has made and why. We look at the footage and make sure that, even though there is no obvious narrative, we are still taking our viewers on a journey through the title sequence.

This is the part of the course where we start to take some of the clips from our timeline and move over into Adobe After Effects, so that we have more options when editing the footage. Evan gives a brief overview of the AE work space and then starts to move over footage from our Premiere Project.

AREAS COVERED

• Learn After Effects Work space
• Moving Footage From Premiere to After Effects
• Working Between Premiere and After Effects
• Layer Properties
• Animation and Key frames
• Pre Rendering
• Organizing Assets in After Effects
• Stabilizing Footage and Stabilization Properties
• Inserting Text and working in 3D
• Masking the Footage
• Blending Modes

The first piece of footage Evan moves over is one of the time lapse pieces. We go through how to re position and scale the footage to the desired size and position. To have more control over the footage, we start to look at the properties and how we can use these to get the exact look we’re. We also start to look at animating this footage using key frames.

Next, we move onto some more exciting effects like stabilization, we go through the process of getting the footage over to After Effects and stabilizing it. We also look at the properties of stabilization and how to do things like smoothing and preserving scales. To give one of our time lapses a different look, we start to look into how to use 3D space and what we can do with it, Evan shows you how to create a new camera to allow us to take full advantage of this new look. To help us with this effect, we start to use feathered masks.

Adding text to the footage can be quite tricky, especially if you want to do it in a way that makes it look like it is part of the footage. Evan goes through the process of adding text in 3D space. There’s no point in doing all of this work if the text is simple and boring. So we go through a few ways to spice it up a little, like blending modes.

Adobe After Effects has a huge library of tricks and techniques, so in this lesson, Evan takes us through a few more in depth things we can do to learn After Effects to a higher standard for our projects.

Some of the effects we want to use on this footage rely on having a full frame rate to process, so the first thing we’re going to do is stretch out our footage, back to it’s original length. We also need to make the composition larger to accommodate all of the footage.

To add text into this scene, we start out with the camera tracker, which gives us the option to apply a number of effects based on the data we get when we run the tracker. Evan talks us through the stages and properties we can set to make analysing the footage much easier for After Effects, giving us a better end product. Now we have this data, what do we do with it? There’s a lot of cool stuff we can now do, so Evan talks us through how we can apply this to text.

AREAS COVERED

• Stretching Footage Back out to its Original Length
• Composition Settings
• Setting the Work Area
• Camera Tracking
• Editing Camera Tracking Points
• Creating Null and Camera
• Parenting to a Null Object in 3D Space
• Precompose your Composition
• Time Remapping
• Graph Editor for Key Frames
• Forced Motion Blur

In order to speed the clip up so that it is the same speed as we originally roughed out, we look at time remapping in After Effects. But! Before we do that, we need to pre-compose the composition so that we can apply some time remapping to all of the layers in the composition.

The last thing we do in this lesson, is to add a couple of tweaks to make this effect much more believable. For a start, we add some forced motion blur.

Now that we know the workflow of moving footage from Premiere to After Effects, we’re going to do the opposite. We will show you how to create title cards in After Effects and move this over to Premiere. We start off by creating a composition that we will create the title card from. We add some text and edit it to have the look we’re after. We also need to animate the text into our sequence, so Evan talks through some options, like animating opacity and the massive amount of properties we have for just this one effect. 

AREAS COVERED

• Creating a Composition
• Text Tool and Text Align
• Animating Text
• Using Masks to Animate
• Working with Key frames
• Adding Textures
• Curves
• Track Maps and Blending Modes
• Creating movement in 3D
• Creating Solids
• CC Particle world, the Physics and Properties.
• Adjustment layers
• Exporting for use in Premiere

We have our title, now we need to make it a little less boring. We get to be a little more creative now and bring in some textures. Next, Evan works a few effects into the background texture using curves - which you’ll be familiar with if you’ve used Photoshop before. 

To make this title more interesting, we should add some movement to the title and why not do that in 3D space! Evan quickly adds in movement to the background and text to make it appear as if it’s coming towards you. 

We also add in some grunge and dust using the CC Particle World effect, which as you’ll see, has a huge amount of scope as to what you can do with it. We go into the physics and properties of the particle simulator to see what we can do before we settle on a final look. We will always be thinking about the overall look, the thematic consistency that will really make your work stand out. So, we add in a new adjustment layer and start to work with the different tones of the piece. 

Once we have something we’re happy with, we look at how to move this title over to our sequence in Premiere.

In the final part of our epic voyage to learn after effects we’re going learn about colour grading and colour correcting (there is a difference!) and how to apply this to our footage. We will also look at how to export our footage ready to be released into the wild.

AREAS COVERED

• Colour Grading and Colour Correcting
• Thematic Consistency
• Grading in After Effects
• Working with Adjustment Layers
• Removing Colour and Adjusting the Contrasts
• Grading in Premiere
• Other Options
• Exporting your Sequence
• Options, Options and more Options
• Adobe Media Encoder

Our title sequence doesn’t have much consistency as the footage was taken in different places with different lighting, so we look at grading and correcting the footage to make the sequence consistent, at least making the sequence thematically consistent.

These finishing touches will make your work stand out, it’s all in that attention to the detail. We have some shots that are very light and taken in the day but this doesn’t exactly say Zombie Apocalypse. So, we look at grading this footage to be more in keeping to our theme.

A lot of the effects we’ve used are also available in Premiere, so if you don’t think you need to move your footage over to After Effects, you’ll want to know where to find them!

The very last thing we need to do, is get this sequence out of Premiere so it can be used. Evan will go through how to export your project and what to bare in mind whilst you’re setting up your export...there’s a lot of options.