The footage for this project was shot with a Sony
MiniDV camcorder and the editing was done using Adobe Premiere
Elements 1.0 on a Windows XP PC (AMD Athlon XP 2600+, 160Gb Hard
Drive, 1Gb RAM, 128MB Video Card)
I started by importing all of
my footage from last Christmas which totaled about 1 hour.
I then previewed each clip to see
which ones I wanted to use. On the longer ones, I used the
Start and End markers to isolate the good parts so I wouldn’t
have to trim them down as much once I imported them into the
timeline. I also made note of any footage that would make good
cut scenes to use at transitions. I then proceeded to
build the video clip by clip, keeping most of the scenes about 9 seconds long, though there were
some variations depending on the scene.
After adding music, I continued to work on
the video by adding titles, credits, and transitions between
shots. For the most part, I used cross-dissolve transitions
because I find more flashy ones to be a bit distracting.
However, in a few places I needed to go with other options. I
noticed a problem with the cross-dissolve transitions into and
away from scenes that I time-stretched into slower motion. It
appears that the time-stretch does not apply until the scene is
completely transitioned. Therefore, those transitions ended up
very jerky so the distraction of the flashier transition
actually helped it flow more smoothly. Finally, I cleaned up the images which
were entirely indoor
shots and needed considerable brightening and contrast
adjustments. I also found the Shadow/Highlight tool to
automatically work wonders on the shots and used it in nearly
every scene.
