Lesson 4: Extra Techniques
We're just about done! This will essentially be your final lesson for the course, the emphasis on what would have been a lesson 5 will instead be more of a workshop/feedback forum for your final project. Once you finish your completed video, you will have graduated this course!
So without further delay, let's get started. This lesson will focus on the editing techniques that are not necessarily inherent in the various tools and options you have in MM as a program. We will apply various singular effects and techniques that will culminate into something altogether new.
For this lesson, it would have been difficult for me to document in pictures, mainly because there would have been a sheer overload of them for each minute detail, if I did that while in progress with the video making. So instead, I just finished the project altogether, and went back afterwards to take the screenshots of key areas where I did specific editing. Hopefully, this won't make understanding the concepts any more difficult, and I will do my best to explain them, this should hopefully eliminate any mistakes I would have very likely made if I had made this lesson's pictures as I went along editing, as I would have surely lost track of or missed a few key pictures and never noticed it otherwise.
For starters, go ahead and watch my completed project, so you can know what we're dealing with.
What are some key editing features you noticed?
- - Music is fast paced and video is synced to it to a high degree. This is obviously intentional, because without the music synced like so, this video would feel vastly different, even with all the same video clips.
- - Certain clips are sped up. Why? In this case, it was for time and syncing purposes. As I said in previous lessons, context is key in certain video clips, and other times it can just be a pain and visually unappealing to split a clip in the middle to get rid of filler that truly isn't essential to the clip overall. Here, I split some clips to speed up the middle parts, so viewers know easily that this is the same uninterrupted video clip, but don't have to watch a few extra seconds where nothing pertinent is occurring. This also helps at certain points to get the music synced with the video without having to delete clips or find more complicated workarounds.
- - A few clips seem jumpy, and have pictures/sped up clips placed in odd areas. This is also intentional of course, and we will look at this in depth more soon, but this is more a cinematic effect I like to put in sometimes. I did it a few times here just because the fast pacing of this video didn't allow for too many other editing options that would work well.
- - There are no transitions between clips. Animations are present in one or two for a cinematic effect, but those visual clip-to-clip transitions are not present in any part of this video. Why? Well like I said before as well, sometimes these are not necessary. Transitions can help but the fast pacing of this video along with the general content just are not very conducive to any transition effects. If I do ever use them, it also isn't going to be between every clip. Decide on transitions on a clip by clip basis and if nothing works, then it is probably best it has no transition in the first place.
- - Visual effects are also sparsely used here. I used the blur effect a couple times, and a grayscale with red tint once. More on that and why I used it to come.
- - Notice anything else you think was intentional? Let me know. There may be a little in there...
But for the most part, what I outlined above were the main points I want to cover.
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Let's start with the music, and how it is synced. You will notice that just about every kill/headshot is synced to a specific upbeat part of the song...parts of which this particular song has a lot of. That, on top of the natural fast paced feel of the song, means that for some proper syncing, clips will have to be pretty short and very specifically timed to make this work.
The first challenge in this is of course having the footage to use here in the first place. Generally, you want to either pick the music you want and build the video around that, or vice versa. I usually find it a better idea to have the music I want picked out, or at least a few different tracks picked out that I think will work, before every compiling the video. This way you know generally how you want to line up your audio and video right from the start.
This isn't something I can easily show through screenshots since it involves audio, so hopefully I can explain this well enough in words. What I generally do for syncing audio to video is first get the audio into the project in the full length I plan to have it - in this case, it was the full song, uninterrupted, to that made it a little more simple. Next, I import all the video I plan to use or even maybe use and just slap it on in there in no particular order. Since I will be severely editing the length of these clips to fit the music, it is good to have a lot more footage than you have audio time. I probably had 20 minutes of raw footage (and that was already severely editing down from hours of gameplay) that became this 3 minute video.
Next I just drag the clips into a general order I think they will eventually fit into the video. I knew the start of this video would need a few quick, short headshot clips to set the pace with the music right, so I took my already short video clips and put them near the start. From there I just work through the video, seeing what is likely to work best at what point in the video with the music. I am not trying to perfectly fit the video to the audio yet, and if you try right away then one small change later will screw up everything behind it in line. So remember to just get a general lineup going here, one that should be just about where your final product will be but isn't synced quite yet so any small changes you may have to make won't screw up a whole lot.
Once you have that general order setup, and everything else is squared away, is when you behind editing for perfection in terms of lining up the video to the audio. ALWAYS START FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE VIDEO! Start syncing from anywhere else and jumping all over the place, and you will screw up timing for everything behind what you change. The video and audio are on different layers and will not change together to accommodate any clips you shave down for size.
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Now we get more into the specific techniques applied. First thing I did was a simple fade in for the very first clip. This clip was also specifically chosen as the first one just because it was best suited to a moderately slow fade in, so as to not jump directly into the music with no hesitation. It allows for at least a slight pause and little action before things kick off. The audio and video here has a fade in, with a Fade in from Black visual effect and the video audio also set to a slow fade in.
http://i.imgur.com/EXkxhCJ.png
The next place I did any specific editing was 17 seconds in. This clip shows a triple kill, but you will notice after the first kill, a fast and blurry clip of what's to come is shown. You can barely even tell what it is, and while in hindsight I could have maybe not sped this bit up as much, it is otherwise intentional. The effect I am going for here is a preview, or foresight, even though it's only a few seconds down the road until that bit is seen anyways. It's a small cinematic effect that I really like, and probably overuse now, but if done right can look pretty good. Here I don't like it as much, but if you recall from one of the Halo videos from lesson 1, this technique was applied there a couple times and done very well.
To execute this, I start with just the single clip of all three kills. I went to the kill I wanted for the preview shot and split it at both ends to get just that short clip of the kill separated (essentially only a seconds worth of footage, at best. This is where using that frame by frame select tool comes in handy, to get really specific on where I want to split the footage). I then COPIED that new short clip, leaving what I just split completely alone (we want to keep it's continuity with the rest of the clip, remember splitting the clip alone won't ruin continuity). I then went back to the start of the clip, and a little bit past the first kill, I split the video again. I PASTE here, selected the now copied clip and sped it up as well as added the Blur visual effect. And that's essentially it. And easy little preview clip, subtle to an extent, since it isn't something most people will immediately recognize, but for those that do or upon a second watching notice, it's a neat little addition.
http://i.imgur.com/nbNiDOx.png
The end bit of the clip has a short animation effect applied, subtle when viewing, but you will notice the camera quickly pan towards the center and down here, which emphasizes who was shot here since that is where the killfeed is ingame.
http://i.imgur.com/8k9HmSg.png
The next effect is a simple sped up clip, which is doing just what I described early, and that's cutting out a little bit of downtime where no relevant action is going on but not breaking the continuity of the clip.
http://i.imgur.com/EnYcH01.png
This is done a few more times throughout the video, I won't point out where unless there is something else special about it, because this is such a simple little edit. Whenever you want to do just this, you can split the clip at the correct points (here it's basically around the start and end of the gun reloading) and speed up just the new clip that's in between, so continuity is maintained and the rest of the clip isn't also sped up.
Next edited clip is another preview shot. Did you spot this one before too? It's done in the same way as the first one.
http://i.imgur.com/qkY6oVL.png
The next major edit is a little more tricky, as I combine a bunch of different things. Here, I have another preview shot, done the same as the previous ones. What's new is after this preview shot when the clip goes back to regular timing, I add a black and white visual effect. I don't remove this effect until right where the third kill happens, so as he is coming out of the scope, the regular color comes back.
http://i.imgur.com/m56VsDs.png
http://i.imgur.com/AOPoODk.png
http://i.imgur.com/4cY15ri.png
http://i.imgur.com/MYDZ49F.png
There is also another animation once the third kill happens, the Zoom to Bottom effect, again emphasizing the killfeed display in the bottom center.
This effectively combines every other technique previously applied in the video, and being at the end is a good way of building up to it as well. Even with all this in one short clip, some of it is still subtle, and what isn't won't overload the viewer either (well, hopefully
Other than the final clip of the video being slowed down a bit to fit the outro of the music track, there are no other edits in here that are different from what I described above. A lot of little subtle techniques applied, and the video has a little more life because of it. Imagine what you can do with other similar, but more specific techniques, with different audio and video? There are a lot of possibilities for such simple software.
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That concludes most of the lesson, at least what can be learned from my final video render from above. Now though, I will go over a few other points on things you can apply that weren't specifically outlined above.
1) Extra Audio
Notice how we have only one audio layer to work with? That can be a pain when you want to place multiple layers of audio in your project at the same point. There is an easy, albeit time consuming and not entirely conventional trick to work around this though. Simply render your video as complete as it can be for your one audio layer, and once it is rendered just import it into WLMM again (but as a new project this time). Now, your video is all put together with that audio now part of the video, so your audio layer is now free for different audio. Mixing the audio here could be a bit tricky, but is possible. Generally if I did something like this, it was to get subtle or small voiceover clips into the final product, such as the "Double Kill" or "Headshot" sound clips. Just make sure your volumes for the video and audio don't conflict too badly and this should work fairly well for most simple audio edits.
2) Tackling larger projects
You may not always have a small, 3 minute long video project like the one I had above. And that small one still took a lot of time and effort to complete fully. Whenever you have a larger project, especially one that may require multiple audio tracks and a lot more video, it may be better to split the project into segments and work on those one at a time. One older video I did had three separate audio tracks for music, so I split the work into 3 separate MM projects, one for each audio track. For one, it makes things easier to manage, but if you try to do all 3 in the same project, you run a huge risk of messing with the timing of one part in the beginning and messing up the timing of the rest of the timeline after that because of it. You make things easier on your organization if you split things up, and reduce the headaches of small tweaks or mistakes.
3) Photos are good too!
It's fine to use photos in your videos as well, but it obviously depends on the goal of your video on how much to use them, how to use them, and where to use them, if at all. With my video above, there was really no place for any pictures, as they would not have fit the fast pacing of the music. But generally in titles, intro, credits, and specific parts of the video, a few photos may fit very well. I have used them most in titles and credits, and if you have skills in photoshop those can be applied into WLMM through some good photos used as a title or credits image of some sort. It all depends on the goal of your video of course, but don'y shy away from photo usage just because you're doing a video project. WLMM has that Snapshot feature for a reason, and that's because it can be useful to use more often than you think! Rewatch my video below, and notice a few points where I use photos - ones taken using the Snapshot feature in the programs itself, at that.
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