Speaker 1: Hey, hello everyone, I'm Dimitri with Horror Canucks and welcome to another video. In the past, we have done a few filming tutorials giving you a few tips and techniques of how our videos are produced, you know, using the camera and using gear and stuff like that. But in this episode, we'll be talking about post-production and what goes into behind the editing process of it. It won't be super technical, but I will be giving you guys the concepts and ideas to take away from it so that you can apply it to your own workflow, regardless if you use the same Adobe CC 2016 suite or not. Let's get started. But first, the sponsor for this video, Videoblocks.com. They have a ton of good quality footage, motion backgrounds, and After Effects templates for you to use, which is very well categorized. You get a 7-day free trial with 140 free downloads if you use our link to sign up. Everything is royalty-free to use in your future personal or commercial projects. All right, so the first thing that I'm going to talk to you about is organization and backup. Organization is important because it improves efficiency and the satisfaction of your workflow, and backup is so that you don't get stuck with lost data and costly recovery and may potentially fully lost information. So the way I work now is I have three Vector 180 SSDs. One of them is dedicated for video projects that are currently working on, so all my source information goes there. My Cache 2 drive is the backup for the video project, so these are kind of linked together. So anytime I'm working on projects here, they are sort of backed up or cloned onto this drive so that I have two spots in case any of them sort of fails. And my Cache Vector 180 SSD drive, which is for my scratch disks and just Adobe Cache. So this is the video project's SSD. This is where all the current projects are happening. I'll be using NZXT Manta as the example for this video. So we open that up, and this is where all the source files are located. But basically, as soon as those files are imported onto the SSD, I copy that folder onto a separate SSD, which as you can see right here. And in case anything happens with SSD number one, everything is sort of still backed up. Now, as soon as the review is finished, it's going to go into our Western Digital My Cloud Mirror, which is an 8TB RAID 1 array. Basically go into here, go into this volume, Hardware Connects Video Backup, which is our archive, go into my name, and I would cut the full completed NZXT Manta video into here so that I can access it later on if needed without it occupying space on any of my SSDs. So this Local Area Network Connected NAS is very nice for archiving stuff, and I can access it anytime I want. All right, the next thing that we're going to talk about is templates. And, you know, once we're happy with folder organization outside of this, you know, video editing software, we have to worry about organization inside of it. So first, I have sort of created a template for each single video review, in which this type of folder organization doesn't change from video to video. It maintains the same. So I have my video list, which is all my B-roll. It's kind of self-explanatory. You can see it here. I have another folder for on camera. So if I'm doing something on camera, it's going to go there because I record audio on an external voice recorder so that when I drop all those files in there, I can easily just align them to and know where those files are because that's the best thing. You don't want to be looking for files. You want to be working with files. Extra footage is where I place anything that I shoot extra after the review or the initial B-roll thing is finished. So for example, if I'm working with, you know, one video and I see all one shot is missing, I would shoot that shot and I would put it in here so that I can sort of navigate to the extra footage folder in case I need to access it later. Music, self-explanatory. Everything is organized by genre. Very nice and easy in case I want to have some calm background or hip hop stuff, it's right over here. Titles is where I place my text easily so it's not like just floating around anywhere here and pre-rolls, our pre-roll spots that I would create would go here and can be accessed easily in the future. So coming back to the idea of templates, it's very important to create this sort of, you know, flow structure. So like folder stuff inside the video editing software so that you follow the same structure for all future videos. Now I want to talk about storyboarding. It's very efficient to do it inside Premiere and I do it inside my B-roll folder because you can, you know, drag footage around and you can place it in order that you want to be, you know, the video to flow. The awesome thing is that you can sort of scrub through the video in order to see what's happening within the frame. And that's very important because you can basically compile your entire video structure before dropping it into the timeline. And something very important for my Adobe friends here, let's enter another sequence here. Let's say I want to select all my footage and drop it into the timeline below me. I would do the following. I would select all the footage, automate the sequence. Once this pops up, I would ignore audio because we don't want any of the audio files coming up here. I would leave this in this type of format, click OK. And it would insert all these files in the way that I ordered them. So all I have to go do now is basically go in and cut them out, you know, shorten them and trim everything and work in this type of workflow with footage already aligned in the order that it would be in the final review. It's a big time saver because once you store the board inside your video list folder, it allows you to basically get in here and quickly cut it, cut the review without having to worry about the placement and the order of each file. All right, let's move on to a few workflow tricks and tips that I can give you guys. Everybody's asking me about the adjustment layer and what the hell is it and why it's there and what type of things you have on it. So the adjustment layer applies any effect that is applied to it for anything that is underneath it. So right now, I have a few adjustment layers because I wanted to create different color effects for each of these sequences inside the timeline. But right now, this adjustment layer spans the entire portion of the filmed review video, which basically allows me to color correct and make sure that everything looks good in one single go. I do not touch this adjustment layer because I film with basically exactly the same settings throughout every single video and therefore, I don't need to tweak it. I do have a color adjustment applied to it. So just some toning stuff, increasing my contrast, some shadows, crushing the blacks a little bit. I do not touch the white balance because that's saved in the camera. Inside the creative, I do add a bit of faded film, sharpening, no touching of the shadow or highlight hints, don't touch the curves either, and I go into color wheels and I bring up the highlights into the orangey portions a little bit and my mid-tones into the blue and purples so that you have a bit of a filmic look where the black, not exactly black, but they have a bit of a bluish, purplish highlight tone to it. So this is with and without, with and without. So that is it for my adjustment layer. Next is I follow the audio cues. So this is my voiceover layer right below it. I wrote it and I recorded it and I have a pretty good idea of what I'm gonna be talking about in the beginning and in the end. So this is a good representation of when using a break, let's see, there's that tiny break in the audio to transition to another shot, bam. And there's another one where I talk about something else and bam, a little transition, another little break here and bam. Obviously, I don't use these breaks as the only cue and when to cut the video, but it does help when I edit. You also want to be careful not to apply too many transitions, too many crossfade transitions or too many hard cuts. So this is an example of a hard cut, bam. See how there's no transition, it just goes to another shot and this is a transition of a crossfade. So both shots have a bit of motion in them, a bit of rotation and motion and I thought it was appropriate for this crossfade to appear here and there's no rule of thumb, you just have to follow what looks natural and what looks the most balanced. Here's a little tip when I type in wipe, it brings up my wipe transitions and this is the one I use the most. You notice that the transition follows the same lines of the composition of the video. This is important because you don't want to be creating sort of a vertical transition on something that maybe has a lot of lines or circles. Obviously, this is not in all situations but you have to be aware of the composition of the background track before applying a wipe transition. But the cool thing is you can change the location of where the wipe is coming from, from the bottom, from the angle, from which angle and it's cool to have that transition, bam. It works because we have nice straight lines and you have to look into what makes sense and what looks natural. Next thing, everybody's asking about audio and what are the levels like. Volume is not the same as levels, okay? Volume is based on the amplification of your source through your headphones or your speakers. Levels are these things. So the actual levels, it's like a meter of what the audio is actually like will be across the board. The rule of thumb for the vocals is to be anywhere between minus six and minus 12 peaking. You don't want it to be like too harsh, closer to zero. So minus six and minus 12 for vocals while the background track, let me mute my vocals. This is my audio right now, which is right here. This is the music in the background and it's peaking around minus 24, between minus 30 and minus 24. So that gives you the best balance between hearing your stuff in the foreground, so your vocals versus having a nice soothing background music in the background so that it's not overpowering the vocals. So those rule of thumb, minus six dB for vocals and minus 30, minus 24 for the background track. And the last one is warp. I use this all the time to just stabilize the footage just a tiny bit and giving it that extra level of smoothness, especially for shots where I'm sliding and when I'm rotating. So this one is a little bit trickier to achieve to 100% perfection in camera so that you apply a little bit of stabilization in Premiere and it looks beautiful. Very buttery smooth. I've actually created a preset so that when I type in warp, it's right there. I drag it and drop it onto the footage and I analyze it and I have it in 30 and 30% for smoothness and cropping less. And the last one is export settings. Control M to bring up your export window. So here I first rename my stuff. So we're going to here. The first one is 4K as resolution and ZXT Manta revision. And revision is important in case you have to do any changes. You know which video export is the latest one. If I'm doing anything with 1080p, I would type in 1080p and I would also put in my frame rate. At 4K, I don't do it because it's an only 30p frame rate for me. But the 1080p 60 is a good representation of the frame rate and resolution. Type in the name of the project and then revision number. So afterwards, I use the exact same settings for every single video in terms of resolution and it matches my sequence settings in terms of frame rate. I do VBR one pass, variable bit rate one pass. I don't do two passes because that just takes extra time. Double the time actually. 30, 40 and maximum render quality and maximum depth. That's the settings, ma'am. That's don't have anything else in terms of what I change. These are the settings that I'm happy with. And I always make sure that my work area is actually the one that I want to complete. I don't change it in here. Actually, that is changed by setting my in and out points for the review like this and like this. So if you go back to export and choose sequence in and out, bam. So the entire review will be rendered based on those in and out points. I would do Q and I use Adobe Media Encoder simply because while that's rendering out the video, I can still use Premiere, you know, maybe compiling footage for the other projects and stuff or something like that. But we use CUDA acceleration because of our NVIDIA GPUs. And if you have an AMD GPU, you can also enable GPU acceleration with OpenCL. And if you don't, well, CPU only. And just as a reminder on how you could potentially utilize videoblocks.com footage, assets, backgrounds and After Effects compositions in your own creative work, I've compiled this little composition on how I would personally utilize those assets in a video introduction to say my camera gear. Here it is. All right. So I hope you guys enjoyed this behind the scenes and the post-production process. I hope it was helpful to you. And for any video editors watching, maybe you can take away some of the concepts to improve your own workflow or if you have any ideas and suggestions on how I can improve mine, leave them in the comments down below. And also a few things to take away from this video to recap. Organization, important inside the software and outside for data management. Backup, very important. We recently had our RAID 0 loss and, you know, data wasn't backed up. And unfortunately, we lost a lot of video files. And number three, it's very important that you create your own templates. Templates are important to streamline that video editing process so you don't have to redo multiple things that are already created that work best for you. So storyboarding inside the software before you drop your video footage onto the timeline. For me, the Manta video took me 45 minutes to edit once the footage was dropped into the timeline. Of course, there's a lot of work that goes into the preparation stage before you actually start to cut things inside the timeline like storyboarding, you know, making sure that the order is correct, what files goes after what, the voiceovers and the scripting stuff. Obviously that goes into the preparation stage as well. But as long as you have that streamline and you know what process goes after what, it will drastically improve your productivity when it comes to video editing. So that is it for the post-production editing process. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I'm Dimitri with HowItConnects. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you in the next video.
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