Construction Post 4: Music Video post-production

The software we used to edit our music video was Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. I found this software easy to use as I have had a lot of previous experience editing previous school projects and personal videos on Premiere Pro.

Our video consisted of a narrative centering around a male trapped in a nightmare sequence and studio shots of our artist. I felt that this was a hard video to edit as we had to build atmosphere for the video as well as have a clear narrative sequence that was easy to follow. This made the process of editing quite hard as we often produced sequences that didn't flow easily.

Beneficial Tools during editing

Below are the tools that we used most whilst editing our sequence. 

For basic construction of the sequence we used 

Mark In & Out

The mark in and out tool was useful when isolating takes from our rushes. The short cut for "Mark In" was the letter "I" on the keyboard and "Mark Out" was the letter "O" on the keyboard. This made cutting out segments of video easy and quick to do, thus making our overall edit more efficient. 

Razor Tool

The razor tool was used to fine cut our clips. This was useful as it was a quick and easy way to fine tune our edit so that each clip lasts just the right amount of time. This was also useful when I had cut to the beat of the music which required precise editing. An example of a section I edited to the beat can be seen below.

example of fast editing to the beat in our music video.

Slip Tool

The slip tool allows the clip duration to remain the same  whilst changing the position of the video. I found this specifically useful when we had already cut a clip duration to match the beat however it was the wrong section of video. The slip tool was also used for some of our more complicated shots where we matched jump cuts. This can be seen in the GIF below.

matched jump cuts

Effects

After showing our test video to teachers and members of our target audience it was clear to us that our video simply did not flow. In order to combat this problem we used a mixture of cuts, various dissolves and dips to black in order to flow better as well as build atmosphere. 

Extract from our sequence containing Dips to black and Cross Dissolves

Here is a segment that contains two cross dissolves and a dip to black. The resulting footage looks like the GIF below. 

Extract from our final video containing Dips to black and Cross Dissolves

When editing these sections I found it was mostly trial and error with which effects to use. For example some shots did not look good together as the set ups did not look varied. This was definitely a challenge during the editing process as it took a few different variants of the sequence in order to get it right, however this was overcome after multiple tries and feedback from our teachers and target audience. 

Alterations

During this week we received regular feedback from our teachers and target audience. This was useful as we we're able to easily alter our timeline according to their views.

For example one issue that was raised was that for our "dream-sequence" section of the video it was not clear that it was a dream sequence. This was swiftly changed by using an alternative take and adding in a dissolve. This was received well by our target audience and thus the issue was resolved. The finished section of the video can be seen below. 

dream-sequence section of our music video

A huge alteration to our video was that it was far too long. Our music video lasted 3 minutes and 40 seconds however our brief specified the music video had to be three-minutes. Although this was a shock at first, the shortened music video turned out to be way more interesting and flowed so much better. 

This issue was tackled by the music being edited down on premiere pro by studying the wavelengths of the song. A point was found were we could smoothly cut out a section of the music in order to have a 3 minute version. After this we moved the sequence accordingly which left us with a much slicker music video. This is because we had previously had excessively long shots in order to fill the entire song, these shots we're then narrowed down which improved the music video as a whole.

Old Time-line which lasted 3 minutes and 40 seconds

Time-line after being reduced to 3 minutes

Grading

Grading is the enhancement of colors in a video. It greatly affects the mood and atmosphere of a video and also increases the production quality of the whole music video. Grading was especially important for our music video as it completely amplified the look of graffiti in most scenes. Below are a few screenshots of graded and ungraded footage I edited.

Extract 1 not graded

Extract 1 graded

Extract 2 not graded

Extract 2 graded

Extract 3 not graded

Extract 3 graded

The main tool we used to grade was ProcAmp, this allowed us to alter the following aspects of our video. 

1. Brightness
2. Contrast
3. Hue
4. Saturation

Although Three-way colour corrector was also an option in the grading process, after using it for the first few shots we decided it was unnecessary and did not help us achieve the look we wanted. Thus using only ProcAmp was sufficient.

A challenge when grading is that each shot has to be done individually and there is no specific setting that will work for each shot. It was a very time consuming process due to the sheer amount of shots we had in our three-minute period. Another grading related issue is that often skin colour would have an orange-tint. This was solved by not increasing the saturation as much, however this took some vibrance away from graffiti- finding a happy medium between the colour of the graffiti and the orange tint was key in this process. 

Below you can find our finished music video. I am very pleased with the video as I feel it has improved a great amount since our very first test shoot version.