Editing is what got me hooked on the idea of studying TV production, so I was eager to give Adobe Premiere a try, as most of my editing experience comes from hours and hours toying away at Sony Vegas. I had used Premiere a few times before, but I had never got to the rendering/exporting stage. I purchased an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription a few weeks ago however this was my first proper hands-on experience in using the software.
I think I got the hang of it pretty quickly; not quite ready to edit any feature films yet, but my experience with Sony Vegas helped as I saw a number of similarities between the two different programs. We were given sample footage with a voiceover, some ambient noises and a piece of music that we could use to edit as we saw fit.
This was also my first time editing on a Mac, as I am used to working on PC, although I feel I will stick with using PC as there were some minor differences that bugged me quite a lot with Mac; I spent about 15 minutes trying to work out how to copy my finished clip to my hard drive, for example (I gave up in the end).
This is what I put together:
The sequencing of the clip was tricky considering I wasn't involved in the filming, so I didn't know the context of what I was editing. However, I arranged them so it began with a few establishing shots, and timed the entrance of the central character with the start of his monologue. I also added a small title, with a dissolve transition to create a calm, sombre feel to it. The rest of the footage did not rely on transitions; jumping from one shot to another worked well in my opinion, and adding anything would detract from the man speaking. I toyed with some colour correction on the clips, but left it as it was, as I felt I would not be able to make much of a difference, as I liked the warm lighting in the raw footage.
I also tweaked the audio using Adobe Audition - I liked how I could simply right-click the audio track in Premiere, edit in Audition, and it would simply appear in my project with the changes I made. This would have saved me a lot of time in the past, where I had to render specific snippets of audio in Vegas, edit using Audacity, then export it, and paste it back into Vegas. I used this to remove some background noise, such as the cameraman talking, and group of people laughing which I felt would have distracted us from the monologue. I also added some silence at the end of the clip to give gravitas to the final line.
Overall, I enjoyed working with industry-standard software for a change, and I was glad that it didn't feel too different from what I am used to.
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