Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
Rotoscoping
Rotoscoping is adding effects to a movie frame by frame—basically painting stuff onto a movie. This was the technique used to make the lightsabres in the Star Wars films. To rotoscope using premiere, you have to export the file as a filmstrip, and then edit the frames using Photoshop or an equivalent software. First select the part of the movie you want to export into filmstrip. The work area bar is just below the timescale in the timeline sequence window. Ideally, select durations less than five seconds, as anything larger than that is liable to crash the image editing software. Go to File > Export > Movie, the export movie window will pop up. By default, premier exports the movie as an AVI file. Go to Settings > General > File Type and select FilmStrip in the drop down box. Then select the Range as Work Area Bar instead of Entire Sequence, else Premiere will crash. You now have a grid of frames you can edit frame by frame. The filmstrip is saved as a .FLM file.
Scaling The Video
While handling videos imported from camcorders, digital cameras or mobile phone clips, a common problem is that the videos are too small and there is an empty black space on the screen. This persists as a large black frame around the movie even when the project is rendered. To solve this problem, select the clip, go to Effect Controls > Motion > Scale. The scale slider slides from only 0 to 100. Click on the number 100, and you can enter a numerical value for the scale here. Put in 250, or 200 depending on how much you want to resize the clip. Alternatively, you can click once on the video, and resize it using the mouse. To make premiere automatically take care of this problem every time you import a clip, go to Edit > Preferences > General and then check Default scale to frame size.
Autosave
Most Adobe applications automatically save the file after five minutes. For some reason, in Premiere, the default is twenty minutes. To change this, go to Edit > Preferences > Autosave. Change the Automatically save every value from 20 to 5. Then click OK.
Re-establish Media Links
If you are working on a large project for a long time, and during the course of the work, if you change the names of the base files or place them in a different folder, then the project in premiere will retain the edits you have made, but lose the link to the file. If there are a lot of cuts or edits, this may seem like the end of the world. Simply right-click on the file in the bin, select Link Media then look up the file in the browser and click OK.
Leader
A counting leader is often used at the start of a clip to allow minor adjustments on a projector, check if everything is working normally, and to leave some buffer time before the video starts. To include one in your file, right-click on the bin, select New Item > Universal Counting Leader. You can change the wipe, background, line, target and numeral colors according you your choice. Then drag and drop the leader on to the beginning of your timeline.
Panel Full Screen Toggle
It is sometimes necessary to make very minor adjustments in the timeline panel, or adjusting the keyframes in the effects panel. To make these slight adjustments, it is possible to put any panel on fullscreen mode. To do this, select the panel, then press the [`] key (it’s just before the [1] key). Press the same key again to get out of the full screen mode. Watching the program sequence or a monitor on full screen without rendering the project first will however make for a very jerky viewing.
Saving Workspaces
As and when you work with premiere, you will learn to retain the most used panels and toolbars, along with a customized layout. Premiere automatically loads the last used layout every time you start up. If there is a particular layout that you are most at ease with, then save it by going to Windows > Workspace > New Workspace. Enter a name for your workspace in the pop up and click OK. Now the workspace name should appear in the Windows > Workspace menu itself. Additionally, a shortcut key for the workspace is automatically assigned. If you are doing this for the first time, it should be [Alt] + [Shift] + [5]. This simple measure also prevents other users from messing up your workspace.
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Blank Video
To add blank video to the project, right-click in the bin, go to New Item > Black Video and select OK. This is basically a black matte that can be used at the beginning or at the end of the film, and by default it lasts for six seconds. To use a matte in any other color, right-click in the bin, go to New Item > Color Matte. A color picker will appear, choose a color or enter the values and click OK. This too, by default lasts for six seconds. To change this default setting, go to Edit > Preferences > General and change the ‘still image duration’ value. 150 frames is equal to six seconds, so if you want twelve seconds, change the value to 300.
Change Playback Speed
There are many ways to change the speed at which a clip plays back. To change the speed consistently across all the edits in the timeline, right-click on the video in the bin, select Speed / Duration in the context menu, and change the speed value from 100% to whatever you want. Alternatively, you can change the duration value and make the clip last exactly so many seconds. If however, you want to change the speed of only a small portion of the clip in the timeline, use the razor tool to cut out that part of the clip, and right-click to bring up the context menu, then select Speed / Duration. Checking the Reverse Speed option will play the clip backwards.
A-V Links
Whenever a clip is added to the sequence, it gets split into two parts. The audio part shows up in an audio track, and the video part shows up in the video track. When you move them, or cut them, the changes that affect one also affect the other. This occurs because the two are linked to each other. You can find out if media is linked by looking at their title. If they are linked, the title will be underlined followed by a [A] annotation for audio and a [V] annotation for video. To perform any operations on them separately, right-click on the clip and select ‘Unlink’. It is possible to synchronize operations on an audio and video sequence that you want to link up together. To do this, align the audio and video sequence together on the timeline, select both of them, right-click and click Link. If either the audio or the video track is askew at this point—they will remain so through further edits unless you correct them. Moreover, premiere keeps track of unlinked audio and video components of the same file, so you can relink them if there is any need. Select the unlinked components, right-click, and select link. If they are askew, Premiere shows up the duration by which the synchronization is off in red numbers on a white box to the left of the title. Right-click on this box and ‘select move into sync’ to rectify the synchronization error automatically.
Docking Panels
You can move most of the panels around the workplace. The default editing view has a number of tabbed panels arranged in six areas. When you move around a panel from one place to another, just before you dock it, a purple highlight indicates the position where it is going to be docked. Whenever you move a panel to another position, if the highlight is on the middle of the panel, then it will be added as a tab. If the top, bottom, left or right one-third of the panel gets highlighted, then the two panels will share the space, and dock next to each other in the positions indicated. If the highlight appears on the title bar, then the panel is going to be docked as a tab.
UI Brightness
Go to Edit > Preferences > User Interface and you will come across one of the oddest sliders to be put in any software. It is a slider for adjusting the brightness of the user interface, without affecting windows settings, or the menu bar. The panels and everything inside them vary in brightness according to the slider.
Export To Device
To export the video sequence in a format that is playable on a PMP, go to File > Export > Adobe Media Encoder. Under Export Settings, in the Format drop down box, select the H.264 format. Change the range to ‘work area’ or ‘entire sequence’ as per preference, and then select a preset. There are a bunch of Apple iPod, 3gp, Google video, YouTube and Sony PSP presets. For most S60 phones, choose 3GPP, 320x240, 15FPS preset. Click on OK.
Custom Transition
The gradient wipe transition allows you to use an image to effect a transition. This allows for a number of possibilities—like using the company logo as a transition in a corporate film. The image has to be a grayscale, it is reduced to one by premiere if it is not. The blackest part of the picture is replaced first and the image works upwards through all the shades of grey, and white is replaced last of all. Once the clips are aligned next to each other, in the effects panel, go to Video Transitions > Wipe > Gradient Wipe. Then go to the effects controls panel, and click on Custom. Choose an image from there, and your custom transition is ready.