Tag Archives: editing

Adobe Premiere Elements 14

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Adobe Premiere Elements 14

Back in the heyday of the FireWire interface, I became fairly proficient with Final Cut Express. However, in 2011 Apple stopped developing it, and Final Cut express just wasn’t designed to work natively with compressed video file formats that virtually all modern cameras output. I really liked the Final Cut Express interface and was sad to see it be left behind.

Many people rave about iMovie. Unfortunately for me, I’m one of those people that doesn’t like the iMovie interface. Just give me a linear editor with stackable clips and I can easily and quickly find my way around.

In the meantime, my 2007 MacBook Pro 17” inch became quite long in the tooth and I started leaving it at home. For the past year I’ve been doing relatively simple video editing on my phone.

The recent purchase of a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 256 gigabyte machine inspired me to try out a trial version of Adobe Premiere Elements 14, the latest version of Adobe’s consumer verson of Premiere, which is aimed at high-end professional video editors. Premier Elements 14 is somewhat different than Final Cut Express, but actually very similar since it is a linear editing approach.

Unlike Final Cut Express, Premiere Elements 14 is quite up to date and handles all of the modern compressed digital file formats. It is even capable of editing 4k video. It’s quite flexible in output formats, and is capable of uploading directly to YouTube and Facebook.

I am still learning my way around the interface. My biggest complaint so far is that using the animated titles seems a bit clunky. I’m sure I will become proficient with them over time as I continue to use the software. Some of the options at first blush seem to be a bit hidden.

Before I pulled the trigger and purchased the unlock key from the Adobe website, I watched a number of tutorial videos on YouTube to make certain that the program could do everything I expected it to be able to do. It turns out that all of the features are present, but proficiency requires a bit of time and effort. Alas, this is video editing after all!

Version 14 of the software has 4 modes, Live, Quick, Guided and Expert. The two most useful modes for my needs are Quick and Expert. Though I am spending most of my time in Expert mode, switching to Quick mode can be useful from time to time in order to gain quick access to certain features. To instantly switch from one mode to another it’s as easy as clicking on the appropriate word just below the title bar.

Premiere Elements 14 sells for $99 dollars US and is available for download at the Adobe website. The 30 day trial version is easily converted to the full purchased version by purchasing a license key from Adobe.

Overall, I like the software. I will be happy to purchase the next upgrade.

Lightworks by EditShare

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lightworks-monitor-gui-new2EditShare is introducing the Mac version of Lightworks. Lightworks is a cross–platform film editing software. Lightworks has been used by some of the best film makers over the past two decades. It now works seamlessly on Mac OS X.  Film makers who love their Mac’s, will now have the option of using it for their film editing. EditShare will be showing off the Mac version at NAB and will be starting the new alpha program in the near future.

EditShare is also releasing the full version of the new Lightworks version 11.1 for Windows on April 30, 2013. The Linux version has successfully completed the Alpha program of version 11.1 and will begin the public beta on April 30, 2013.

EditShare is already working on Lightworks version 11.2 which will add:

  • Added support for AJA I/O hardware
  • Support for screen capture using the record panel
  • An improved import panel: now behaves similarly to bins, mark/park clips before import
  • Native H.264 MOV playback
  • Added curve effect to FX color correction effects

If you are or want to be a film maker you owe it to yourself to take a look at Lightworks, by EditShare. If you are at NAB they will be at booth SL9010 showing off the new Mac version of Lightworks.

A Review of Scrible

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Let’s say you are researching a paper for school or maybe you are working on a project for work. You are pulling up web pages on the subject and you want to highlight passages, make notes and then share the information, but how do you do that.  You could of course print the web pages out and mark them up that way. The problem with doing it this way is it’s a waste of  paper and it makes sharing difficult.  Plus there is a good chance that you have lost some of the links to the articles you have just marked up. Perhaps you could save them out as PDF and than mark them up with a PDF editing tool. Unfortunately sharing PDFs can be problematic, plus PDF editing tools can be expensive. There must  be a better way, so what is it. A possible solution maybe a new web tool called Scrible. Scrible has just entered public beta and is ready for some feed back.

What is Scrible.  Scrible is a web extension that is available for all major browsers (except IE 9). It sits in your bookmark toolbar and when you need it you just click on it and it is ready to use. What can you with it. Well you can highlight passages, add notes, cross out sentences, make them bold or italicize them. Once you are done and you are ready to save the page, you can add tags and notes. You can then saved the information to your personal library within Scrible . There is 125 mb of storage available in the library. Within you library you can sort by date, page name or owner. You can also search and organize by tags.  You can also email a link to the annotated page along with comments. When the person goes to that linked page, all your markings and notes will be there. You can create a legend within the page and share specific notes with specific groups. If you are using IE you can also export the page.

I do like Scrible so far after using it for a couple of days. There are a couple of things that I hope and expect they will fix. The first is the ability to export needs to available across all browsers, which I understand they are working on. The second problem I ran into was I had trouble finding the link to my library, that could be made clearer. Other then these small problems, Scrible works really well and worth installing.

 

Videolicious

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I’ve been playing around with video recording and editing for a number of years. One constant with video editing that can always be counted on is that it’s editing video is time-consuming.

That is all about to change. Enter Videolicious, a FREE video app for iOS. This is an amazing app. Videolicious makes it possible to produce short (up to about 50 second) videos in a tightly-edited, documentary style complete with background music and voiceovers.

You start by recording short video clips. I do this all the time – I have my own name for them – “video snapshots.” I take plenty of short video clips, generally following the “rule of thirds” for good photography and holding the camera as steady as possible, compensating for the cheesy fixed iPod camera lens by getting in close and using angles as much as possible to create visual interest.

Once you have up to 10 video clips, you are ready to quickly put them together into a movie in Videolicious. Step One in Videolicious is to select the video clips or still photos from the iPod (or iPhone or iPad) Camera Roll. Touching the thumbnail in the sequence you want to talk about the clips and photos will number them. You can have up to ten per video.

Once You have selected your clips and/or photos, you move to Step Two. Record up to a 50 second long video of yourself talking about the clips, ideally in the order you numbered them in when you selected them in Step One.

Once you have recorded yourself talking about the clips and/or photos, Step Three consists of selecting background music. Videolicious comes with six background tracks though you can also select any other track present on your iPod. I suggest sticking with one of the tracks that comes with Videolicious, since these are public domain and will keep you out of trouble with the copyright police if you share your video publically on sites such as YouTube or Facebook. Once you have selected your track, the video will quickly render into a final *.MOV file, ready to share with the world.

The remarkable breakthrough with Videolicious is that it has predefined parameters that it follows in order to create a tightly-edited final result. Playback starts with video of you talking and then quickly cuts to the scenes you have selected in the order you selected them. Still shots automatically have the so-called “Ken Burns” effect applied. At the end of the video the shot cuts back to you ending your description of the clips, resulting in a brisk documentary style video that takes what would have been boring clips by themselves and makes them into visual elements of your spoken story discussion of the clips.

It is possible to produce a tightly-edited, to-the-point video in just a few minutes and share that with the world, which is an amazing accomplishment.

Videolicious is not a replacement for traditional video editors. It is a way of placing video clips into bins where the software itself decides makes most of the editing decisions. Videolicious spits out surprisingly watchable, entertaining results in a matter of a few minutes. This is a task that can easily take hours with traditional video editing tools.