As part of my series on “How I Went from Knowing Nothing About Adobe Premiere and After Effects to Producing a Client Video in 2 Weeks” I consulted a lot of videos and training resources as I attempted a crash course in Adobe video production.
I’ve done all of my previous projects using Final Cut (mostly version 7) and Motion, and while I’ve wanted to make use of Adobe’s products because of their integration with all their other tools (Photoshop & Illustrator in particular), they’ve been kind of a mystery to me. So I decided with a recent project to use it as an opportunity to force myself to learn Premiere Pro and After Effects.
I’d like to de-construct my project and go through it step by step, but in the mean time, I thought it might be helpful to list out a handful of videos and links that I used to go from total newbie – I didn’t even understand the user interface – to having produced a complete project for a paying client!
Getting Started – First off, I highly recommend going though as many of Adobe’s Premiere Pro tutorials as you have time for. And I’m preaching to the choir here… I always tend to jump right in and start trying to do something complicated right off the bat. But Premiere Pro and After Effects are very different from Apple’s counterparts and I could seamlessly transition from one to the other. From this link, scroll down a little and select “Learn Essentials” and go from there. Most of them are pretty short and give a really good overview for anyone starting out from scratch.
For After Effects, this getting started link served as my launching pad of sorts. It’s basically another collection of links, but it’s really helpful and covers most of the basics.
All of this getting started stuff is a little like drinking out of a fire hose, but after a while, I started to get the hang of it and I’m glad I stuck with it.
Dealing with Footage, Specifically Clips & Subclips – In my first Premiere Pro project, I was dealing with 2 clips of footage. The first was a short talking head intro shot which was short and sweet. But the other was ripped footage from a DVD of a talk where the client wanted a number of excerpts shortened and put together montage style. This page from Adobe’s Premiere Pro help deals specifically with clips and subclips. This specific video was also very helpful.
I had a little trouble with getting clips into After Effects, particularly for a set of subclips that I created from a long clip of footage that I then had to edit together where some of the clips and audio overlapped. I found a few helpful items on this page in the Creative Cow forum and also by googling “importing premiere pro clips into After Effects.”
The Adobe tutorials on the Dynamic Link between Premiere Pro and After Effects can be found here.
Cleaning up Audio with Audition – There are several good videos here about the integration with Audition, but this is the one that I got the most out of. It specifically deals with some random background noise and the hiss that I always seem to get no matter how hard I try to finesse my Sennheiser mike settings!
Random Tutorials that Helped Me Better Understand After Effects – One of the ways I learn is by watching how other folks do things I’d like to understand. Once I kind of knew my way around the After Effects interface, I just watched a handful of tutorials that showed up on YouTube that looked cool to immerse myself in what the program can do. I watched a bunch, but here are a few that I found particularly helpful, and for which I’m grateful to the guys who took the time to make them:
Kinetic Typography with After Effects – This one helped my get the hang of animated text and working with layers in After Effects.
Making Jittery Type with After Effects – Dan’s video is really cool and this one introduced me to Pre-Composing in After Effects. He didn’t explain what that actually does, but he did so much pre-composing, it became obvious that I needed to understand compositions better. After watching this and doing a little more reading, I realized the power of creating compositions and then being able to animate the entire composition within other compositions.
How to Make a Flock of Birds – One of the more random videos that I watched, but I was actually pretty captivated by it that I found some video on the internet and walked through my own version of this tutorial. The way this helped me was to introduce me to finding presets in After Effects, to the KeyLight preset (which I used in my project), to Sprites and using the particle animator – I used CC Particle World even though he used a 3rd party plugin. Again, this was good “immersion education” in how to do something cool in After Effects.
Split & Slide Effect – For my project, I almost used what I learned here to make some interesting transitions, but I ended up going a different direction based on what my client wanted. Still I liked this effect so much that I wanted to use it! Another very helpful tutorial to add some interest to typical corporate “talking head” video.
Using After Effects to Create a Moving Hexagonal Background – This utilized a handful of tools in After Effects to get a dynamic background effect. Didn’t use anything out of this video, but it was helpful to see the application of a number of different methods and effects.
Creating a Looping Animation in After Effects – This page contains concise instructions for using time remapping and an expression to loop an animation. It was written for CS5, but worked fine in the newer CC version that I have. I used the expression to loop an animation of the CC Light Sweep present on a graphic that was on screen for about 2 minutes.
Understanding Expressions – Expressions kind of freak me out a little… too much like coding and when I first ran across expressions when trying to figure out the solutions to a couple problems I was running into, I was tempted to shut down! But I actually used 2 expressions in my project and I’m grateful to MonkeyBoy84 for the looping expression I mentioned above and Roland R. Kahlenberg’s post on the Creative Cow forum for both of them.
For Roland’s expression, this page helped me modify the logical operator in the expression to fit my application of it for my video.
Also, this page from Adobe’s After Effects Help was a good resource for understanding a little more about the expressions and their parameters and variables.
After doing some subsequent reading on this and a similar effect, I found a link to this script that you can purchase with a really helpful video that further helped me understand expressions.
Exporting Videos from Premiere Pro – So this should be easy, even for dummies like me, but with all the options, I wanted a place to start to help figure out the best option for exporting to YouTube. Premiere doesn’t have an easy to find share function like FCPX for getting videos directly to YouTube or Vimeo, so I had to hunt and peck around a little to find how to do it. It’s not hard, but it’s about knowing where to look. Here’s an overview of exporting. Here’s the simple one-line answer that clued me in to the fact that there are presets in Media Encoder… I just didn’t know where to look.