Recommended
More Related Content
Viewers also liked
Similar to Postprocessing and editing
Similar to Postprocessing and editing (6)
More from LoCoMoTion Project
More from LoCoMoTion Project (17)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Postprocessing and editing
- 1. Postprocessing and Editing Jörn Loviscach
- 2. In this video: • Video cleanup • Audio cleaup • Video editing
- 3. Video cleanup • Apply general cleanup before cutting • Cropping • Color adjustment • Stabilize shaky footage
- 4. Audio cleanup Easy and helpful: • Equalization • Noise reduction • Dynamics compression • Time compression
- 5. Video editing • Non-destructive: Backup? Endless fine-tuning? • From the coarse to the detail • Look at the audio track: pauses, your signals • Don’t get lost in details that you edit out anyway
- 6. The LoCoMoTion project is funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union. The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Editor's Notes
- Postprocessing and editing. At best, every video that you have recorded is ready for publication. But at least if you work with a camcorder, some final steps are inevitable.
- Sometimes, you can‘t fully remedy all visual and acoustic problems before or during recording, in particular not when recording outside of a studio. So, both the picture as well as the sound may need some digital improvement. After that comes the real process of editing, that is, of finding and putting together the good pieces.
- It‘s important to do the cleanup before cutting. This way, the changes are consistent throughout the entire resulting video. And you work on stretches of footage that are as long as possible. By cropping off parts at the sides of the video frame, you get rid of distracting furniture in the background or you get rid of window frames on the screen. Of course, it‘s better to not record them in the first place. Faces almost always need color correction to look natural. And if you did shoot video without a tripod (which you should avoid), many video editing programs offer a function to reduce the shakiness of that video.
- The names of the techniques for cleaning up audio sound intimidating. But some are easy to use, very helpful, and are available even in video editing software that costs less than 100 Euros. Equalization, best in form of a parametric equalizer can add more bite to muffled voices or reduce the boominess of a recording in a resonant room. If there is a constant noise, for instance power line humming or hissing from the air conditioning, this can be removed well by noise reduction. All you need is to provide the program with a fingerprint of the noise, that is: a second or two of that noise with no other sound at the same time. Dynamics compression evens out the volume of louder and quieter passages. This is what you need, for instance, when a speaker has used a hand-held microphone but has kept changing the distance between mouth and microphone. Finally, if you find that the speech is a little plodding, you may want to speed up the video by some percent. On the audio processing side this means that the pitch has to be corrected to still sound normal. Otherwise, for extreme settings the voice turns into that of Mickey Mouse.
- Virtually every video editing program works non-destructively, that is: It does not change the original files. A project file only describes which editing operation and which effect to apply where. Eventually, the resulting video is created as a brand-new file. This is tricky in two respects: First, you have to make sure to not only backup the project files but also all of the original video files as well. Second, as you are never actually discarding any part of the video, you can keep on fiddling about for days. Don’t fall into that trap. First get the big chunks more or less right, only then look into the details. Start at the coarsest zoom level on the timeline and zoom in step by step. If you used clapping or a bell as acoustic signals whether or not a take was good, you can spot these in the audio waveform and cut accordingly. And, finally, I want to repeat the advice: Start by roughing the edits out for the entire video, only then look into the details. Otherwise you may discard lots of your work.