Professional Toolkit: Effects Essentials

Effects Essentials: Second half of the book.


if you look back to my previous post on the effects essentials on what we covered you will see a list of the topics we went through during our workshop, this post are a few screen shots of what we covered and to also show the technical look of the program.

 Colour Correction

Green Screening

Avid: Effects Essentials

Things learned on this course:

• Adding and Modifying a Quick Disolve (/)
• What handles are and why they are important
• Types of Effects, and how to add/modify them (Motion, Segment, Transition)
• Stabilization / Tracking
• Resizing Shots
• Keyframes
• Fluid Morph
• How to pan and zoom an image without losing resolution (Avid Pan & Zoom)
• Keyframe Types
• Source Settings (especially on raw files)
• Motion Effects
• Timewarp Effects
• Color Correction
• Nesting Effects
• Multilayered Effects (Such as Picture in Picture)
• Advanced Keyframing
• Layering and Nesting
• Applying Effects to Filler
• Performance
• ExpertRender
• Keying and Alpha Mattes
• Avid Marquee Tool

Avid

Workshop

Continuing from the previous Avid workshops we learned about using bins from other projects
(right click - open bins)
transitions/ dissolves key ( "\")
Titles using the Avid Title Tool
Exporting

Using these methods and knowledge we gained we finished the edit of the hatun runa project which you can see on the previous Avid post.


The second part of the book was about

Advanced bin details / organizing bins

Sifting / Cloning / Duplicating clips

Syncing (Manual & Time code)

Cutting a Scene (focusing on keyboard shortcuts)

Our exercise material this time was the Fisker "The Deal" TVC:

we learned the following

Trimming using the Trim Tool

Fixing sync issues

Markers

Copying clips from other sequences, and splicing them in.

Slipping & Sliding.

using these methods here is the Fisker video below.

The video may be out of sync in terms the bars coming in late and clock coming in late aswell, but i will be using avid in my future works making sure this wont happen.

After this we went back to the Hatun Runa project to learn the following

Audio Mixing

Key framing

Audio Effects (Audio EQ & Audio Suite)

Avid

These are videos which i found quite helpful about avid whilst researching at home,

 Top video is an look behind the Avengers film and editing process using avid
the bottom video editor Eddie Hamiltom goes through some of avids editing techniques and in depth features. both videos i found interesting and useful.

Avid

I will go through these exercises at home and will doing tutorials to keep my mind afresh and so i can get the hang of the software.


Using the Avid books that we brought for this training we went through the first three lessons of the avid book by Bryan Castle Jr.

Lesson One:

This first lesson  we learnt the basics of avid, such as launching the media composer, understanding how the interface is arranged and what it consists of, creating and saving projects, working with bins and to organize and edit bins.
found this first lesson easy and kept track most times.

Lesson Two:

This second lesson was about the basics of avid, building sequences, using smart tools, splicing clips, adding narration with the overwrite tool and adjusting the sequences audio.
In this lesson we created a rough edit of a sequence and I found this a bit tricky at some points but nonetheless was ok with.

Lesson Three:

This lesson we dealt with refining an edit and learnt how to delete from the timeline, moving timeline
segments, changing the shots in the sequence and length of timeline segments.
I found this particular lesson again a bit tricky but was ok with, apart from the audio adjusting and the edit refining which I found challenging however when redoing this again I understood it more and helped me gain more knowledge but will keep going over this so I can gain a better understanding of the software for future projects.


keyboard used for avid shortcuts

Avid Interface/layout

Source monitor on left/ record monitor on right

key objects

 
  marking clips/shortcuts                                   



From lesson 1 to 3 we have covered

• Basic User Interface
• Creating a Project
• Importing Media / Bins
• Organising Media
• Saving
• Creating a Sequence
• Basic Editing Funcions / Keyboard Shortcuts
• Basic Audio
• Trimming

These are all covered in Lessons 1 till 3 in the "Media Composer Editing Essentials" book.


These are the basic shortcuts for easier access

• J, K and L = Backwards, Pause, Play (hitting the key twice will go in to fast motion)
• Spacebar = Play & Pause
• I, O = mark In, mark Out
• V = Splice
• B = Overwrite
• Left, Right or 3,4 = Skip by one frame backwards, forwards.
• M, comma, period, / = Nudge Clip
• T = Mark Clip
• Z, X = Extract, Lift

At  home i have been doing  the lessons so i can get a better knowledge of the software
but have a lot to work on if i want to pass the Avid exam and need to learn how to solve technical faults on my own. below is my work from which i have been on from home but is offline and this is one of he problems i need to solve if i want to move forward.

This is the video result from the first three lessons, the edit at some points maybe off a bit, in which case i need refine my editing skills by regularly using avid on daily basis.