Small Yet Helpful Features While Editing

While based off the title of this blog, it might seem that discussing this is useless however I believe there are several features in Adobe which go unnoticed and need their spotlight. Also since The Bird Watcher is now finished I thought I'd share editing features that helped lead to the success of the movie.

First one of my favorites, speeding up a movie clip. This feature may seem normal on paper because I could speed up clips on an iPhone while editing footage if I wanted to, but once you dive deeper into the feature in Adobe it changes a lot. 

To put some context behind using this feature in my movie, I had a major problem when I was editing a certain clip we had filmed: The speed was extremely slow. What I mean by this is when I acted out backing up out of fear after seeing the missing person tied to a tree, it felt way too slow to feel real. I thought to myself that this could easily be fixed by simply speeding up the clip; however, it wasn't this simple. During the clip you can hear me heavily breathing to portray the fear after Eric sees the missing person; this meant that if I sped up the clip to make it faster the breathing would also be sped up. Overall, the clip would sound weird and I was unsure of what to do. That's when I found the maintain audio pitch feature. What I was able to do through Adobe was speed up the clip while maintaining the same speed of the audio, which is my breathing in this case. This made everything so much easier, especially since we didn't have to reshoot anything now. 

The clip and the red circle showing where the edit was done can be seen below.

One last feature that must be mentioned- which can actually be seen in both the picture above and below- is the black video. One cool thing you are able to do in Adobe is add a plain black screen which you can put text or any other mini features like shapes onto, all while choosing the duration of the clip. What the black video feature allowed me to do was create the binocular feature. I was able to place 2 circles onto the black video and then after getting them into place I put the effect over another clip. I also was able to use black video for the "An Hour Later" black screen.