Book Trailers as Video Taglines: Using a Video Editor

Posted on 3:36 pm in Video | 0 comments

As you begin this third installment of creating your own book trailer, I hope you have selected a few images to work with. Take a look at Book Trailers 101 (purpose and pre-planning for a trailer) and Start with Story (layout and sources) to get an idea of where you should be in this process before tackling the next few paragraphs.

Video Programs

Although I can tell you that creating a video is a step-by-step process, in practice it involves a great deal of back-and-forth between your video editing (Adobe Premiere) and your image editing (Adobe Photoshop). You may have the perfect picture, but once you place it in the video, you may want to crop it differently or change the color. No problem. Once you get all your images, video clips, text/copy, and sound files into Premiere, you can spend eternity revising any one part. So don’t worry so much about getting each step perfect before you move on to the next. Sort of like not editing as you write: save it for the end.

I’m going to focus in this tutorial on Adobe Premiere. However, Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Flash, Magix, and other editing programs work much the same way, and I’ve used many Windows editors (alas, not Mac) . The principles of video editing, filters, tools, screens, and rendering are the same. However, the specifics of layout will be different. Movie Maker, for example, limits how many tracks you can have, but it has a timeline, effects, and transitions like the rest.

I’ve never found video editing to be intuitive in the way image editing is, so I tend to think of the video environment in imaging terms–like tracks as layers. Your experience may, of course, be different.

With any of these programs, you’re going to expect to fiddle and get frustrated until it begins to make sense. I’ve never learned to use any program from a manual. For me, manuals only answer specific questions—like what the tools do and how to change the panels—so I’m going to give you a few specifics and a direction, but you’ll have to navigate your own path and learn your own process by picking apart what I show you and experimenting with tools.

The Project

Adobe Premiere keeps your video stored as a PROJECT. When you launch Premiere, you’ll need to create a Project name and save it somewhere on your computer. Create a folder for this Project and expect to save not only the Project files in this folder but every image, clip, and sound you will use. This is best! Don’t keep video, images, and sound stored in different folders on your hard drive. I realize you may have good logic for storing files separately, but believe me, down the road, you’ll want to pull up this Project and make changes or copy from it, and every file you’ve used in it will have to be in the exact same place or Premiere won’t find it.

Why does Premiere do this? When you import a file into your video Project, it doesn’t insert it, as say, Microsoft Word does with an image. The Project only links to this file. There is a good reason for this. By linking to the file and not copying and pasting it into the Project, Premiere allows you to make changes to your original file and the changes will automatically show up in your Project. This feature of linking makes it easy to change anything in only one place and see the result immediately in all places.

Also, keep your files local. When you go to render your video, it may take hours, depending on your processor speed. Accessing files through an external drive (hard drive, CD, USB) will just slow that rate down.

Open Premiere

Open Premiere and click “New Project”. The menu you get next will have you set some parameters for your Project as well as the location of the folders. Use the Browse feature and select your folder for the Project files. Give the Project a Name. Leave the parameters in their default. Click OK.

Your second screen gives you more parameters. You’ll have to give your Sequence a name. The Sequence will be what actually gets rendered as your video (the Project holds many Sequences). So create the Project “MyBookTrailer”, for example, and create one Sequence for each book you’re doing. This saves time on setting up new Projects for each video, not to mention having to import some of the same files you would use on multiple videos (like your photo, for example). Additionally, you can create variations in style or length of the same video by using different Sequences. Here, I named my Sequence “Darklaw”.

Select HDV 720p24 under the HDV tab. You’ll see on the right of this menu that your frame size will be 1280×720. That’s in pixels, which I’ll get to when we get to Adobe Photoshop. The timebase is 23.976fps, which means your video will show at a rate of about 24 frames a second. These are good values for a web video, but not the best. A frame rate of 29/second, for example, would show smoother movements and transitions, but YouTube reduces higher rate videos anyway.

As you look at these menus, you’ll realize you have MANY options to choose from, with respect to frame size and rate. Premiere allows you to create video for any kind of playback and any player, so feel free to experiment after you’ve gotten through this tutorial. You may want to develop for DVD or a PSP. Maybe you’d like to see a really nice, high-quality AVI file on your desktop. Great ideas, but not what we’ll be focusing on here.

Click OK. This has been the set up. Once you finish building your video, you will still have to choose how to render it. That’s where we’ll make critical decisions about quality vs. practicality due to the time constraints of rendering and uploading.

Your Project looks like the above. The black screen on the right is where your movie will show as you create it. The box on the left with “Darklaw” Sequence is where your files will show up once you import them. The box in the lower left with “Presets”, etc., is where you’ll choose your transitions and effects. The long box at the bottom with time sequence and tracks (video 1, video 2, audio 1, audio 2, etc) is where you put your movie together.

To get started, click the file menu item, and select Import. Import a picture from a folder. In the image below, I’m importing many images at once. You can go ahead and import ALL pictures, sounds, etc., that you’ll be using. You can always add more later, and what you have already imported you won’t have to use. Click OPEN. Wait for everything to be imported. The lower right status bar may show messages while files are being examined.

Once an item is imported, you can double-click it and it will appear in the middle gray box at the top–the Source Monitor. This shows you the view of a particular item. If you have a video clip, you can even watch it play here. Right-click on this source image (either the image of it or the name of it in the File viewer) and select “overlay”. This places it in the Timeline.

A static image like a picture gets set to a 5 second default. This means it’s on-screen for 5 seconds. You can change this to whatever you’d like. To manipulate the Timeline, you may have to zoom in. Click the mountain/landscape icon on the very bottom of the timeline box to make the items in the Timeline larger or smaller. In the image below, I have zoomed in on the Timeline. The item—the 5-second duration of the picture—isn’t changed, only my view of it is.

Now use the mouse to click and drag the blue Timeline cursor (looks like a gemstone/diamond) backwards so that the frame selected is within the picture. Wherever this cursor is on your Timeline, that frame with all its tracks and effect will show in the right viewer, as below.

In the screen-captured image below, you’ll see how one “slice’ of a video (one frame) appears on screen when all layers (tracks) have been combined. In the video screen on the right in this image, you see the video as a combination of all these tracks and their effects. The tracks consist of a music file in Audio 1, an image of ancient soldiers in Video 1, and a map in Video 2. The map in the Video 2 (the upper track), has an opacity effect applied to it which makes it grow transparent over time. I’ve changed the Source Monitor in the middle panel to the Effect Control (it’s clicked in the tabs which are a little hidden. You can also find it in the Window menu at the top of the program). If you watch my Darklaw book trailer, you’ll see how this part of the video has a map fade from view to be replaced with the soldiers, which then zooms in and switches to the castle image.

When you add an item to the Timeline, it gets placed wherever the cursor is, so move the cursor to that spot first. If you want your item on a particular track, be sure to click that track “on” and the others “off” (video 3 is “on” here so an item I “overlay” will be placed on this track). You can drag items from track-to-track once they are in the Timeline. Add tracks by right-clicking the tracks panel.

I suggest you start placing images, sounds, and videos into your Project. Stack them in different tracks. In the next post, I’ll go through some effects and transitions.