Producing a video for the first time in Adobe Premiere Rush.
The last few months, I have become involved with South Bay Professional Association, a peer networking, support, and training group for professionals in the Los Angeles South Bay area. Professionals in career transition from Santa Monica to San Pedro, Redondo Beach to Compton, meet twice a week to improve their job search skills and share experiences and knowledge.
Soon after joining, I took over as Chair of the Marketing and Social Media Committee. My duties include creating and maintaining the website, managing the social media accounts, promoting the organization, and generally finding ways to market the organization to external audiences as well as helping the Executive and Administration Committees improve how the organization runs internally. I’m currently working on revamping new member orientation presentations and other internal process efficiency improvements.
Looking for ways to build our online presence and boost our reputation as a job search skills authority, I added a Training section to the website. Training is intended to be original content developed by SBPA members on the subject of job search skills and strategies. Members have written articles which are posted, but I also wanted to expand to include video.
In March, Aneta Thinkofall joined us to give a presentation on these topics. Given I was working with a budget of zero, I brought my Android phone and tripod to record her presentation. This could be a valuable resource to job seekers who might visit the website, and would be a great first video for the Training section.
My immediate challenge was to discover that my phone recorded in 10 minute segments. Then the speaker immediately walked out of the frame at the start. Not fatal, but issues to work through.
Once I began editing, I learned that my phone recorded the video in Variable Frame Rate, giving me audio sync issues. I used Handbrake to convert the video into Constant Frame Rate and Apple Quicktime Player to cut the 10 minute clips into segments. So far, so good.
Next, to begin building the final product. What tool to use?
I had previously used Animoto to add pizzazz to music and motion to static slideshows (here and here), but I didn’t think that tool would be quite right this time. I was also concerned about upload/download time working with a cloud based solution.
Being a graphic design professional, I have the entire Adobe Creative Cloud subscription available, so my choices were Adobe Premiere Pro or Adobe After Effects. Both looked like overkill for what seemed to be a pretty straightforward and simple end product. Then I noticed Adobe had just released Adobe Premiere Rush.
According to the Adobe website:
“Editing is easy, with simple tools for color, audio, motion graphics, and more. Share right from the app to favorite social channels like YouTube, Facebook, and lnstagram.”
Sounds perfect.
I watched the training video and jumped in to creating the project. I had worked with Adobe Flash several years ago, so the timeline interface was familiar. In just an afternoon, I had the entire project assembled and ready for export.
I used most of the tools available, too. Crop and placement of the video to eliminate a messy background. Slight rotation on the video to fix tripod tilt. Some color tweaking. Audio adjustments for reducing background noise and echo. Simple cross fades for video gaps.
Overall, I was very happy with the tool and the end product.
This is somewhat typical of my experience as a graphic designer. I am presented with a challenge, I research options, learn something along the way, and produce an end product that accomplishes the goals as elegantly and efficiently as possible.
Premiere Rush ended up being just the right tool at the right time for the project at hand.