Creating a video with Premier Pro

Last year we got introduced with Premier Pro and this year we got a reminder of basics how to use it and some other basic information about creating a video piece.

Some video basics that we were reminded:

Video Format Options and terminology

Video system

PAL (Europe, most of Asia and Oceania, most of Africa, and parts of South America) / NTSC (North America, Japan, and most of South America)

PAL or NTSC format is the colour encoding system used by DVD players and broadcast television.

These formats are no longer used in the same way that they were originally intended to be. The technical challenges these encoding systems were created to solve in the 1950’s don’t apply to the modern world. However, DVDs are still labelled NTSC or PAL, and the timings, resolutions, and refresh rates established in these systems are still used in modern televisions and monitors.

Frame rate

For example: 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 50, 60 fps (frames per second)

PAL - 24, 25, 50 NTSC - 24, 30, 60

Standard output is 25 fps, so to get the best results is better to shoot at 25 fps. The more frames per second the more you can slow down the video, for example to capture a bullet you would need a camera that can shoot at 10,000 fps.

Frame size / dimensions

Frame aspect ratio

4:3 (older computer monitors, iPad); 3:2 (DSLR stills, 35mm film stills); 16:10 (MacBook Pro, older iMacs); 16:9 (1080 video, 4K UHD video, HD TV, current iMacs)

Shooting setting and considerations

Shutter speed controls exposure and motion blur, as with stills photography, but it cannot be slower than the frame rate.

The ideal shutter speed is 2x the frame rate, for example, for 25fps, use 1/50s.

ISO and aperture is the same as shooting stills.

Exposure, white balance, sharpening etc. – these should be done right when shooting, because video uses compressed file and not RAW like in shooting stills.

When we were reminded about all of that we needed to go out and shoot some footage for a short video about the New Adelphi. The Premier Pro bit was just putting in files in files, cropping them, applying transitions. In the second lesson of Premier Pro we learned how to create stills from a video. I didn’t apply this on my final video about the building, but I can explain (put my notes in from a lesson) how to do it.

Select the video and exact part of it that you want, then export the series of images the same size as video is. Format: jpeg, preset: custom. Change the size of the images to the video size. (check in info video); frame rate: depends what detail you want (for example 6 images per sec) then import them back into premiere as a batch. Create a folder and import images into that bin. (bins helps to keep media panel organised)

Choose images and then create new sequence from clip.

Select all the images on the sequence and then change the speed duration, because automatically it takes about 5 sec. for each images, which is way too long.

And of course my video on New Adelphi: