Over the past few years there have been some incredible advances made in the field of stabilizing handheld footage.
Action cameras like the GoPro and the range from DJI have brought some amazing internally driven stabilization features.
On top of that handheld gimbals have also taken things to a new level going so far as to capture gyro information that can be used in software later.
However even the most advanced stabilization system around these days, the Steadicam, requires the operator to move in a way that works best for the system.
Here are a few tips for you and I when working with gimbals.
Well in all honesty I am not really sure that these are the “only” three sound effects you need but I think the number is not the actual point here!
Just as is the case with special effects, transitions and everything else that comes with a modern video editing program, sound effects also get delivered in spades.
And also like those other things the temptation is, “Hey! I’ve got ’em, might as well use ’em!”
Well just because you can does not necessarily mean you should and there are many roads leading to what we in the industry like to call “a hot mess!”
So it’s probably best to look at this video as an introduction to the basic sound effects to use effectively and everything beyond that a something to be added with caution.
You may not actually ever need to recreate a scene of a vehicle drives into fog!
However that’s not the point!
In this tutorial you can see an example of using keyframing in combination with color grading to create an evolving scene.
In addition to that you can learn how to add and modify particles to further enhance a scene and make it work the way you want.
All of this is done in PowerDirector but none of the effects and tools to my knowledge are exclusive to that program.
Version 15.3 of Filmora has just been released into the wild.
I haven’t had a chance yet to check out all the new stuff but in the meantime here’s a video covering the two new features they are highlighting.
First is the HSL Selection tool which allows you to select a color in your video then manipulate only that color while leaving everything else untouched.
The second one is the Flicker Removal tool which is quite a handy little addition.
Sometimes you may find that there is a noticeable flicker occurring in your footage which is usually the result of either two things.
First the lighting in the scene (usually indoors) is coming from fluorescent lights that are refreshing at a rate not seen by the naked eye but appearing in the footage.
The second can be that the shutter speed or frame rate your device is set to is conflicting with the refresh rate of whatever lighting is present so again, you get flicker.
Either way this new tool allows you to remove that flicker manually to restore the footage.
When you are operating as a single camera person or just shooting yourself there is a problem that will eventually trip you up.
It is the fact that as your video progresses there is pretty much no change of camera angle as well as no change of camera distance.
This makes for a quite visually boring video from an audience perspective.
One trick to get around this is to use zoom-in’s and zoom-outs’ to break up the monotony.
Like most things in editing, this can work very well or it can end up looking totally naff!
Here are a few tips.
Just recently my wife decided she wanted to take over editing her short form videos for herself in an effort to stop bugging me to hurry up and get them done!
To do that she decided that she wanted to use CapCut as her editing software because she was already somewhat familiar with the program and its features.
Everything was ticking along very well for her for a while but then she noticed that her computer started to run very slowly.
After I did a little digging I discovered that CapCut was creating quite a few cache files and these had begun building up over time hence the slowdown.
So a quick cleanup got things running smoothly again but just in case we aren’t the only ones that have hit this problem, here’s a video from Jacky on how to clear those files.
Apart from that I generally find CapCut to be a good little editor especially for newbies or those wanting to keep things simple.
If you have ever had an interest in starting to make videos for YouTube or some other platform then this is a great tutorial to get you going.
One of the main stopping points for people wanting to get into this is that they don’t know what they don’t know!
The reality is that no matter what you think you should be doing there always seems to be some other thing that you were supposed to do before that and it is a pattern that repeats.
So, here’s a run through from start to finish on how to go about it the right way.
This is the first part in a series I came across this week specifically on the subject of shooting video.
Before you check it out I wanted to explain a little of my reasoning for including it in the Friday Roundup.
If you have checked out any of the rest of my website you would know that it is clearly aimed at the amateur or newbie so a video series like this one below would seem out of place.
My reasoning on things like this is pretty simple.
I regularly check out what people are teaching at a professional level even though I certainly don’t operate at that level!
Trust me, I am not delusional!
So while I may not implement everything that I learn in videos like this, I certainly gain a greater understanding of what I am doing.
In fact when I screw things up, it is the knowledge gained from videos like this that I can quickly work out how I screwed up and how to fix it!
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