DIY Video Editor Blog

The Friday Roundup – Sound Effects, Story Boards and Voice Over Tips

Producing Your Own Sound Effects: Perfecting Audio

The video below gives a great insight into how you can create your own sound effects and why you perhaps may want to do it.

However there is another important take away you can well… take away from it.

I often get questions and requests regarding the subject of “making my videos more cinematic” and often what people are really wanting is to take their videos towards a more professional level.

The problem with that is that most of the things that actually make a video or film look “cinematic” are a bunch of tiny little details that are in themselves almost undetectable by just watching the film.

This video offers a great opportunity to look into that world of pro video and see the level of detail that is involved in just one aspect of movie making in general.

Story Boarding?

At the beginning of the article linked below the question is posed as to whether all video projects need a story board.

My answer to that is yes, absolutely. However I understand why the question is being posed.

For many people the concept of a story board conjures up pictures of long production meetings with the writing staff, the director and director of photography along with a professional sketch artist ready to draw it all up.

I am not sure about your last holiday video but if it was anything like mine that scenario may seem a little over the top!

I guess the real problem here is what exactly a story board needs to be in order to be useful.

Obviously for a big budget movie it has to be the full deal in order to get all the moving pieces of the production working correctly.

However at the other end of the scale (where we live) the most basic “story board” would simply be having in your mind what shots you probably need to get in order to edit it all together into a reasonably watchable video.

Even if you are not actually writing anything down just having some pre-planned ideas will at least put you ahead of not having any at all!

13 More Voice Over Tips Explained with Examples

A few weeks back Kevin at the Basic Video Maker posted a video covering a number of tips for recording voice overs.

This week he has backed it up with another 13 tips and whilst not all of us are going to need all of them, they are pretty good nonetheless.

CyberLink Releases PowerDirector Patch

This week CyberLink released an update/patch for PowerDirector 17.

This release addresses a few glitches that have been uncovered since the initial release.

They have also reworked a few features to bring the program into line with the latest device and driver updates and developments.

Here is the full list:

  • Adds sort by date modified in the Media Room.
  • Adds support for enabling OpenVINO* hardware acceleration for the AI Style Plugin.
  • Adds support for enabling NVIDIA NVENC hardware acceleration with driver version 416 or above**.
  • Improves the preview performance when using undo/redo and Special Effects in Title Designer. Improves the program stability when editing with titles, video speed, lens correction and 360 video.
  • Fixes the issue that produced video is trimmed unexpectedly if the end of project is audio only.
  • Fixes the issue that variation of wave (frequency) is reset after previewing.
  • Fixes the issue that SVRT becomes 0% workload reduced after adding a clip to the timeline.
  • Fixes the issue that opacity modifications on the timeline cannot be undone.
  • Fixes the issue that applied audio effects in the Audio Editor are gone after opening a project.
  • Fixes the issue that sometimes opacity modifications on the timeline cannot be saved with the project. Minor bug fixes.
  • PowerDirector Updates

PowerDirector – Tips on managing Opacity in the Timeline

This is just a quick walk-through video in PowerDirector 17 of how to handle the opacity of a clip in the timeline.

Like most video editors PowerDirector generally offers more than one path to accessing features and controls so it’s handy to know what the alternatives are.

Original Image: Female Video Editor Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

Lance Carr

Lance is a fully qualified video editing tragic and renowned techno-struggler. He has put in the hard yards working out all manner of things technical... so you don't have to!

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