Being primarily into Photo editing, I use Adobe Photoshop CC for all my creative efforts there. Until now I have taken a few courses in Photoshop. There are some specific YouTube channels I too follow and mimic their creative touches, namely PixImperfect and Letsgettoit. You can check out some of my work on my Instagram page. More on this probably in a separate blog post.
More recently, I started delving into video editing. Adobe Premiere Pro is the industry-leading video editing software. It is more of a software cut for professional use, and unless I have the time and intensity for it, I’m not ready at this point to shell out extra bucks! With Adobe Photoshop CC though you can try out some very basic video editing. It is just good enough for general hobbyists, that too for very early stages of exploration. Nevertheless, you can still come up with some interesting mashups from multiple clips.
To bring up the video editing page, select the ‘TimeLine’ from the Windows menu.
The overall edit page looks something like this, with the Timeline window (docked at the bottom) where you would do all the editing, and the layers view (docked at the right) to do additional customizations.
To bring up video clips for editing, simply open the first video file. It will automatically show up in the Timeline window. Subsequently, add multiple video files through the (+) option. Each video file shows up as a separate layer. This means just like photo editing, you can apply photo transformations to each video clip from the layer window.
The Timeline window provides three key features …
Video Speed and Duration, which lets you control the length of the clip, and the speed. The combination of this also automatically trims the clip to the desired length. The best use of this is to align the clip transitions with the audio track transitions (more about this a bit further down) to create some good overall effects.
Then there is the Transition feature which lets you create the fading effects between the clips. For that, all that is required is to drag and drop the Fade option over the boundary between 2 adjacent video clips. Once done, the fade length can also be customized to seamlessly transition out from the previous clip and into the next clip.
And lastly, you can superimpose an Audio Track over the overall video track duration and customize the audio duration too. Typically, you would align the video duration (through the individual clip duration and speed settings) to that of the audio length you would want to play.
Once the timeline structure is created, additional transformations or effects can be applied for each of the video layers or the video group as a whole.
My experience, though enjoyable, so far has been on a single track. There aren’t many interesting ideas that you can implement over the limited set of features, but at the same time, there is always something here to bring basic creativity to your video memories.