Tutorials

Looking how to do something right? We have you covered.

CREATING VIDEOS

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EDITING CONTENT

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PRO TIPS

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staying organized

color-coded timeline in premiere pro

Best Practices for Post-Production & Video Editing

Having an organized timeline is essential for a multi-camera, multi-interview edit. For this recent project we kept the timeline clean by color-coding our footage and naming our tracks.

In Depth

One of the simplest ways to keep your timeline clean and tidy is to use different label colors to organize your footage. For this recent project we had 4 interviews to drive the story, along with b-roll and some motion graphics animations. By assigning a different color to each interview we were able to quickly tell the difference between each piece of footage, which not only makes the timeline cleaner and easier to look at, it makes it easier to add changes without having to search throughout the edit.

Here you can watch both the short version designed for their social media feeds as well as the hero video that lives on their website.

You can watch the full video below.

To The Rescue!

Creating a Comic Book Effect for your video in Photoshop

Partners in Post recently created a short video series highlighting several “Food Safety Superheroes” who worked for our client. (If you want to learn more about how we developed the creative strategy for this video series, click here.) We decided to develop a comic book effect that we could apply to still frames from the video to add a little superhero flair. After searching for a way to achieve this effect online, we ultimately decided that none of them were ideal for what we were trying to do, and instead developed our own. This is a short tutorial on how to achieve a similar effect

1. Grab A Still

The first step is to pick a still from your video and export it as png or jpg. We found that the best results came from stills that had foreground, midground and background elements. Also, the effect is much harder to apply if parts of the image are heavily out of focus, so watch out for shots with a shallow depth of field. 

This is one that we ended up using that worked well:

2. Separate Background and Foreground Elements with masks

The next step is to bring your image into photoshop and separate the foreground from the background in individual layers. You can also separate a third layer if you want, for a more complex effect. In our example, we separated both the worker and the frame of the forklift from the background as separate layers.

 After you’ve separated your foreground and midground elements, use content aware fill to patch any obvious holes in your midground caused by objects in front of them, like the right arm in our example.

[CAPTION ON IMAGE] The subject’s left arm was hidden behind a monitor on the forklift. We used Photoshop’s content aware fill to quickly and easily replace it.

Again using content aware fill, fill in all the gaps in the background. It may look a little strange, but the majority of the area that you fill will be covered by your foreground and midground. This is just to avoid awkward gaps around the edges of the layers

Before

After

3. Apply Comic Book Effects

There’s a number of tutorials for how to get this kind of effect online, but the one we liked most combined several of them. Also, we strongly recommend converting your layers to smart objects so that effects applied to them are editable afterwards. These are the main effects we used: 

4. Bring the images back into your NLE

Import your images into the NLE you’re using. We used FCPX for this project. Arrange them on top of each other in the correct order. Finally, keyframe in a slight scale adjustment on each layer individually, moving around their anchor points so that they drift in slightly different patterns. This creates a parallax effect that gives the image a lot of movement even though it’s technically a still. How you transition the still frame on is up to you, but for this clip we used a simple wipe effect. 

5. Adding extra Comic elements (Optional)

Finally, you may want to add some extra comic book elements to you images. These can be speech bubbles, thought bubbles, solid color banners, title text, location callouts and any number of other things. 

This effect gives plenty of room to experiment and be creative, so try it out and show us what you were able to come up with!

Here’s the final product:

https://vimeo.com/partnersinpost/review/339413578/6a9307e0e4

Optionally, a second video that could go with this post could just show Photoshop with each step being applied.  Basically start with the video, end on the freeze frame above, and then transition each subsequent photo on the video with text below as Maddie suggested.

BULLETPROOF

video PRODUCTION Guide