19 POLISHING A ROUGH DIAMOND
- Jenske Sampson
- May 30, 2021
- 7 min read
Updated: May 31, 2021
Yeah Yeah Yeah! I think this will be the last post before showing you the finale! Supreme! There are some last things I really would like to discuss first. A dessert :3! Luckily, because my juices are running dry after these intense weeks of editing :)! I have a small list of stuff to talk about: Adding Baruch Williamson to the clip About the rendering/framerate About cleaning up About the Hadouken Street Fighter About the multiplying cosmonaut About the the ending. Here is what I've got now: it is 95% complete :3!
ADDING THE ARTIST (FILLER?)
To continue last weeks topic of how to fill up a clip of .28min, if you're already running dry at 4 minutes. Lol!
Another great asset I used to generate more content and fill up the blanks.
It worked out perfectly. I repeated the procedure at the climax of the song, but shorter.
I also always blended the images to distract the attention.
On One occasion I used color effects.
Another time I zoom in.
Another time I show it original, but very short!
....
Here are some examples:



If you wanna watch the full performance of Baruch Williamson, check below. IT IS MINDBLOWING!
RENDERING & FRAMERATE
OK! Another thingy I wanted to bring up is about rendering. I'm now around a file size of about 1,5 GB. That is a lot for a video of 6,38 min. Never expected it to be so big.
To improve the smoothness and quality I found out that I can change the settings of the sequence (timeline) to work in a higher framerate.
To change this, you can select your sequence by clicking on it's name in your timeline.
Than select sequence in the top menu bar of Adobe premiere Pro.


There you can adjust the sequence settings.
You can do this with all your clips as well!

I changed the rate to 60 frames per second. In reality I upped the rate from 23 to 30. This counts for most clips. The ones that are recorded less, get extra shots.
Afterwards I exported the file in Adobe Premiere Pro by clicking the top menu bar on File - Export -Media.

Afterwards you get a similar menu as the sequence editing menu.
Here you can also already choose file type and some quality adjustments.
I find it easier to upload my file in Adobe Media Encoder.
Recap: You can drag your file into Media Encoder and then click on the format type. It open a similar menu as in Premiere Pro. If you change your settings to H.264 (instead of AVI), you can change the bitrate in the video options menu (scrolling down). You can also see an estimated file size that should be f.e. half of what the original size was.

In the end you click the green arrow on the top right of your screen to convert your file.

THE MULTIPLYING COSMONAUT
To make the lonely guy float in space and multiply itself I opted for a couple of effects.
First I masked the little guy out of its own video.
Then I used the wormhole that I morphed and transformed in the background.

Next I wanted to make multiple of him to fill up the screen.

To do this I copied the original with ALT-key several times and put them on top of each other, but every time with around two seconds of delay in comparison with the previous one. Next I nested all clips.

Next I manually keyframed every image separately to make them go in different directions over time. This way out of the same astronaut more and more copies keep arising.
To do this displacement I used the position -effect and changed it over time.
A good trick to get the screen full is also copying multiple of this nested sequence above and next to each other with small scale and position, so you copy packs of these astronauts at the same time ;) yeah, make it messy. As long as your computer keeps running there is not really a problem I would dare to say.
This is the timeline that accompanies it:

Finally I nest all those clips together and keyframe them over time so they start rotating and change in scale, namely grow in size.
If you then add the background and also make it change color, you should get something like this:

MMMMMMHH beautiful!
HADOUKEN 3.0
One interesting adjustment I made is improving the Street Fighter around 2.25 min even more.
Recap: last episode I explained all the effects I used to create it so far. I used solarize, strobe effect, change color (hls), gave it a glow. Add multiple layers on top and blended them with hard and soft light, and so on.
Now I'm gonna increase the glow and make it red over time!



What I changed, is the color of the strobe light effect over time. Over time at the end I let it change from white to red to get the extremely esthetic burst of color at the end of this clip. when it solarizes (remember?) it reverses the color and gives a blue AND red burst. Super cool!

INFINITE FILES
There is only one real topic that I need to address in this project, and that is how to keep your Adobe files clean.
First I want to show you how huge the amount of files is I have created during this project. I wanted to document as much as possible and even now I had to leave out a lot of juicy information.
It is incredible how many data a human can generate.
Even more incredible is how chaotic and messy that data can become if you don't think to much about it.
This would be one of the things I would do completely different if I could start the project again from scratch!
PEOPLE, CLEAN UP CONSTANTLY OR YOU WILL GET IN TROUBLE!!!88
No seriously, I wish I had or took the time to name all files properly and keep doing so. It would be so easy to find back ALL (yes! all!) of my sources, my changes, my files, etcetera. I'm not saying it is impossible or you are doomed without.
In my case it would have been better.
I think it is a valuable lesson for all my future projects as it can just save you a huge bunch of time.
You have to imagine. At the moment I have 27 rendered versions. I have 274 source materials in my library and around 13 Adobe project versions. Wauw, tell me about it!



TIMELINE IS FRAGMENTED
Time is an illusion. I can prove it to you below!
Another thing I want to show insight to is my total timeline and the complexity of this beast.
Look at this:



A final zoom in on a dense piece:

It consists of more than 1000 pieces. 1000+ manually placed blocks. A huge Lego set!
I had never imagined it to become so complex. If you look at this it looks like a giant puzzle or maze! You can compare it with a midi song produced in Ableton or something. It is a big surprise for me to find out video editing is very similar to creating a music track. It feels like every track for a video could be a track of an instrument. I love that idea and used it to visualize different instrumental changes on different moments :)!
CLEAN YOUR SHIP (EVERY F* DAY) Below I want to show how to correct dense spots. This can help you keep the file size down and be very helpful when rendering takes too long or seems impossible at a certain point. recap: remember that my pc was crashing in the beginning only with a couple of layers? After cleaning out every now and then, that problem felt solved. (And of course that amazing button below your play screen to put rendering 1/2)

Eventually there were two layers which were not doing anything anymore. They just made my computer crash in playing the video. If you have a couple of these spots and clean them out, it can be wonderful for your rendering speed.
After the cleaning we got something like this:

TIE LOOSE ENDS
Correct ugly ends! It is a stupid silly little thing, but I noticed it way to late. Sometimes My video got stuck when I wanted to play it and I could not figure out why it got stuck, while I already downsized the file or deleted several layers. The devil was hidden in a frame. If you look at the image below you see a little indicated overlap. The overlap is useless. If you clean up these small overlaps, you downize your files and make it run smoother in Adobe Premiere.
Before:

After:

I found tens of these small mistake, which really screwed with my rendering and playing of the video. If you exported it, there was no problem and you could not know or see it. It is also a great factor in decreasing your file size of your final video!
It really made a big difference.
Checking all these little things also gave me the time to reset some positions and make multiple transitions that little bit smoother.
I should repeat this process several times.
Time is the key every good project. Finetuning, finetuning, finetuning. There is nothing else you can do. You can only make it better by working more and more detailed.
That may be a criticism on my piece. I just did not have enough time (and a smooth enough pc) to connect al the dots into the straightest line ever.
But...
I'm happy I was able to connect a lot of dots in a very unique way :D!
I hope you were able to learn a lot from my process, not only qua Adobe Premiere, but also of taking on a big project, keep persisting and maybe even the psychological process a person might go through if he/she is in a hurry, haha!
Thank you if you were able to stay and follow the journey.
You are a through cosmonaut.
Now take on your own journey and try what you have seen here into your own creative lives :)!
But...
Don't forget: tomorrow or the day after I'm dropping my final video! I will also drop the adobe file and try to make a zip of my whole library of sources!
Yes, no shit!
TOEDELOE
XOXOO
THE ENDING IS PENDING
KEEP UP TO DATE
FINAL SPACE IS AIRING TOMORROW!!
OXOXOXOX
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