Something I’ve learned is that editing short clips (social media videos that are usually limited to 60 seconds) and inserting screenshots to get your point across effectively is hard. And after I’ve played around with a few different methods in attempts to improve that, I think I’ve significantly improved it.
Last week, when I was working on editing a clip, I decided to experiment with screenshots; this time around, I tried an “on-screen look.” Instead of just slapping an image full of small text, I used a couple of really cool features in Premiere to animate, blur, and highlight the text to bring focus to the actual important part.
Here are examples of a video that has editing and no editing of the screenshot:
In the second example, I added a bunch of extra effects to get across the focus of the screenshot. One of those changes that I had never used before was the “Basic 3D” effect; it adds that tilting/pan animation, which really emphasizes the “on-screen” effect.
Some more minor changes were the blurs. In the background, I added a stock photo of the topic (in this case, a girl crying) and some blur to blend it into the background. Another blur that I added was around the headline. A simple “Gaussian Blur” with an inverted mask did the trick. The highlighting effect was also done by simply keyframing two orange blocks with the opacity set to “Multiply,” which blended the colors, instead of just turning down the opacity for a transparent look, which would work just not as clean looking.
Most of this I learned from a handy tutorial video by the channel Storysium. Which brings me to my next point:
It’s easier than ever to start Video Editing
The great thing about video editing is that almost everyone needs to do it. Thus, there are hundreds of thousands of tutorials on basically any way to edit. And all for free on YouTube. Most of my learning has been from just watching shorts, or other videos in which I see someone do a really cool effect, and then I look up or try to replicate that myself. I myself am still learning stuff, and I think I can still improve many aspects of my editing, but with the free use of YouTube and many people willing to share their presets for small prices, it’s a quick process to get started with video editing today.
Nice thumbnail.