Simpsons Editing Task

In today's session, we were given the two hour time slot to edit together a very basic trailer for The Simpsons Movie. To create this we used Premier Pro, an already built in video editing piece of software on the Macs at college. 

I found using Premier Pro to be extremely difficult. Having never used the software before, I was anxious about being thrown in at the deep end, but after an hour or so of working out the tools, I feel at greater ease with the programme, and even found myself helping other class mates to use it too! 

The tools that I mainly used and worked with were:

• The text tool- in which I brought this up by pressing CMD & T to bring up the title option and add text to my video.
• The time line- I have experience of using Windows Movie Maker to create simple presentations, and found that although more precise and hard to initially come to terms with, the timeline on this programme was quite self explanatory. Images, footage, text etc were to be dragged onto the timeline and I now know that these elements are able to overlap and can be seperated from each other etc.
• The video effects/ transitions. I experimented mainly with the video transitions when working with the textual elements of the video. I found out how to add simple effects such as dissolves and twirls and looked at the other, more complex options. I now feel confident when wanting to add a transition or effect to a video used in Premier Pro and feel that I could inform others of how to drag the effect onto the timeline.
• The split screen- the initial screen to your left shows the video or title/image etc that you want to edit and work with. Your edited working progress is then presented on the right side of the screen. I found this to be an extremely useful tool as I was fully aware of the original footage and the elements that I wanted to edit, whilst being able to ensure that the overall project was maintained and new footage would fit in etc.

Overall, I found this editing exercise on Premier Pro to be very worthwhile as I learnt the basic controls of how to work it. I feel that it is a complicated piece of software, however with the multitude of options to play with, I feel that it is a reliable and powerful piece of software to use for when editing my own video.