Much of this past weekend was spent trying to wrap my head around Adobe Premiere Pro for the Mac.  Here’s the result of hours of wrestling with the new (to me anyway…) software:

In addition to using Premiere Pro do edit, assemble, and clean-up my video footage, I used Adobe Sound Booth to add narration,  add copyright-free music tracks, and get the volume levels of each where I wanted them.  By the time I trimmed out what I didn’t like, the actual video footage of our dogs wasn’t very long…only a couple of minutes worth.  So I decided to add a photo slide show, which I used Apple’s iPhoto to do.  The end product was a just under five minute video which I think turned out fairly well.  More importantly, I learned a lot about the tools I have at my disposal.   I’m finding that the more I know about the post-production end of things, the better job I do at shooting and capturing video footage in the front end of the project.

I recently upgraded to Premiere Pro from Premiere Elements – which I assumed would be in every way better.    And for the most part, during editing and production, it very much is.  However, rendering a 1080p file for YouTube is just plain easier in Premiere elements.  1080p rendered files in Premiere Pro however are huge – anything in the 10-15 minute length (my typical YouTube video length) is going to bigger than the YouTube limit of 2GB.  So I end up rendering many of my Premiere Pro projects at 720p.  And there’s certainly an argument that for a YouTube video, 720p is plenty good, and that 1080p is a bit of a waste.  As valid as that may be, I have equipment capable of recording at 1080p by golly so I want to render and upload 1080p files!  I’m hoping that I can “break the code” with how to render a 1080p file of reasonable size in Premiere Pro – it’s next on my “to-do” list to learn.