sometimes showing what you're talking about is imperative to the whole story
what's happening guys Dan Debenham here yes today we're talking about
b-roll and about how to achieve uh a better look in b-roll um and sometimes there just isn't
the equipment available there isn't the camera track dollies um the cranes the gimbals
all that good stuff that you would normally want to use to achieve
an amazing shot in uh you know motorized uh robotic arm etc etc you just haven't got all that
sometimes it's just down to you holding a camera that may be a factor of budget or it could well
be just that you are looking for that handheld sort of look to your project but invariably um
camera movements with handheld when they're handheld uh are quite shaky or off-centre or
or they're not quite what you expected them to be once you've done them no matter how many times you
try and do that movement is different each and in individual time is slightly different because
you know you can't repeat the same movement over and over and over again exactly the same
so today we're going to show you or i'm going to show you behind the edit of what i would do or
what i do do in order to sort of manipulate my handheld shots to look a little bit more
like they are what the viewer would expect to see to do that i'm going to enlist the help
of Kiefer Sutherland not the real one it's this guy and this is Kiefer Sutherland from
lost boys with his noodles and what we're going to do is he's going to start in a little sequence
or a little scene for me um just so that we can show you what we would do so let's jump
into premiere pro with our clip it's already been filmed and let's see how i do it so we're
into premiere pro we've got our scene in place and now what we need to do is start to manipulate it
so first things first to do is we need to scrub through it and just see roughly what
it is that we're going to be trying to alter so i'm going to give this a play and i can already
see a couple of things that i don't like it's a bit janky and it's not level and we sort of
we're sort of in a position where it needs a bit it needs a bit of finessing to this
so first things first what let's let's start with this then start with this clip we've got two clips
we've got this and we've got just a straight truck in and these are just basically if we need to use
a different clip uh or we need to tuck something on to the end of it in this case i'm not sure we
will so let's just have a look and see what we can do so one of the tricks we can do is we can slow
the footage down um and that gives it a little bit more of a cinematic appeal it gives it a bit more
uh what people are expecting from a cinematic or a b-roll sequence where it's slightly slower and
slowing it down also that also smooths out any imperfections or as much of the imperfections as
it can um with the movement that you've made when you've done it at normal everyday speed so first
things first i'm going to go here right click on it speed duration i'm going to make it 40 percent
of full speed which is going to slow it down and that's going to just take away some of the the
sort of rumbling of the handheld some of the chunkiness of it and it's going to just make
it already look a little bit better than it was before so round about i'd say around about here
um it wants to sort of slow down so we're going to add a bit of speed into this so let's go up
to speed here and we're going to add it make that 200 and we're just going to reduce that
so now we've got this where are we at now sort of 2 19 19 frames so just under a second's worth of
fast motion drops straight into uh slow motion so we're going to get the brakes at around 19 frames
that's cool okay that's okay we're happy with that that's no worries we're quite we're quite happy
with that brilliant okay so what we'll do now is we'll add a square onto the screen so let's just
drag a square on just to add that little bit more to the uh the whole sequence itself you
could in effect film this in a different format uh a wider format um you know like a 235 or something
and then just transplant it straight into your sequence but if you haven't done that what we can
do is we can just add bars at the top and bottom and that just differentiates this sequence uh
from the other sequences that you've got going off like this like this piece of camera that we're
doing now is different so that will be full screen um and then the cinematic stuff the b-roll stuff
that we've got to show what's going off we can put bars top and bottom of that to differentiate
what that is and give the viewer the opinion that this was filmed at a different point or a
different time uh in a different format and it's much more sort of it's larger than it actually
is in terms of the the the width of the the um the sequence itself we're going to make
that sort of the same length as our clip and then we're going to add a opacity mask to it
so obviously we're coming down to masks and then we're adding an opacity mask grabbing these two
handles and just dragging them out like so because i want it to be the full width of the um seam
we're going to take off the we're going to take off the feather so now it's a flat black
no problems and we're going to invert it as well so that it is now the opposite way around to what
it should be and then we're going to go to the mask expansion and we're going to expand this out
to around about here okay so now that we've got that set we're all good next
thing we can do and the reason we've done that is so that we can now manipulate this
with these fake bars on now in essence if you've shot it on a different any different formats we've
showed you 235 or whatever or 133 you're going to end up it's going to be widescreen anyway and so
that's going to make this job slightly different um and it's going to you know you're going to do
without those black bars you don't need to do with these black bars i haven't shot in this
so i'm adding them in to make it look a little bit more like it was it differentiates it from
the rest of the fake video that we've already shot that's not got these on hear me out here
so obviously it's not straight the horizon isn't straight so what we're going to have to do
is we're going to have to straighten that out, just to just because i'm not happy with the fact that
it's slightly an odd angle as i move across the little key for summerlin that we've got going off
i just want to straighten that out so it just needs to look a little bit more a little bit
more like it's been a controlled shot rather than a handheld shot so next thing to do is to
get a guide in because we know that this scene is not quite straight we can see from the beginning
it doesn't look too bad actually because obviously the angle where it's going to look
slightly janky and this table's a different place to this uh window ledge so it's going
to be slightly off so we're going to ignore the table what we're looking at is this guy kefir
we're looking at the lamp and we're looking at the um the windowsill and as you can see
when i noticed when we got to the end you can see how how out of line that is which means he's also
alice he looks like everybody's we're almost on a sinking ship so we're going to fix that and the
way to fix that is we're going to go to guides which is this little uh show guide icon here if
you haven't got it go to your plus editor button which is here look for this guy drag it on and
then you're all good to go so once it's on and it's all done and dusted we're going to click
let's get the icon we're going to click this icon here we're going to click the actual scene itself
we're going to go to view and then we're going to go to
add guide don't worry about any of this business uh let's just make sure it's
selected to horizontal and not vertical and then click ok and then we end up with a guide
that if you hover over you get a little like sort of i can move you about line
so what we're going to do is we're going to just jump to the end of the scene and go back one frame
and then we're going to position this guide so that the guide runs through this corner because
that's the corner we're going to use to move everything up so effectively it's like a triangle
it's going to start here and it goes out into the width here so it's very pointed here and it's the
widest point over here so what we're going to do now is we're going to go to the beginning of
the scene make sure our clips selected and not the black bars so we've got our clip selected
then we're going to go to the rotation and we're going to add a keyframe in
so let's undo that keyframe and make sure we're at the beginning of this scene we are yes and we're
going to add a keyframing like so we're then going to scoot all the way to the end go back one frame
add a keyframe in now we need to straighten this up so we're going to start i like to
start with like two degrees and i'd just like to see what two degrees does to it
so i reckon it's probably two point two point five maybe two point three
so i think it's two point three degrees and in essence what's going to happen is is
as you can see if you watch this figure here you'll see it moving down because as i get
further towards the front of the clip towards the beginning you can see it goes back to
zero so what he's doing now is premiere pro is keeping that scene basically set
to level which is pretty cool um and effectively what we're going to do next is we're going to
get our key for sutherland guy you can see how it sort of changed it here so what we're going
to need to do is we're going to need to come back to the beginning of our scene so let's go back to
the beginning of our scene and we're going to need to put a scale icon icon in a keyframing
we're going to go across to the end of our scene and we're going to put another scale keyframe in
so first keyframe what we're going to do is we're going to say this wants to be 120.
and then this keyframe i'm going to make it 130. now there's a reason for that a very
good reason for that actually and that is that i'm going to use this to try and keep
keefer slightly into the center of the frame so what we can do is come back to
the beginning of the keyframe again we're going to go to position i'm going to hit the keyframe
there back to the end and then we're going to hit keyframe on there again and what we're going to do
is we're going to make sure that we adjust this so that keith is more in frame and more in the center
like so so what happens is is we've got leveling we've got zoom in and we've got moving all at the
same time along with scale so the scale's coming up the movement's coming up and kefir is coming up
effectively so what we've ended up with is we've ended with a shot that looks like this now we also
need to make sure that the beginning of this keyframe what's the scale on the beginning of
this keyframe 120. so we need to click on this one here and we're just going to do a standard
no keyframe we're going to boost it to 120 and that means that it matches the next frame on
so it doesn't it doesn't look odd like we've jumped
massively now we can add that next that next frame in and we can just extend this out slightly
and then we can come to here and we can say okay what's going on with this we
can still use the same guide and we can see that it's still slightly out
so what we could do is we could just go to the front of this one here uh add a rotation keyframe
go to the back go back one frame obviously so i can see it and we can go to there and then what
we can do is we can manually just drag this about like so so we get it sort of straight
at the end now you can see it's straight to the to us but not to that that window there so we want
we need to we need to make a decision on what it is that we want to be straight
so in essence in this situation i would say probably the windowsill wants to be straight
because that's the thing that is not quite right and then from here obviously you can
see it's still not right there so we'll go back to this keyframe and
we'll straighten it out and straighten the windowsill out so that everything looks kind
of straight there and then effectively what happens is is you see it coming in
like so what we can do now is we can just go and we can just make this entire thing
sort of 50 let's go with 50 rather than 40 just to mix things up slightly and we also need to zoom
in but in this case what we can do is we can just zoom in 110 and we just do it the whole scene 110
for now so we can see what we're doing okay and then what we can do is we can come back
we can go to position go across add another keyframe in and then once we get to the end
we'll drop him up a little bit and we'll bring him across slightly ever so slightly
what i'm going to do also is i'm going to truck that across a little bit like that
so we've got everything running the same and then in essence what happens is this
so as you can see it just tidies things up it just gives that little bit more to the viewer
and it just allows you to sort of manipulate your edit to be where
you want it to be and to see what you want to see rather than just a straight handheld
out the camera nothing else i can do with it that's just what we stuck with
kind of situation it's brilliant it's a great idea to do it does take a little bit more time
but then again that's why we're here that's what we're doing um we're not just shoving
things out of a camera onto an edit and then off we go we have to sort of tell a story and
because of that that involves us tweaking and manipulating and massaging these things into place
so with that i hope that you did find this useful and i will see you guys in the next one
peace
you