Adobe Premiere Pro: First Cut

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First-cut of my learning to use Premiere Pro below.

I have dabbled with Premiere before, but always kind of danced around getting into it because I found it a little overwhelming, and quite honestly never had any footage worth learning with. Now I do, thanks to my Mavic 2 Pro. Also have a bit of time, thanks to Covid-19

I had help:

The music is Humanity, by Scott Holmes. It kind of makes the video if you ask me. And while meaning no discredit to the composer, I think we certainly have a strong Hans Zimmer influence.

Syncing video with music – the YT vid below started me off on the right path. The DJI GO 4 app does do this automatically (as does the software for GoPro camera) but your control over the process is limited. DJI GO 4 does not seem to work with the full 4K resolution film saved on the drone, it uses the cached videos on the phone – I might be missing something here.

What I learnt

Have some time ( and screen space)

It takes time. This rough cut video took a couple of hours to put together.

A lot of us are going to have some time available at the moment, so we might as put it to use – though Netflix is an equally valid alternative.

Have a plan (before you film)

The music track I picked has a stanza of around 4 seconds so it sticks on a certain pattern for ~4 seconds and then changes it up a bit for the next 4 seconds etc. It then has its ‘epic’ bits which go on a little longer. So you need at least 4 seconds of smooth continuous footage.

The ‘epic’ bits extend of a longer period of 8-12 seconds.

Having a plan (and knowing that you need x+ seconds) would be a good thing to know prior to filming. Even though I have 40minutes of footage I could barely scrape enough together to make just under 3 minutes of usable film.

Crap in = At-best polished crap out (still crap)

What looks really shit is if the video jerks on one of the sequences because I moved the drone controls a bit (direction, zoom, camera incline). Smooth = good. I think I’ll try some of the Mavic’s built-in sequence function to do this.

Also, all the footage was over-exposed. This is a common issue it seems with the Mavic Pro drones. Reading around, a little calibration and fine-tuning of camera steering can address this.