This week was a very successful week for me because I had the opportunity to add audio to some transition clips I filmed. I thought this process was going to be extremely difficult because I had talked to a friend of mine who said he spent four hours trying to do this one time. I found this process to actually be fairly easy. I started by searching how to download music to my pc and I found a software that allows me to download YouTube videos and change them to mp4. This is very useful for me because I can edit the audio and make it fit the video that I’m recording.

After downloading this software, I turned my focus to editing the audio when it’s in Premiere Pro. That’s where the video above comes from. I stumbled across this video when searching how to add sound clips to Premiere Pro and it had a nice tutorial on how to edit the sound to do things like fade in or out. This video was a lot of help to me because I needed to cut the audio down to a spot that I liked and this helped me do that. I also needed to mute the audios from the clips that I had filmed, which I had to figure out on my own. My solution was to drag the audio of the clips I wanted muted to a new audio line and mute the whole line. This worked well, but next time I’d like to mute the clips without moving the audio to a new line because I might want to add a few layers of audio onto a clip and I don’t want to run out of audio lines. This video was fun to film and I enjoyed learning a new trick in editing as well.

This week I had a tough time with getting clips and editing because I have just been laid off from work and I’ve lost a lot of motivation to do anything. However, I did make a video, it wasn’t very long and it might not have been my best work, but I pushed one out. I didn’t want to lose any progress I’ve made, so I forced myself to learn even if this week I didn’t want to. This week I didn’t learn anything new about editing, but I got more comfortable and faster with the editing software that I’ve chosen to use.

I decided to put a sketch in this video because I wanted to have more fun filming the videos. I believe a major portion of editing is having fun clips that make you want to edit them and make the best video possible. Even though I struggle this week, I think I came out successful because I finished a vlog and posted it. Next week I will try to make a better video and push myself to use more than just 1 software to complete it. What I’ve learned this week is that I’m capable of editing fairly quickly and that I can do anything that I want to if I just set my mind to it.

I decided to research After Effects as the platform to enhance my professional learning. I did the tutorials so I could see the basics about the app and I was surprised at what could be done. I learned how to have logos fly into frame and how to have words appear from thin air. This is beneficial to my learning project because I can use this tool to put subtitles on videos if I’m too quiet when I’m speaking or I can make commercials for assignments to grab students’ interest. I think class is more interesting when there are videos to introduce topics and show students that school can be fun. The use for this in schools is basically what I sated above. We can create videos to aid students in their lifelong learning journey.

The applications is very useful and has a lot of tools that I explored when looking into it. One thing that I found interesting was the blur feature. I love that videos can have a background blur when you’re creating them because it adds much more professionalism into the final project. Another feature of After Effects that I enjoyed was the mirror effect that videos can have. What this does is it takes one side of your video and mirrors it down the middle to the other side to create the illusion that only the left or the right side of the video is being filmed. I used both of these effects in the video above so if you wanted to see what it turns out like or want to get a better understanding of what I mean then you can watch it. I really enjoyed using this program and I will be putting more time into it as the semester progresses.

This week I was determined to get a video completed and posted on YouTube! The video that I created isn’t one with crazy cool edits or anything, actually it’s pretty basic. The reason for this is because I’ve never had to make videos for any class and whenever I have, they either don’t have to be edited or someone in my group is more skilled at it so they do it. Going from having no skill tp pushing out videos is a real challenge for me, but I’m doing my best and I’m challenging myself to be better every week.

For my learning project this week I learned a new video effect. One of my clips for my video came out as a portrait mode video for some reason and so I was tasked with figuring out how to rotate the clip to be in landscape mode like the rest of my clips. The way that I learned how to do it was from a YouTube video. The action is really easy and I’m starting to get used to the software that I’m using. I had some difficulties transferring some files from my phone to my desktop which was frustrating, but I figured it out and I got a video posted for everyone to see. Next week I’m going to focus on uploading a video and putting a thumbnail on it. I’ve come up with an end goal that I want to hit by the end of the semester, which is to create a short film and post it to YouTube with a thumbnail. I’m excited to keep learning about editing and to take the class on my journey.