Editing – Page 13 – Latest News from MediaStorm

MediaStorm Guide to Rendering in Adobe Premiere Pro

Post author:Eric Maierson
Post published:January 7, 2013

This article is part of a new series of posts with tips and tricks from our producers' experience working with Adobe Premiere Pro after years of working in Final Cut Pro. To read more about why we made the switch, check out this post. Today's post was written by MediaStorm producer Eric Maierson. If you’ve spent any time in Adobe Premiere Pro, you’ve probably noticed the various colors above the timeline. According to Adobe’s help pages they can be decoded as follows: Green: There are preview files available for this section that will be used during playback. Playback will be in real time. Yellow: There are no preview files available for this section. These sections will render just before the playhead reaches them. Playback will probably be in real time. Red: There are no preview files available for this section. These sections will render just before the playhead reaches them. Playback will…

Finishing is the Hard Part

Post author:Eric Maierson
Post published:January 2, 2013

Creative work is of course never really finished. As the saying goes, it’s only abandoned. Nevertheless, the last few days of production can feel excruciatingly difficult. At MediaStorm, we often say that the last 10 percent of work requires 30 percent of the effort. So why is that? I think the struggle comes from two equally strong and opposing forces. On the one hand, there’s a certain impatience at the end of a project. Often after spending weeks or even months on the same piece, I’m frankly ready to be done. I’m ready for others to start watching. On the other hand, finishing a project requires a meticulous attention to detail. Just as my work feels like it’s coming to an end, there’s a barrage of tedious but requisite tasks that need to be finished: adding room tone, mixing and repairing audio, color correcting video. So even as there’s a strong pull…

MediaStorm Guide to Dictation with Apple Mountain Lion

Post author:Eric Maierson
Post published:December 11, 2012

Today's post was written by MediaStorm producer Eric Maierson. See his other recent tutorials here. I am a slow typer. I dread transcriptions, something we do at MediaStorm for every interview. Recently I discovered an alternative that's built right into Apple's Mountain Lion operating system: dictation. It’s quick, easy and most importantly, pretty darn accurate. To turn on dictation select the  > System Preferences... then choose Dictation & Speech. In the Dictation tab click the On radio button. Choose a shortcut key to trigger dictation. I use the suggested fn key on my MacBook Air. Finally, select your language. Transcribing To begin dictation open TextEdit or another text editor. Our application of choice is Barta Technologies’ $29.99 Transcrivia. (Built-in dictation does not work with Google Docs.) Then double click your trigger key. A microphone icon will appear. Dictate a sentence or two, then press your trigger key once again. The microphone…

MediaStorm Guide to Enhancing Adobe Premiere Pro’s Auto-save Functionality

Post author:Eric Maierson
Post published:December 3, 2012

This article is part of a new series of posts with tips and tricks from our producers' experience working with Adobe Premiere Pro after years of working in Final Cut Pro. To read more about why we made the switch, check out this post. Today's post was written by MediaStorm producer Eric Maierson. Like Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro offers an auto-save vault. The functionality is similar. Premiere incrementally saves a backup of your project at a user-specified interval. To customize this feature on your Mac choose the menu Premiere Pro > Preferences > Auto Save. There are three options in this menu: A checkbox to enable the feature, plus two options boxes. One tells Premiere how often to backup and the other designates the maximum number of versions that will be saved before the application begins to delete the oldest ones. I like to save every 10 minutes. That’s about as…

MediaStorm Guide to Keyboard Customization in Adobe Premiere Pro

Post author:Eric Maierson
Post published:November 29, 2012

This article is part of a new series of posts with tips and tricks from our producers' experience working with Adobe Premiere Pro after years of working in Final Cut Pro. To read more about why we made the switch, check out this post. Today's post was written by MediaStorm producer Eric Maierson. One of the keys to getting up to speed on any editing application is to know your shortcuts. In Adobe Premiere, these are available in the Premiere Pro > Keyboard Shortcuts... menu. At the top of the window, you’ll see a pull-down menu labeled Keyboard Layout Preset. By default this is set to Adobe Premiere Pro CS 6.0. These are Adobe’s built-in shortcuts. If you’d prefer to use the more familiar Final Cut Pro 7 shortcuts, choose the Final Cut Pro 7.0 option from the pull-down menu. After some debate, we’ve decided at MediaStorm to use the default Adobe…